louiseinlimbo

One very strong lesson I am learning from my first couple of months of nomadism is that I must slow down!  My last post here was in Bulgaria, since which time I have taken an overnight bus to Istanbul, a flight from there to Beirut, and spent nearly two busy weeks seeing the Lebanon - with no time to write up my adventures in here.  Even now, a part of me wants to be out on the streets of the fascinating city of Beirut, but I know I have to record some of my adventures in here before I depart tomorrow night to Ethiopia!! I shall start here with the more 'conventional' side of a visit to Lebanon, being the amazing remnants of the country's rich and varied history.  My head is still spinning from the stories of Phoenicians, Romans, Crusaders, Umayyads, Ottomans, Mamluks...  & it's not just stories, but the visible remains of those different epochs, including the ruins at Baalbek of which the temple of Bacchus, above, is only one part.  A UNESCO World Heritage ...

As well as the 'formal' ruins, Bulgaria has countless abandoned houses, factories and other buildings. In Veliko Tarnovo I poked around three different abandoned places.  The first was a Soviet-era dam, intended to raise the level of the river so that residents of the town could swim in it, but not yet completed at the time of the fall of communism.  The kind of place that would be safely closed off to random passers-by in somewhere like the UK, but just left in Bulgaria for people like me, who are fascinated by abandoned places, to go into at my own risk. The second I only found thanks to a conversation with a friend of the hostel manager, as I would otherwise have just walked past without realising what was there.  Would your attention be drawn to this building on the right if you walked past it? I'd been told that down by the river there was an old Roman baths, later used as a hammam by the Ottomans, which had fallen into disrepair and even been used for a while by a s...