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IT WAS the Germans who suggested the highway to Sofia was fine. If I could take it, as they had, it would take two days off my passage across Bulgaria with, I hoped, no loss of scenery.

Well, I gave it a go. At dawn, as far as Harmanli and its odd welcoming statue at 15km, things were tolerable. Then in the time it takes to eat a sticky bun, the world descended on me.

I should have deduced it from the map because Harmanli is where the highway on the Greek side of the border, the one I had taken, meets the road I hadn't taken on the Turkish side. So the road, just wider than a truck, was full of trucks. And their drivers, discontent at being back on an ordinary road and with a schedule to keep, saw no reason to take their foot off the pedal because there was a cyclist clinging to the road's edge. They weren't driving dangerously. They gave the room that they could. But there wasn't space to give.

The Germans weren't carrying maps. They had internet directions. On a computer the road looked fine, and obviously they had no objections because the worst they could say was that it was 'busy for a while but not too bad.'

Maybe I am less tolerant. Perhaps they had ridden at a different time of day. And they were coming the other way, of course, with traffic approaching the big highways and not leaving it. Well, it was more than I wanted to put up with and I took the first chance to turn off, to the delightfully named Polyanovo.

The road was full of holes, easy to navigate on a bike, and as quiet as only a pot-holed road is likely to be. But it was then I made my mistake. And I will tell you because you and I have no secrets and I am beyond the age of feeling shame.

To understand what happened, you have to know that until the Germans suggested otherwise, I had pencilled a route on my map which would take me across the mountains in the northern heartlands, the Balkan ridge. I was delighted to see my line just north of Polyvano and I set off to follow it. It was only after 12km of dust road, where road crews had stripped off asphalt before getting round to replacing it with something better, that I realised I had been following not my route but a railway line, also grey, which happened to run beside the road.

Of course, if drivers on the highway saw no reason to ease off for my benefit, the monsters carting whatever road-monsters carry in these circumstances, neither slowed nor moved out of the way. Deliveries were paid by the delivery, come what may. And what came were great clouds of dust that took much of minute to subside. In subsiding, much of it fell on me. I turned into a grey ghost.

Nobody would have taken any notice in Galabovo, the next town, because it is in the Readers' Digest Guide to Places to Avoid. You can see it from way back. An eternity of power lines cancers out from its heart. There are generating stations from the old era, abandoned, pointless windows browned and broken. There are replacement stations, barely fresher and no more picturesque. They are fuelled by brown coal which arrives by truck. The air here, before Bulgaria adopted modern ways, must have been intolerable.

And this isn't a place you'd want to be even now. Apartment blocks of striking ugliness, which elsewhere would have been condemned before they left the planners' sketchbook, stand in disorganised groups in wasteland to one side of where, presumably, everyone goes to work. I couldn't see over a long mound of earth that separated these places from the road but it didn't take much to guess there would be long coarse, weed-like grass, abandoned cars and ribby dogs.

Even if you overlooked that, accustomed to the visual misery, there would still be no respite. For silence would be unknown. Every one of the dozens of power lines buzzed and disturbed the peace. The effect was unsettling, disorientating. This is no fit place for man. And to think I was sorry for myself for being needlessly coated in dust. I could find a hotel in Radnovo and shower it off. Those poor bastards were stuck with it until life improbably took a lucky turn and they could move away.