It rained in the morning. For those of you who think it rains all the time in winter, think again, this was the first time I had been rained on since the day I left Munich back in November (not counting a little impossble rain in Budapest!) 57 days and not a drop of (real) rain. And even now this rain could hardly be counted, for it only lasted an hour or so and I spent most of that time hiding in a bus shelter.

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I had two options with regards which route to take and I first attempted to follow the main highway along the coast. I passed through a small town and the road took me on a steep climb. As I was inching along up this ascent I passed three men who were working on building a house by the road. They looked down on me from their scaffolding and shouted something at me. Obviously I couldn't tell what it was because it was in Bulgarian but I assumed it was probably something about getting my tits out. Builders!

At the top of the climb I had a view over the Black Sea but there was a sign saying no cycling on this road. You could have put it at the bottom of the hill!!! The road seemed perfectly safe as there was almost no traffic but I guessed as it was a winding cliffside coastal road there was quite likely to be tunnels which was probably why cycling wasn't allowed, and in any case I didn't want to risk getting stopped by the police. So I went back down the hill, shouting "perverts" at the builders as I whizzed past, or perhaps just imagining that I should, I can't remember.

The inland alternative took me on a much longer climb, six or seven kilometres steep uphill. I was cursing Gerry under my breath. Flat all the way to Turkey is it Gerry? I could forgive him being wrong about Romania, but Bulgaria was (supposedly) his home country! At least the sun had come out and the scenery was wonderful. It looked like the south of France, or Greece, or somewhere in the Mediteranean for sure. I came to a gas station and it had a digital reading of the temperature saying that it was sixteen degrees! I stopped at the gas station to use the wifi (they all have free wifi in Bulgaria) and I had an email from Hanna telling me that it was MINUS sixteen in Belarus. Ha Ha Ha!!! Sucks to be you Hanna! Ha Ha Ha!!! When I left the gas station the temperature had increased to seventeen! Ha Ha Ha!!!

As I descended into the city of Varna it at first looked very much like the mediteranean, with houses clinging to the hillsides as I descended the narrow road overlooking the sea. It was really lovely and I thought about how different and how much nicer it was compared to Dobric. But then I got down to the flat, main part of the city, and that looked exacty the same as Dobric. All tower blocks, ugly and worn down, and busy roads that all looked like one another. There was even the same treacherously deceitful supermarket adverts. I took a right turn for a Billa that was supposed to be 500m away and in 500m came to a sign saying Billa was 500m away to the right and got so annoyed I turned left instead only out of spite.

The city was so ugly and unfriendly for cycling I decided I absoutely had to avoid going to any more cities in Bulgaria. That meant I had to find an internet cafe or somewhere now, because I needed to print my e-visa for Turkey (just a heads-up if you are planning to travel to Turkey, you should now apply for your visa online - as of April 2014 they will stop issuing visas at the border!) It is pretty easy to apply for a Turkey e-visa - all you need is to fill in a form, give them your bank account details and click print. However, I did have a problem that I didn't get my visa straight away after I did this and I'll give you a top tip that the above process will work much better if you have a computer that is attached to a printer.

So now I had to find somewhere that I could print. I was walking around the streets and I wanted to ask someone if they knew of an internet cafe, but nobody looked like someone that I wanted to ask. Everyone looked so unfriendly. The girls looked sultry, they definitely looked like they would break my heart, whilst the guys just looked like they would break my nose. Everyone seemed very miserable as they walked around in the beautiful seventeen degree sunshine.

But then I saw a happy looking young African man standing on some steps. He was the first black man I had seen in months. I asked him if he spoke English and he said that he did and shook my hand with enthusiasm. Then I asked if he knew of an internet cafe and I made a typing motion with my fingers as I did this, which was quite unnecessary because the man clearly spoke good English. "Oh you need an internet cafe?" he responded, also doing the keybord motion with his fingers, which was even more unnecessary. "No I don't know, sorry, I'm new in town."

I asked him if he worked here and he told me he was a student. He was from Nigeria and he reminded me very much of Franklin, the Ghanaian man that had tried to sell me a boat ride in Saint Petersburg. I remember that I was very impressed by Franklin because he was studying in Russian with the weird alphabet and Bulgaria also uses this weird alphabet. "Do you study in Bulgarian?" I asked.

"No, in English,"

"Oh you're not as impressive as Franklin."

"Who?"

"Don't you want to sell me a boat ticket?"

"What?"

I changed the subject. He was wearing an Arsenal t-shirt so we talked about football for a bit and I said I liked Arsenal too and hoped they won the league this year and he shook my hand again. Then he asked me what I was doing and I told him I was cycling to Australia.

"Oh, you're a sportsman?"

"Something like that, yeah." I took my leave and he shook my hand again. We'd only spoken for two minutes and he'd shook my hand three times. Nice chap.

I kept walking and then I saw a very tall building and at the bottom was written "Information Centre." It wasn't actually written like that, it was written in the funny letters, but thanks to Dasha's Christmas present I was (very proud of myself because I was) able to translate it. I locked my bike up and walked inside. Now, I've been in a lot of information centres but I can assure you I have never seen one like this. Usually they have maps of the area on the wall, scores of leaflets everywhere, somebody smiling behind a desk. What they don't usually have is an armed security guard and an airport-style body scanner that you have to walk through to get in. I was pretty sure that I had gone through the wrong door but the guard waved me forward with such authority I was powerless to do anything else. Once past this security check I found myself in a big hall and the door which led to what I thought was the information centre was protected by what appeared to be a bouncer. Beyond him I could see that the information centre was actually more of the local city hall place thing where people go to pay their council tax. You know what I mean, I don't know what its called. I'm pretty sure it isn't called the information centre though.

The bouncer, who was about six five and appeared to be a retired wrestler addressed me in Bulgarian to which I replied "English? It doesn't matter, I'm in the wrong place." But he called over to someone in the room and told me to wait. While I was waiting a little old lady tried to walk into the information centre and this bouncer blocked her path and told her she couldn't come in, as if she were a sixteen-year-old trying to get into a nightclub. The old woman, who did appear to be sick, started coughing and said something with a tired, wheezy voice which may well have been "you wouldn't deny a dying woman her last wish, would you, to pay her council tax bill?"

Whatever it was, it had much the same effect as if the sixteen-year-old girl had flashed her cleavage; the bouncer stepping aside and allowing the old lady to enter. It was truly bizarre.

A woman who spoke English arrived on the scene and, after I explained my predicament, she told me I would be able to print what I needed at the library on the other side of the building. I walked around and entered another door. There was some sort of cloakroom to the left and ahead I could see the library, so I walked ahead towards it. Big mistake. The woman behind the 'cloakroom' desk started shouting angrily at me. At this point I felt quite a lot like breaking down and crying. But I didn't and again someone was found who could speak English and I was directed to a computer from where I was able to print my visa and finally I could leave this strange building and hopefully the city forever.

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But there was one more rather testing obstacle in my way before I could leave the city. I had to take a bridge out of town and it was a very long bridge. As I approached it I could see that I had two options - cycle in the road or cycle on the footpath. The road was busy and had two lanes with no shoulder and a crash barrier that gave me no space to dive out of the way if I needed to, so I was very much inclined to choose the footpath, which I did. The only problem with the footpath was that every twenty metres there was a big lamppost in the middle of it. The space between the lamppost and the rail on the side of the bridge was only just big enough to squeeze my bike through if I stopped and shimmied the bike from side to side. And so I proceeded across the whole bridge, which must have been at least two kilometres long, in this fashion. Cycle twenty metres, stop, feed the front panniers through, wiggle the back, pull it a little, push it a little, and through, then cycle twenty metres and repeat one hundred times. It was certainly the longest I've ever taken to get across a bridge. The crash barrier was preventing me from changing my mind and joining the road and there was a sense of inevitability about the fact that I wasn't going to be able to join the road when the footpath ended on the other side of the bridge. There was no way to get over the crash barrier and I ended up carrying the bike and all the bags down several flights of stairs to get onto another road.

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By the time all this faffing about was done it was actually getting dark, but my day was far from over. I still hadn't found a stupid supermarket and I needed to find something because I was completely out of water. There had been a sign for a Penny Market pointing across the bridge and so I had gambled that I would find it easily, which was a poorly thought out strategy. Luckily I found a man wandering around in the dark and asked him where it was and he said he was going there, so I walked with him.

This man's name was Dimitar and he worked making little statues. He seemed terribly sad about life. "All I do is work, home, work, home" he said "I don't have time for much else." He was young, about my age (hey, I'm still young, ok?) and it seemed like he'd lost hope. I tried very hard to inspire him. I told him to go abroad and work. I know life is much tougher in Bulgaria; prices are the same but wages are much lower. But I knew for a fact he could go to the UK and do the same job I did (if someone gave Nikolay a job...) and I knew for a fact he could do that job for a few months and make enough money to travel for a year (hello, look at me) but he didn't want to be inspired. He didn't want to do any of these things. He just wanted to get by. I think, in a way, he wanted to be sad. Talking with him I very quickly went from hoping that he would offer me a place to sleep for the night, to hoping he wouldn't.

I bought some water and a shed load of biscuits to cheer me up and found a place to pitch my tent for the night.