The Monument to the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship, Varna - August 2017

Earlier in the year I managed to persuade Mrs Hunter to book the family holiday in Bulgaria. Why persuade you might ask ? Well you see a rather splendid chap whom I infrequently meet up with is based in that part of the world and if you travel all that way it would be very rude not to pop round and well, meet up and see some stuff.

I sat in a local cafe waiting for Darmon Richtor, and him not being a morning person he was late, sorry hang on he wasn't - I was early, having had only 3 hours sleep I sat hiding from the midday sun drinking coffees with fresh lemonade chasers. I hadn't seen him since our Latvia and Lithuania road trip and well I knew he had something rather good to show me and I will be very honest, I was a little excited.

This place was in our second explore of the day.

The Monument to the Bulgarian Soviet Friendship or as it is sometimes called The Russian Monument is a rather grand monument perched 110 metres up on top of a hill above the city of Varna overlooking the Black Sea. A rather deceptive monument which is in fact building with a big secret (more on that later).

Built over a four year period from 1974 the monument acts as a memorial for Russia's support of the Bulgarian people during the 1828-29 Russo-Turkish War.  The political changes of 1989 saw the monument fall into disrepair and without going into any politics, the monument splits opinions.

On with the explore

Hang on, 301 steps and although I didn't count them it was a killer in the early mid afternoon sun, oh you will have to trust me on this, it was hot - very hot.

This shot does not really give a sense of the size of the monument, but it stands 23 metres in height with a width of 48 metres.

So now having reached the summit it was time to go in and unfortunately the entrance sadly had been recently sealed preventing our access.

Fortunately my guide knew of the "servants" entrance and with a bit of a wiggle and limbo in we went to darkened snaking maze of corridors taking us up thru and ultimately onto the top of the monument.

By this time I was hot and bothered, however it was nearly time for some of that cold beer that we had cunningly picked up from the shop before our ascent.

We then started to make our exit and for that promised beer, via the "Star Room".



Pausing to look in the darken depths to a sealed lower level.

Out back into the heat of the day we paused and chatted for a catch up since our last meeting drinking our hard earned beer and then Darmon teasingly let slip "there is more".

We carried on towards the base of the hill, I heard mention words of warning about snakes in the undergrowth - great !!!

Resembling a Dharma Initiative hatch way from an episode of Lost and all we needed now was the dreaded Smoke Monster as we entered some kind of military bunker.

It was vast....

Really, really vast and a sprawling maze.

After a good wander around Darmon directed me to a shaft which rose up thru the hillside into the monument above.

 

Under our feet lay uniformed guillotine cut stone and we stood a few feet below the surrounding floor level. The shaft seemed to continue below us and had been obviously filled in, but someone had been busy removing the stone by hand - perhaps the bunker complex continued below into further levels ?

RAF Wittering Weapons Store - June 2017

Visited with Tbolt and Snapt.

This one didn't really float my boat, but Snapt liked it a lot - as correctly predicted by Tbolt.

This base was once a storage facility for nuclear weapons.

Not a lot to see and mostly shit graf was the order of the day sadly, looks like we missed a bit, but I don't really expect a revisit any time soon.

Sadly 2/10 from me,

Skrunda 1, Latvia - October 2015

If you drive down the country P116 road in Latvia you come to a bus stop next to a concrete side road into the trees.

Tin Dog, Tbolt, Darmon Ritcher and myself pulled up in the car only to be greeted by a number of the locals.

One of the locals, a Bill Clinton like chap, stepped forward to our car and began to question us in Latvian. "English" I piped up and a comical exercise in why perhaps it is a good idea to own a phrase book occurred. I decided to act dumb and made bird like wing movements with my hands "we bird watchers", a long pause and then Bill Clinton's  reply was something like "no birds, abandoned military base". We thought he was kind of beckoning us in to take a look - so far so good, we drove on down the concrete road.

We parked up a little hesitant, Skrunda had a checkered history of access with stories of guard dogs and heavy security only short of, to quote "sharks and laser beams". Skrunda had then become a free for all for the locals but then had recently been sold - access today would seem to be wide open, as we had been advised.



This Russian secret military base was finally abandoned in 1998 and is rather reminiscent of Pripyat without the Ferris wheel and radioactivity.





Onto a roof for a view of the area



It was about this time we spotted a security van driving through the site, thankfully it finally left but we upped our game, given that we had simply walked in through an open gate we hadn't expected a security van. Had Bill Clinton and his band of locals set us up for a big fall?

















Target 1, the shooting range - no pun intended.







Then it went a little bit shit, Darmon spotted two chaps in high viz, we scoped our car and parked slap bang next to it was a police van !!! Time to move sharpish - these chaps are mostly armed and like a good large bribe - we didn't know if we should be in this place or not and stupidly we didn't know our legal rights - not that this means a great deal when you may be face to face with a couple of bent coppers with guns.....

Into the cover of trees and into the shadow of buildings we nervously made a rather rapid move towards the far end of the site taking shelter one of the buildings.

Darmon instructed us all to swap the memory cards in our cameras for fresh blank ones, shortly after we took the shots from target 2.







Time to move bloody sharpish, we could see the coppers moving from building to building, we moved to the far end of the site, in a rather feverish few minutes - being stalked by armed police was not part of the holiday pitch to Tbolt and Tin Dog. Mrs Tbolt and Mrs Tin Dog would never forgive me if this all went tits up.



 



Shelter taken, the decision was taken to exit and we fled over the border to Lithuania.






A rare 10/10 - a return visit required as so much more to see.

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