Wednesday, 30th May, Kazanlak

We leave Velingrad headed for Kazanlak, retracing our steps northwards for a while. Along the road, in the shade of the trees, there are many mushroom collectors carrying long ‘necklaces’ of fungi threaded together. We pass entire Roma families in horse-drawn carts on their way to or from collection outings. At the spot with the plastic container whirlpool, a slight change in the level of the river has dispersed the gathering.

On the edge of Pazardzhik we stop at a decommissioned road-side café that must have been thriving in the fifties and sixties before the motorway was built a few kilometres north of here to take the transit traffic to Turkey.

It now functions as a garage and storage place for building material. The old sign suggests dinner. Let's find a pectopant, I say, my head filled with exotic monsters. The others look blank for a second before grasping that my strange word is an English pronunciation of almost a completely untransliterated restaurant sign. Further in we pay our respects to the monument we visited last year and, on the outskirts of the town itself, L films highrises that have a strange design. These are followed by what could pass for typical communist residential architecture which has been made available to the Roma. Outside of one of the blocks there is a characteristic Roma caravan though it is up on blocks and doesn’t look as if it has been friends with the open road for decades.