Is there really a place for Bansko or 'Banskonia', as a friend likes to call it, after he spent an ill fated Winter camped out up there watching cranes and concrete being poured during the days of the Banskonia's boom! We asked ourselves that question at 12:20 am last Saturday morning as we arrived after a long and stressful week's work in Sofia's cut throat property market! My wife and I had kindly been offered a courtesy weekend break in a self styled 'luxury penthouse apartment' in a development that shall not be named. Needless to say we had high hopes as we had been told it was near the Kempinski and practically front line to the Gondola with ski-in/out facilities so we had high expectations. Before we even get to Bansko the journey out of Sofia is worth mention as a prologue to the main course as it ties in with the whole infrastructure debate in Bulgaria i.e. putting the cart before the horse, with development outstripping Bulgaria's capacity to absorb and meet the demands of modern tourism. There was a two hour, 20km tail-back leaving Sofia, as the melting ice and snow had revealed a scene from a war movie it was more like the road to Baghdad than Bansko! The surface looked as if B52 bombers had carpet bombed it in an attempt to stop a column if enemy tanks in their tracks! It was a lunar landscape Buz Aldrin would have felt at home as we slalomed the cones crawling like intrepid snails on our flight from Sofia! The roadside was littered with damaged and broken down cars, casualties of the craters. I counted at least 12 cars en-route between Sofia and Dupnitsa (at town half way to Bansko). I asked my long suffering wife about this scene of vehicular dysfunction & she informed me that this is all the result of graft. Quelle surprise! Local politicians signing public works contracts to line their pockets with bribes from the Contractors. Nothing new yet here was the dramatic consequences the end result for all to see of corruption. The Macedonian road builder responsible for this section must have taken monumental quantities of material and sold it on the black market leaving the road with a thin veneer of tarmac only to be washed away each Winter and replaced in the Spring. An ironic twist being the nationalistic tension between the two countries with Macedonians claiming to speak a different language when it is patently no more than a dialect of native Bulgarian.
Anyways we got to Bansko around midnight, bouncing like pinballs from one hotel complex to another for over and hour until we found the right Mountain Emerald or was it Mountain Mirage or Mountain Eden or Mountain Paradise or some such fantasy name crearted morefor irony than verisumilitude! At around 01:15 am we lugged our bags into the Complex, nowhere near the Kempinski, buried somewhere up in the tree line. Once in the apartment we began to feel joy and excitement for the coming weekend only to find out that in the cavernous roof space of our penthouse suite there were no more than 2 x heaters the size of Barbie doll's hairdryer! In a vain attempt to keep warm more than romance we clung to each other for survival in 3 layers of woolen clothing, hats and a tracksuits (like a Survival programme on Discovery Channel!) only we had no means of making making fire! After a few hours of restless shivering and intermittent freezing slumber we awoke and made it to the lounge to read the Hotel's 'welcome pack'. We soon found the cause of our discomfort as the Hotel had cleverly engineered it that way. The Developer/Hotel Owner must have had a Eurika moment! Of course why don't we freeze the proverbials off our clients and they will read the welcome pack and presto buy really expensive boxes of wood that come in 3 sizes starting at 40 BL a box! Needless to say we survived the night and skedaddled as soon as the sun rsae installing ourselves in the wonderful 'Biala Mura' (White Fir) Spa in nearby Razlog where they smiled and had full central heating and air-conditioning plasma TV's IPOD stations breathtaking mountain views and efficient room service to every apartment! Sayonara Banskonia and hello Razlog! Our first and last ever 'romantic' night in a Banskonia Emerald/Dream/Paradise/Pearl/Ruby/Jewel/Fantasy/Mirage etc... wannabe (whatever they call themselves?) spa-complex! Gorging on the boom it seems that hoteliers and those involved in promoting Bansko as a tourist desination need to do a lot of work on their service culture and pricing to win back the hordes of skiers that thronged the pistes in latter years! In this regard maybe the crisis will have a silver lining focusing minds on getting on with bread and butter issues such as repeat visits from loyal overseas holiday makers and word of mouth recomendations spreading the good word and turning Banskonia back to Bansko!
