Shortly before leaving Romania for Bulgaria I realised that I didn't have a guidebook with me and tried in vain to locate one in Bucharest. Even the Lonely Planet series that publishes guides to such places as Tonga, Swaziland and Mongolia didn't dedicate anything to the country. So arriving in Sofia at the crack of dawn I acted on my limited prior knowledge and caught the next train to Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria.

It was quite a novel experience arriving in a city armed without any information at all. I had assumed that there would be some sort of information booth or at least a map of the city with which to establish some bearings, but I was wrong. Determined to persevere I left my backpack at the station and wandered off towards the centre, assuming the direction from a McDonalds sign which tend to be located in the busiest places. After an hour or so of traipsing around suburban streets and shopping precincts I admitted defeat and coming across an Internet Shop (used by local kids to play games rather than for checking email) I went on-line and discovered the reason for my failure to find any points of interest in Plovdiv- where basically isn't any. The best website that I found had a collection of uninteresting photographs of the town that pretty much showed me what I had already seen. All presented under the, presumably ironic, banner of "Plovdiv - The Eternal City. Bring Your Camera".

I revised my intention to stay in Plovdiv overnight and instead spent a few more hours exploring before going on to Sofia. In fairness to the city I did chance upon an older part of town that had some nice old crooked buildings and a couple of quiet churches.

Arriving back in Sofia quite late I found a small tourist booth, bought a small map of the city with points of interest highlighted on it and arranged a place to stay. I had been tempted to go upmarket and find a nice comfortable Western style hotel to take a rest from the Spartan hostels and noisy sleeper trains but the only places on offer were home stays. I relented and turned up at a flat in the centre of the city which was very comfortable. I had become used to routine by now and no longer felt guilty about turfing people out of their own rooms, in this case a nice living room satellite TV.

Sofia has a limited number of tourist spots, the main one being the Alexander Nevski church, which was under going some maintenance work and not looking its best. President Clinton has visited the city the year before and the Bulgarians waited until he had gone before throwing up the scaffolding

Aside from the church and a couple of Soviet monuments there wasn't much to see and I was left floundering for a while. It was probably a case of cultural saturation after seeing so many great cities prior to Sofia and I wandered how Bulgaria would fare in the new and competitive tourist industries with its neighbours. Perhaps if Sofia has been my first stop on the journey it would have been different. The novelty of experiencing the Slavic culture with its strange Cyrillic writing and all the remnants of the Soviet era would have warranted a longer stay. Still, the weather was glorious and it was nice not feeling obliged to spend all day sightseeing.

GREECE
The benefit of overnight trains is not always obvious. When it works well, as in the leg from Bucharest to Sofia, it's a dream and the only way to travel. You can spend a full day and evening in one destination, get on the train and arrive ready to start the next day somewhere completely different. Even with the higher fares for a sleeper compartment the saving of a night in a hotel makes it a worthwhile option for the traveller. On the other hand when the timing isn't right is can be a real endurance. The distance from Sofia to Thessalonica is only about 200km yet the train takes nearly eight hours. Border control is at the highly inconvenient time of 3am and takes over an hour involving a stream of passport and customs officials knocking on the cabin door just when you're about to fall asleep.

The sleepless night on the train did give me the chance to review my guidebook and I learnt enough about Thessalonica to only limit my stay to only a few hours and continued on towards the Agrafa mountains in the west of mainland Greece.

The first destination proper was Kalambaka, the nearest town to the monasteries of Meteora. I had decided to come here on the strength of a small photograph in the guidebook which looked astounding and turned out to be even more so in person. Meteroa is located in a valley peppered with huge rock monoliths giving it a panoramic view that would can only be regarded as a true natural wonder. What makes the area so amazing is the fact that perched on top of these sheer rocks are monasteries established hundreds of years ago. How the first monks reached the tops of these peaks isn't clear let alone how they managed to build large buildings that have survived so well and still in use.

The views of the valley were spectacular and the whole place had a quite hypnotic effect. I felt inclined to spend all day just staring at the rocks and taking in the surreal atmosphere so it was with a little reluctance that I made my way back to the hotel after a full day of walking. The next morning when I discovered that there were no tickets left for the train out of town until the afternoon I gratefully took the opportunity of doing the whole thing again.

Moving on to Delphi involved some complicated train connections and ultimately the nearest train stop is about 20km away. Being on the last train meant arriving well after the last bus had gone but I met up with a young Israeli couple and we managed to communication enough information to the stationmaster for him to call us a taxi. The Israelis were on the last few days of their holiday before being conscripted into the army for three years. Given the recent events in the Middle East and New York I was impressed at just how relaxed and philosophical they were about it.

Delphi is situated in a magnificent setting on top of a plateau cut out of a high valley. There isn't a great deal remaining of the city, considered by the Ancient Greeks to be the centre of the World, and some imagination is called for to fully appreciate it's importance. I saw all the ruins the next day and stayed another night so that I could watch the Arsenal v Panathanikos game in the local bar. I had expected to be intimidated by a rowdy crowd of Greek football supporters but being out of season it was all very quiet and sedate.

I caught a bus to Athens, the final destination of the trip. There was a nice symmetry to ending in Europe's most Southerly capital, which is almost directly South from Helsinki its most Northerly. Both are famous Olympic cities and Athens is due to host the modern version for the second time in 2004. Preparations are already underway and there's lots of local talk about how the cities infrastructure will hold up to such a huge event. There's certainly a need to do something about the traffic, which is suffocating and likely to terrify unsuspecting visitors.

All the usual sights of Athens lived up to expectations, particularly the Acropolis which towers elegancy above the chaos of the city. The Greeks had a natural good natured and humorous attitude to life, which was in contrast to the slightly dour nature of the Slavic countries. The manager of the cheap hotel where I stayed would never recommend any local Greek restaurants and always directed me to the nearest McDonalds.

I enjoyed Greece but had a feeling that it was like a conventional holiday artificially tacked on to the Eastern European tour. It's certainly worthy of another visit to see the peninsular and islands and may hold more surprises like the spectacular Meteora.