The European Tijuana, i.e. Bulgaria's Sunny Beach: Tequila, Sex, Marijuana... But No Electricity

Novinite Insider » EDITORIAL | Author: Ivan Dikov |August 15, 2010, Sunday // 23:16
Bulgaria: The European Tijuana, i.e. Bulgaria's Sunny Beach: Tequila, Sex, Marijuana... But No Electricity

Welcome to Sunny Beach! For some reason Mano Chao hasn't made a song about this place yet. Although he really should, especially now that a unique new feature has been added to the portfolio of the Bulgarian sea resort – namely, lack of electricity.

The story of how Sunny Beach, the largest resort on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, ended up in its current state – as the ultimate European cheap party destination with intermittent power outages – is rather intriguing.

In mid July, the crowded resort was hit by a blackout that lasted 41 hours and led many tourists – foreign and Bulgarian alike – to pack their bags and leave.

The Bulgarian authorities – from the National Electric Company NEK to the national security agency DANS – launched an investigation into the causes of the outage which is still ongoing.

They didn't really need to sweat that much because what followed provided the answers which were obvious anyway. Over the past few days, the Sunny Beach resort and other coastal resorts, villages, and towns north of Burgas were “stricken” by new power cuts. Sure, these lasted “only” 1, 2, or 3 hours but came just as unexpectedly.

The causes of the electricity supply problems in the region are clear – infrastructure construction, including the power lines, has not kept up with the crazy over-development that occurred there in the last 15 years fueled primarily by speculators, corruption-generated acquisition of hotels and construction permits, and mafia groups laundering dirty money.

Of course, few of the inspired ladies and gentlemen involved in this process – as joined by the respective Bulgarian central and local authorities – ever thought of developing Sunny Beach properly as a top-quality, upscale resort destination. The evidence for that is right there – no one thought of something as basic as having a regional power grid with a proper capacity.

Thus, as the huge number of tourists packed in Sunny Beach have sought to escape from the heat of the scorching Bulgarian summer by turning on the air-conditioners in their hotel rooms, the electricity consumption went through the roof reaching 110% of the capacity that the local grid can handle. This is what happened on Thursday and Friday. And again on Saturday.

Interestingly, this initially led to announcements made Friday night by sources from NEK and the Electricity System Operator (ESO), a state-owned company monitoring electricity supply, of the introduction of scheduled restrictions of power supply in the region north of Burgas – a measure that Bulgaria has not seen since the last years of the ideologically and economically uninspired communist regime in the late 1980s.

(Back then the Bulgarian language even developed a special expression about the blackouts that now comes in handy when talking about Sunny Beach, whose emotional charge vested into many dear memories of those who were old enough to remember the candle-lit (though unromatic) dinners from those days is rather hard to be conveyed with the English expression “electricity supply restrictions”.)

According to the announcements, Sunny Beach and the other smaller resorts were said to have power five out of every six hours.

As if this situation wasn't bad enough, late on Saturday NEK and ESO declared in a perplexingly victorious tone that there would be no restrictions of power supply. Or at least not scheduled ones.

Thus, they left the hotel and restaurants owners and hundreds of thousands of tourists and local residents “in the dark” - literally and metaphorically speaking – i.e. wondering for quite some time what exactly is happening and when the next blackout will occur.

What is more, their decision perpetuated this situation of uncertainty because the local power utility EVN was given orders to turn off the power of at least part of the region – as it did Saturday night – as soon as the excessive consumption nears the critical level of 200 MW. If this measure is not implemented, the entire grid in the region might collapse leaving Sunny Beach and the other resorts without power for days.

Not surprisingly, some hotel owners declared they preferred the scheduled power supply restrictions as this would at least save them and the tourists the fear of the unknown, and would also save the grid from collapsing completely while the summer season is at its height.

One must take a minute to admire the strategy that NEK and ESO came up with for temporarily solving the problem (i.e. until a third power line to Sunny Beach can be constructed in addition to the two in existence) – they issued a call to the hotel owners AND the tourists to restrict voluntarily their electricity consumption in the peak evening hours.

“Turn off your air-conditioner, or we won't be able to cook your dinner,” is probably what the hotel managers rushed to tell their guests. In an extremely shocking turn of events, this strategy failed to pan out the very day it was “introduced,” which led to the power cut Saturday night.

How many more of these blackout extras to their all-inclusive packages should the good people having fun at Sunny Beach expect by the end of the summer? Probably a few more. It depends on the ingenuity of the Bulgarian state companies, really. They have suggested the local stork population is causing the problems – so they might well be on the right track to solving them.

The situation is as clear as it is absurd and ridiculous – but I would still like to draw the attention of our dear readers to a couple of points about Sunny Beach – as the current electricity issues are only the tip of the iceberg.

Back in the communist days, Sunny Beach was a pretty awesome family-type resort. It had good urban planning, it had what was the best sand beach along the eastern Black Sea coast, and it enjoyed some really amazing nature such as natural sand dunes.

The picture, of course, changed dramatically after 1989 when the uncontrolled over-development of the resort was set off and hotels were built at any empty spot available. The unique sand dunes were gone not just because hotels sprung up in their place but because the sand was sometimes used as readily available construction material.

At one point in 1994, VIS, the then almighty mafia group in Bulgaria, literally took over the resort but placing special checkpoints at its exits (making it look kind-of like West Berlin during the Cold War), in which it was aided by the local police.

Today, 15 years after that episode when the times of overt organized crime and wild capitalism in Bulgaria are supposedly gone, Sunny Beach, has an estimated 300 000 beds, up from only 27 000 in 1989. No wonder that the power grid – which was hardly expanded since the communist days – is about to collapse. (By the way, the sewerage system of the resort is just as inadequate and there have been a couple of problematic instances in that respect which are very unpleasant to describe.)

Sunny Beach, once the pearl of the Black Sea, has become a real “concrete jungle” - just like the expression in “Empire State of Mind”, the hit song of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Except that no dreams are really made there. But there are dreams that are realized in Sunny Beach.

These are the dreams of hordes of teenagers and other people from all around Europe who enjoy hardcore partying combined with cheap booze, cheap drugs, cheap sex services, chaotic orgies, and general debauchery.

Such a description might seem exaggerated to these who have never been there but to those who happen to have seen dozens of 16-17-year-old British, Scandinavian, German or Russian kids throw up collectively outside a disco or break into a local chapel late at night in order to pray, these images are a lot more graphic that words can describe.

For the fact of the matter is that Sunny Beach has emerged as the ultimate low-quality destination – of tourism dominated by cheap packages, and a demand for alcohol, drugs, sex.

In US popular culture, the Mexican city of Tijuana right south of the border is sometimes mentioned as a place for hardcore partying. Well, thanks to Bulgaria, Europe now has its own Tijuana – Sunny Beach – except that the latter is by far not as dignified as the Mexican city, which does have electricity.

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Tags: Sunny Beach, electricity, foreign tourists

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