Candy Houses

I had planned on going back to the USofA sometime near the end of March....

But then remember that British guy Peter who I cycled with in Tajikistan? He's on Easter break or something from work and we got to talking and the Balkans had always kind of been in the back of my mind, but I figured they would be all rainy and cold and blah blah, so I wasn't going to ride them. Talking to Peter about them though got me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. So I'm in the Balkans.

And so is 50 Cent.....He's playing in Skopje, Macedonia on March 31st....I had plans, otherwise I would have been there. I don't even think I'm that big of a fan, but 50 Cent in Macedonia....?

I took a bus from Istanbul to Skopje through Bulgaria. Skopje was ok, but didn't really strike me as being terribly cool.

Then I got on my bike in Skopje and headed west, and the countryside was quite fantastic.

I frequently ask locals about roads. Which roads are good or bad. Lots of traffic or not. Or if a road even exists. And I prefer riding in the mountains, not on busy roads. When I ask about a certain road I almost always get told that the road is impossible. When I keep talking to them about it though, the reason is always that the road is too long, and the next city is too far. When I tell them I came from Singapore, they tell me that the road is too steep. Or too rocky. Or too whatever. In China they told us there were too many alligators on a particular road...on the Tibetan Plateau....(at least, that is what their pantomiming told us....).

The Macedonians (a lot of the old men spoke German. I rolled into one town and asked a guy "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" He replied "Aber selbst verstandlich....") told me this road I wanted to ride was impossible. And except for the 45 sections of snow that I had to push my bike through, it was perfect. The road was so empty, that when my toes were too cold and I was done for the day, I pitched my tent about 2 feet away from the road and went to sleep.

Lake Movrovo, Macedonia.

Albania.

Bulqize, Albania.

Albanian campsite #1. It rained all night....

Albanian city dump.

Albanian buildings.

So far, I'm digging Albania.

Tirane is the capital. And something like their Minister of Culture or something was an artist and thought the city needed more color. Lots of years of communism tends to make a city quite drab. So this minister guy had all the buildings painted. I don't think it really mattered what the colors where or the patterns or anything, just so long as they weren't plain concrete.

Now I'm in Durres waiting for Peter's ferryboat to show up. Then we'll head to Austria.....

Upliscikhe

We took a day trip from Tbilisi to Upliscikhe, which is an old cave monestary place about 2 hours away. As is the case with most people, Armine has lived 2 hours away from this place her whole life but has never seen it (my parents had lived 2 hours from Yellowstone National Park for 10 years before I ever went...). It was a pretty day.




The place was a lot like Capadaccia in Turkey and similar to Petra in Jordan and also other places in Georgia, where instead of building churches, they just dig them out of the rock.







On the bus ride home we passed the refugee housing for the people whose homes were unsafe during the Russian Georgian war of 2008 (or 2007?). Rows upon rows of the exact same houses right up next to the freeway. It looks horrible. And it looks a lot like American urban sprawl....

I stayed with Armine's family the whole time. They're good people. When Armine told her 178 year old grandmother that I was coming to visit, her grandmother said "you mean the one who nearly killed you?" Armine says "yeah.... well, if that hadn't happened I wouldn't have found my tumor" to which she replied "ppppfffffttttt". The grandmother looks old, but whenever I would shake her hand she would nearly crush me.

I think Tbilisi is one of my more favorite cities. While in Yerevan hanging out with Armine's Armenian-Georgian and Armenian friends, the topic of which place is better comes up regularly. Armine is a die hard Georgia fan, she loves Tbilisi. Most of her friends agree that Tbilisi is much prettier than Yerevan (as do I), some like living in Yerevan more, but most of them like Georgia. I ask Armine who has more beautiful women, Georgia or Armenia and she say's "Armenians living Georgia. The Armenian women in Armenia dress too weird." She's right....

I went to the doctor to get an MRI on my ankle. It only hurts occasionally and the MRI is about $1,000 cheaper in Georgia....so I figured it wouldn't hurt to know if I have cartilage damage or something. I got into the MRI room and they laid me down and told me I didn't need to take my shoes off. I thought that was weird. They strapped my head in and were right about to roll me into the machine when I asked Armine to make sure they knew they were scanning my left ankle. They unstrapped me and ushered me back into the waiting room and had me wait another hour for a different radiologist to show up....they thought they were scanning my brain....Armine says "see. Georgian medicine...."

Armenia

This picture is supposed to be of Mt. Ararat, in Turkey, as seen from Armenia. It was too cloudy for me to ever see it. It's in Turkey, but the Armenian's claim it as theirs. The Soviet Union gave it to Turkey way back when.



I dropped my bike off in Turkey and took a bus to Georgia to go visit Armine. She's done with surgery and back at home. And I was in the mood for some Katchapuri. I'm telling you, a country whose national dish is cheesy bread is alright by me.

We took a bus to Armenia for a few days. She's Armenian afterall, and I'd never been.



Etchmiadzin Church near Yerevan. The 'vatican' for the Armenian Church.




We went to the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan. It was heavy.







For good luck Armenian's tie cloth to trees at certain places....

We shared a taxi back to Tbilisi with an old Georgian couple who has been living in Russia since the 60's. They had just landed at the airport in Yerevan, got picked up by the driver, who then picked us up for the 5 hour or whatever ride to Tbilisi. Somewhere in the mountains we pulled over for a lunch break and this old woman pulled out a bowl of homemade fried chicken and about 20 hard boiled eggs. She brought them from Russia. On the plane. So weird. And then at the border the Georgian's only allowed her and her husband to bring in 4 of the 8 boxes of spark plugs they were carrying and only half the medicine's. Armine told me that type of medicine costs almost nothing in Tbilisi.

It's funny being with Armine because she fills me in on all the background noise, because she speaks the language. When two drivers slam on their brakes in the middle of the street and roll down their windows to yell at each other, she explains that they're fighting because the one guy claimed the other guy had his brights on, but that guy said he didn't and he could come and see for himself, and blah blah blah. Or while waiting at the border for the old couple to get all their battery's through, the Georgian guards thought it was crazy that I was only wearing sandals, with no socks. Armine hears it all and tells me about it. And apparently Georgian women swear like sailor's. I never get this kind of information and I always wonder what people are fighting about.

No Problem

After I told the Turkish border guard that I needed to purchase a visa he said "ok. Welcome to Turkey. In Syria, many problems. In Turkey, no problems". Which is exactly what the Pakistani soldier told Spencer as we crossed into Pakistan from China.....after we had just spent 2 days arguing with the Chinese Border Guards because they wouldn't let us ride over the Khunjerab Pass.

The 10 days I spent in Syria were fantastic. The people were great, the food was good and I really enjoyed all of it.

My last two hours in Syria pissed me off. The cops didn't, for some reason, want me camping. And they knew there were no more hotels on my route, so they drove behind me for 2 hours to make sure I left the country and didn't try camping. It drove me crazy. My mom has always taught me to not take crap from the Syrian police, but these guys have just a tiny bit of authority and they weren't budging. So I crossed the border right as the sun was going down. Which really sucks for a guy like me because there weren't any hotels on the Turkey side for at least another 25 km. And it was pitch black outside.

I rode, with two lights on the front and one on the back, for about 10 min, thinking it wouldn't be too bad. Then the streetlights ended and it turned black outside. It was overcast so there was no light from the sky. Dogs were barking and coming out at me from all over. I rode on the wrong side of the road so I could see the cars as they were coming (I'm sick of getting hit from behind (that one's for you Spencer)) but my blinky lights freaked out the oncoming traffic and they all honked like crazy.

I wasn't into riding like this and really wanted to camp. But everything was farm land or infested with dogs and I couldn't see anything, but for some reason I wasn't at all worried. I'm not sure why I wasn't worried, but I wasn't.

I rolled up to a gas station and before I even got off my bike the attendant walked out and asked if I needed a place to sleep. He sleeps at the station so he can sell gas all night, and there was an extra couch. He gave me dinner, spoke a little english and we watched Turkish Fear Factor until I fell asleep.

Flatlands

The scenery didn't change much for the four or five days or whatever it was that took me to cycle through Syria. I took a lot of pictures of my bike.

The road was very flat. Sometimes a little up or a little down, but not enough of either to really effect anything. The wind, however, was a total bitch. It was almost always a cross wind, slanted more towards me than with me. Which meant that everytime a truck drove past me all the wind changed and nearly knocked me over.

These guys gave me a banana and some of that Orange Fanta the 3rd guy from the left is holding.

These kids were playing hide and seek. This kid had his eyes covered and was counting, then decided to peek right when I took the picture. Then the game was over anyway because all the kids wanted to stand around me. Which was kind of a fun novelty thing for me at the beginning of my trip (something like one year ago), but being the center of attention has lots its charm.

I got to this town, Soukhneh, in the early afternoon. It was broke. I mean really broke. There was a 15 foot deep, 10 foot long trench dug into the middle of one of the streets, with no apparent work going on around it. Nearly every building either incomplete or it had exceded it's life span by 15 years. Garbage everywhere. And millions of kids (my least favorite demographic....they always ask for money and want to touch me). I've never seen a town with so many kids.

Right as I was about to leave town the weather started to turn. It was that gusty wind with moments of complete stillness and you could feel in the air that it wasn't going to be good. The clouds weren't even black, they were brown from all the dust. I slowed down a bit to wait and see what the weather would do. When I was tired of being accosted by the kids I headed out of town and got nearly blown over by a gust. Wind is awful on a bike, but gusts are worse. I rolled back into town and sat down on a curb for 45 min trying to decide what to do. The weather was too bad to leave and there weren't any more towns for another 70 km. There were no hotels in town (I'd asked about 5 different people and was told 'no' (really, I was hinting that I wanted to stay at their house....but they didn't bite)), so my only plan was to go back to that mechanic's shop were I bought some fruit juice an hour earlier. That was it. My only plan. He was a little bit out of town, and if he said 'no' I had no other ideas. It was too windy for my tent to stand and there was a thick dust in the air that made it hard to see.

I ended up getting an invite from someone else. It took forever, but he invited me. As I cycled to his house the dust storm kicked in and visibility was something like 15 yards. I couldn't breath with my mouth open there was too much dust and garbage blowing everywhere.

We got to his house and one of his kids brought in this huge tray of food. For just me. Humous, pizza's, yoghurt, eggplant, something funky, soggy french fries and salad.

I'm still unsure how many kids this guy has. Nobody spoke any english (which makes for A LOT of staring (them staring at me)), but there were, at one point, 18 kids in this room watching me eat. And my host made me memorize all of their names. Which was extremely difficult cause they kept moving around. Then he would yell "shishumay" (or something like that) and they would all yell my name in unison. This went on for at least 1.5 hours. For the first hour, one of the little girls, Rada, cried every time I looked at her. Then for the second 3 hours she laughed every time I looked at her.

All night long the storm outside went nuts. Completely nuts.

In the morning some neighbor invited me in for breakfast. This guy, with the sweetest moustache ever, was asleep in the room when I got there. He had been sleeping in black slacks, a white button up shirt and a tie. He woke up, straightened all his clothes, pulled a mirror with stand out of a combo lock hard cased suitcase (which took him about 3 minutes to open because the lock was jambed....) and rubbed hand and face cream and lemon oil over his face and hands and hair. Then as he was running the comb through his eyebrows and moustache he decided to completely change his whole outfit. He put on a yellow shirt with brown pants. New tie also. He first tied the tie around his knee (he was kneeling in front of the mirror to get ready) then slid it over his neck. I watched the whole thing and it seemed so odd for some reason. Why didn't he just bring pajama's? Why did he straighen all of his clothes and then decide to put on his other wrinkly outfit? Why did he lock his suitcase when he was asleep right next to it? And why did he lock it while he was getting ready?

These sheep all had headbands....

The Euphrates River. Which was surprisingly very beautiful. I thought it would be a disgusting flowing cesspool, but it was very blue with virtually no garbage on the banks. If it was warm I would have swam.

Buildings like this were all over northern Syria.

On my way to Turkey everything turned green.