More Georgia

Kazbegi. Mount Kazbegi in the background with some famous church in the foreground. It was about an hour hike to get to the church. It was fantastic. The church is perched on top of a hill and can be seen from town. The Soviets had built a tram up to the top, but the locals tore it down....

I took the wrong trail up and approached the church from the back side. The final 200 meters to the church was a high alpine grass valley and reminded me of running in Alaska (incidentally, about the only thing I miss from America, aside from a handful of people, are the Thursday Evening Epics....).

Tbilisi.

Water fountain in Tbilisi. They were all over and had water continually spitting out the top. I'm too leary of anything that I haven't treated myself, or that hasn't come out of a bottle with a safety seal, for me to drink it. This one has a man's name on it and was donated by his family after the man died.

I slept at some guy's house. His name is Luka. He lets travellers stay at his house. It fluctuated, but one night we peaked out at 16 travellers....I had to go to bed early so I could get a 'good' spot.

Heading out of Tbilisi.

My dinner....

I met Eitam and his wife Ali in Tajikistan, they're from Israel. I kept running into them. I met them in Khorog. We all left separate ways and then I met them again in Khorog something like 2 weeks later. Then I bumped into them in Samarqand a few weeks after that, and then again in Bukhara. They flew home from Uzbekistan sometime in September. Then Eitam and his brother and father were going to be in Georgia the same time as I was. We emailed a few times, and I knew he was around somewhere. Then one night I got back to my place and there was a note on my bike, from Eitam. He walked into where I was staying and saw my bike.

I met Ivan while waiting for the ferry in Aktau, Kazakhstan. When we got to Baku we separated and I hadn't seen him in 2 or 3 weeks. He went to Armenia and we had just missed each other in Tbilisi. Then one week later I was in the mountains walking across a parking lot and a car drove by with somethe yelling my name (which is weird when you're in a weird place and someone knows your name....). It was Ivan.

I met Corrinne while riding my bike in Tajikistan. She's an American and is on a bike. We are both headed west but have been using different routes. Then I ran into her in Dushanbe, along with a bunch of other cyclists I had met on the way. Just like with all the others I knew she was going to be in Georgia, but I didn't know when. I had just bought a banana on the street in Tbilisi and I looked back and saw her and Michael.

I met Michael in Khorog, Tajikistan. He's a German on a motorcycle. When I got to Dushanbe I wandered around looking for a place to stay at 10 pm and I literally bumped into him walking down the street. So we shared a hotel. I left Dushanbe and he was sick, so I got ahead of him. I just missed him in Uzbekistan. He went the southern way, through Iran and again, I knew he would be in Georgia or Turkey sometime, and I thought I would see him. Then I bumped into him and Corrinne. It's strange continually bumping into these people. I like it.

Gori. This is Stalin.

Michael and I left Tbilisi the same day. He needed to spend some time in Gori picking up a recovered stolen camera from some Icelandic friends of his (bureacratic nightmare...I hope his friends appreciate what he's doing...). So we met the next day in Gori, ate a couple of lunches and went to the Stalin museum. Interesting place. Not at all objective. The place was covered with pictures of him. Him while he was young, during the revolution, while in exhile, etc....Pictures of happy Soviets driving tractors, the first woman to drive a car, Stalin and the first luxury car produced in the Soviet Union, etc.... Everything was in Georgian and Russian, but there was an older Russian woman giving a tour in English. She spoke so quickly that the only question asked during the 40 min tour was "Did Stalin play the piano?" (when we were in a mock up of Stalin's office and there was a piano). The response was "No. Over here in this case we have the uniform....". She didn't want any questions asked.

A bronze mask of Stalin, taken from a plaster cast of him which was made a few hours after he died. Yes, that is a full size replica of Stalin's face on a white pedastal surrounded by red carpet surrounded by marble columns in a room all by itself.

The only negative thing I heard was this (I don't remember the exact numbers....): "In 19XX, while under Stalin, 1.X million people were arrested for political reasons. 800,000 were shot while the remaining prisoners were sent to a prison camp. Unfortunately, X00,000 died in the prison camp due to bad living conditions. Over here we have pictures of Stalin's second wife and children....".

Heading out of Gori.

A church outside Kareli.

Tbilisi is ultra cosmopolitan. Parts of it felt very European. Once you get outside of Tbilisi though the villages are in various stages of disrepair. I take smaller roads when I can, so I pass through tiny villages. It's odd that the roads between towns are often paved, but once I hit a village the road falls apart. Most of the houses are built from logs and look like they're barely standing. A lot of people stand around doing nothing and the shops don't have very much stuff.

I was noticing all these things about these villages and then talking to a local about it. Last year when Georgia was having a war with Russia (that sentence sounds strange....) Gori was bombed quite heavily, as were the surrounding areas. Which also explained all the rows of cheap, quickly built tract housing I saw in a few places. They were there because people's homes had been shelled.....

Fall.

I ended up spending some more time in Tbilisi than I planned, because I liked it there. It's caught between really wanting to be Europe, but still being a city from the former Soviet Union. It's been one of my favorite cities, next to that place in Laos that sold only watermelon, coke and dildo's, of course...

Georgia is a little frustrating on a bike. There aren't a lot of roads and so I've been forced to ride on the highway for some parts, which has a lot of traffic and a lot of really crazy drivers. Also, a lot of the places I wanted to see have only one road leading there. Maybe it's sissy, but it's mentally frustrating to ride 250 km up a dirt road only to turn around and ride right back down the same way....

I'm in Borjomi now.

In two days: Turkey.

Georgia

From my first Georgian campsite. Near the Azerbaijan border.




This is at Davit Gareji (sp?). It's a cave monestary. The sloped slab of rock in the back has housing carved into it where the monks stay.


I walked around for 2 or 3 hours and saw cave dwellings all over the place. This place was way off any main road and not near any towns and there were quite a few Georgian tourists making a day trip pilgrimage.




This cave caught water and then directed it through the 'pipe' into a 'bath' which had a weir that overflowed into a large pit.


My bike with Signagi in the back. Signagi felt very Italian. All the streets were cobble and there was a fortress wall encircling the whole town.


I rode up to a town called Ananuri. This reservoir sat beside it.


A Georgian snack. It's either walnuts or hazelnuts (I don't know how to specify one or the other...) strung onto a string and then dipped in some type of jelly made from grapes. When it dries it looks like pooh on a string, but tastes like a fruit roll up.

Fortress in Ananuri.

Ananuri still....
One of the motorcycles in the background is owned by a guy from Palmer, Alaska. The first Alaskan I've met since climbing in Thailand. I don't remember his name. He used to live out on Maude Road, but now lives near the golf course. He's been working in Afghanistan for awhile. He's a civil engineer.


The national dish is Katchapuri. Ok, maybe it's not the national dish, but it's everywhere. It's pretty much just cheesy bread. It looks like a pizza, but just has cheese. I love it.


Mtskheta.


I walked around Tbilisi on Saturday looking at old churches and I saw about 10 weddings. They were cool to watch. This one had an acapella group which would chant short prayers after the priest would sing something. It was fantastic. I also walked in on a funeral. There was a long line of people going into the church, and Georgians just mostly wear black anyway, so I didn't even realize. I figured it must have been a nice church....when I got inside I broke off from the line of people to look at some paintings, and if I hadn't broken off, then I would have been standing right in front of the widow...offering condolescenses?

Georgian's don't preserve their dead the way they do in the west. It was open casket and the man's face was a very dark greenish/grayish color. A couple of days later I was in a neighborhood and a funeral was happening. A large group of people were walking down a narrow street, filling the street. In the front were 6 men carrying an open casket in which was a man, with the same dark green/gray colored face. It was interesting. The setting was very peaceful, very beautiful. I didn't take a picture, I didn't comfortable.


Another Katchapuri type dish. It's a bread bowl baked with cheese in it. Then they put in a slab of butter and a raw egg. The heat from the cheese cooks the egg. It's delicious.

Azerbaijan Part 2

More Azerbaijan pictures.

The rat hotel in Ismayalli.

The scenery went from desert nothingness to green grass covered hillsides in about 10 kilometers.

These cows were down on a riverbed.  And there wasn't any grass, so they were all just standing around.  It was weird.  I see cows all the time, but they're always eating.  These cows looked so bored....

This guy was sitting on the road in the middle of nowhere rocking out to Azeri music.

Seki fortress.

Azerbaijan

Baku, Azerbaijan.

Where Ivan and I slept my first night in Azerbaijan.

Cycling away from Baku.

This man got an economics degree at a university in Azerbaijan. Now he's selling melon on the side of the highway....He was very happy and gave me as much melon as I could eat.

My first campsite in Azerbaijan.

The only tree I saw in 150 km after leaving Baku.

2nd campsite in Azerbaijan. It rained this night and every night after for the next week.

I thought there was a fire in the valley, but it was the river reflecting the setting sun.