It's a day of torrential downpours here in the southern French Alps, so it seems as good a time as any to catch up on some long-overdue blogging. The fact that it's the end of August and this will be my first post of the year tells you a great deal about how 2020 has been for travel and for feeling in the mood for blogging!
I am catching up on a year's worth of overdue trips (Svaneti, Armenia, Panama and the Tour de Georgie), and I'm moving in reverse chronological order, so I will start with the bicycle tour I undertook two months ago as a farewell to Georgia. I first arrived in Georgia
in 2009 on my bicycle, and
my second visit in 2011 was also on a cycle tour, so it seemed an appropriate bookend to two wonderful years of teaching in my favourite post-Soviet state to take a couple of weeks and ride around to several places that I had missed over the years to give closure to my Caucasian adventures.
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Commelina communis (Asiatic dayflower)
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| Small tortoiseshell butterfly (Aglais urticae) |
To set the stage, Terri and I arrived back in Tbilisi in early January after three fun weeks exploring Panama with my sister Saakje, her partner Henkka and my mom. (There will be a Panamanian post soon, I promise.) The winter in Tbilisi was bleak, with almost no snow to be found anywhere in the eastern half of Georgia's Caucasus mountains, and hence no skiing. In early March, just as the world started into a coronavirus lockdown, Terri flew to New Zealand for what was supposed to be a six-week trip but which turned out to be a five-month separation. The international school at which I was teaching closed its doors and turned to online "learning", which I found soul-destroying and futile.
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| Dactylorhiza umbrosa (marsh orchid) |
We were never locked indoors the way that French, Spanish or Italian citizens were, and Georgia did extremely well at containing the spread of covid-19, but it was a long, bleak period of uncertainty. Georgia cut off essentially all international flights in March and sealed its land borders, meaning that when the school year finally ground to a halt in mid-June I was unable to leave the country, and was still cut off from Terri. Our elaborately-laid travel plans (a road trip through Iran, hiking in Armenia, then time in Canada and Bali before a September return to South Africa to start driving Stanley around the continent) were completely impossible, and I had no idea where or when Terri and I could be reunited again (New Zealand wouldn't have me, Georgia wouldn't have Terri, and Canada originally wouldn't have Terri either, although then it had a change of policy which meant that we would have 2 weeks of expensive and annoying quarantine). It seemed like a good time to get out of Tbilisi, shake off the mental cobwebs and lockdown gut that I had been accumulating for the past few months, and see whether a change of scene would do me some good.
Riding to Ghebi
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| Uplistsikhe from a distance |
I pedalled out of Tbilisi on a blazing hot morning on June 16th, leaving Tbilisi along the dangerous and unpleasant main expressway for a few kilometres before turning off onto the secondary road that runs west along the Mtkvari River from Mtskheta to Gori. It was a long hot 70-kilometre slog, with little in the way of scenery to redeem it other than a distant view of the ancient cave city of Uplistsikhe shimmering in the heat haze on the opposite bank of the river as I approached Stalin's home town of Gori. I found most hotels in town not accepting guests thanks to strict anti-coronavirus health measures, but eventually I ended up in a slightly upmarket motel with a swimming pool to soak away the dust and heat fatigue.
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| Samtsevrisi fortress |
The ride the next day was through unfamiliar territory, as I continued along the south side of the Mtkvari on a series of secondary roads through prosperous farming country and past a rather scenic medieval fortress at Samtsevrisi. Eventually I crossed back to the north bank and branched off on a gently climbing and very scenic road over a low pass that led downhill towards the bleak manganese mining town of Chiatura. I passed up a couple of good campsites in hopes of a perfect campsite, and ended up instead after 98 kilometres at a suboptimal spot overlooking what seemed to be an abandoned derelict ore-processing plant.
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| Soviet Realist art in Chiatura |
The morning of June 18th, I awoke to crashing and banging and the sound of heavy machinery starting up, and I realized that the ruined factory was in fact still very much in operation. I ate breakfast and watched the ore dust billow out of the holes in the roof and the broken side windows, before descending to the road and continuing on my way. I rode through town, climbed steeply out the other side in extreme heat, and saw an unexpected sight: a couple of Westerners pedalling a fully-loaded tandem touring bicycle. Given that Georgia hadn't allowed in any tourists in months, this was a surprise, so I stopped to chat. It turned out that Nina and Hugo had in fact arrived in Georgia in early December, having cycled from France, and had spent the past six months working at a tourist hostel in Martvili. They were headed to Tbilisi on their first cycling excursion since December, hoping that land borders would open at some point soon so that they could start riding back to France (their planned trip to Mongolia having been torpedoed by coronavirus). I commiserated with them, and then shared the unwelcome news that they had just pedalled several kilometres uphill in the heat past the Katskhi Pillar Church which they very much wanted to see. I left them to decide whether they would turn around and return to the church or not, and set off downhill myself.
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| Katskhi Pillar Church |
I had visited Katskhi once before, back in 2015, but it's so spectacular that I didn't mind seeing it again. There's a perfectly adequate view from the main road, but I bumped along a dirt track to get closer and obtain a better angle for photographs. It's like a little piece of
Meteora, Greece dropped into Georgia, except that there's no easy way up around the back. This part of Georgia, Imereti, is characterized by steep-sided limestone gorges, and this pillar is pretty sheer or overhanging on all sides. Two tiny churches sit on top, built in the 9th or 10th century and abandoned several centuries later. The climbing route to the top was forgotten until a mountaineer and a writer led an exploratory team up in 1944. In the 1990s, after Georgian independence,
a Georgian monk named Maxime took up residence like a modern-day
Simeon Stylites. (I visited
the church of the original 5th-century Simeon Stylites outside Aleppo, Syria in 1999, and the church of the
6th-century Simeon Stylites the Younger outside Antioch in 2009, as well as the precipitous cliff-top Ethiopian monastery of
Debro Damo in 2010, so I was glad to add to my collection of pillar-dwelling ascetics.)
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| My Lost World swimming hole and campsite |
I realized as I pedalled away that there was another less famous church atop a steep limestone pillar not far away that didn't draw any tourists (it's probably easier to get to the top); I was interested to realize that Katskhi was not a one-off unique creation but part of a larger pattern. I had lots of time to contemplate Imeretian limestone that afternoon as I rode off the map and into a lost world. I was toggling between several paper maps as well as online Google Maps and offline Maps.me, and none could agree on whether I could ride up a particularly remote gorge and pop out the other side. I took a chance, and was glad that I did. I bumped along increasingly rugged and unrideable tracks until I reached the Dzusa River and started pedalling up a steep-sided canyon. I wanted a quiet place to camp, and I found it, beside an idyllic swimming hole alive with butterflies and shrilling frogs and (as I found out after taking a refreshing dip) at least one small water snake. It felt wonderful to be in such a remote area, far from traffic and people and civilization, and I slept very soundly after 45 hard-won kilometres.
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Dense Colchic forest draping the steep Imeretian gorges
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| A seriously dodgy bridge over the Dzusa River |
June 19th found me pushing my bicycle uphill along unrideable dirt and cobblestone tracks and across flimsy-looking log bridges until I left behind the dense Colchic oak/hornbeam forest and the walls of the canyon and emerged into an agricultural valley. I climbed very slowly until, after several hours, I found asphalt for the first time in almost 24 hours just in time for a very steep climb up and over the final ridge separating me from the town of Tkibuli. I rocketed downhill into town, found a small restaurant and stuffed myself silly with khinkali (Georgian dumplings).
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Final steep grunt over the pass to Tkibuli
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| Refuelling stop in Tkibuli |
That fuel was needed as the next stretch of the road was a 600-metre vertical ascent up the limestone ramparts of the Racha Range in the full 38-degree heat and humidity of mid-afternoon. I took it slowly, and steadily ground my way up to a pass before descending slightly to the Shaori Reservoir, which Terri and I had driven past the previous summer, commenting on the camping possibilities. I found a spot on the lakeshore to put up a tent, cooked up some lentils and couscous and fell asleep early, worn out by the heat and the vertical ascents, even if I had only covered 39 kilometres all day.
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The Racha Range towering over Tkibuli
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| Unusual six-fold symmetry to Nikortsminda Church |
The next day I rolled downhill to Nikortsminda Church, one of the architectural gems of Georgia. Somehow a hexagonal pattern of six naves is fitted into a rectangular building, a very clever design that plays tricks on your senses. I was impressed that such a complex church had been built in what today is a tiny village. The landscape got steeper and greener as I descended to the Rioni River at Ambrolauri, the main city of the region of Racha. From here on the road stayed in the valley bottom as it ascended steadily to the regional capital Oni and its famous synagogue (Jews have been living in Oni for over 2000 years, although almost none of them are left after large-scale migration to Israel), then continued uphill towards my destination of Ghebi. The road, immaculately paved up until Utsera, deteriorated into muddy misery as it passed through a narrow defile and never really recovered. I ended up camping just short of Ghebi in a scenic meadow plagued with malevolent flies, having ridden 74 kilometres.
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Wonderful carving, Nikortsminda
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| Nikortsminda Church |
June 21st found me pedalling and pushing 4 kilometres further along to Ghebi, a scenic stone-built village in a stupendous location tucked between the 3000-metre peaks of the Lentekhi Range and the 4000-metre summits of the main Caucasus range against the border with Russia's North Ossetia republic. I was worn out after 5 fairly tough, hot days in the saddle and was glad for a roof over my head (courtesy of Zia, a middle-aged woman running a guesthouse in the village) and a couple of days out of the saddle. I had made it to one of my primary objectives for the trip, and was happy to relax for a little while by going for a hike.
Ghebi and Upper Racha
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| Sunny morning in Ghebi, Racha |
My first day of hiking did not go as well as I had hoped. Georgian hiking trails are often poorly marked, and subject to the vagaries of weather and harsh winters. I had hoped to hike up to the base camp for Shoda, the big peak to the south of Ghebi. It sounded like an idyllic walk, and the first 20 minutes or so were lovely, hiking through the back streets of the village and along a promising-looking track. As soon as the trail hit a stream, however, it vanished entirely. The stream was in full spate, and looked very tricky to cross. Luckily I met a local man coming the other way who showed me the very rickety bridge that had been cobbled together out of driftwood just downstream. I thanked him and headed across, but by the time I had reached two more channels of the river, all semblance of a path was gone. I could find neither trail markers nor any sign of a track, and ended up casting around for a while before settling down for a lunch of leftover khachapuri and cheese. It was a pretty spot, full of colourful butterflies and wildflowers, and I whiled away a happy hour before turning around and returning to Zia's for a hearty supper.
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| Early-morning light on the peaks south of Ghebi |
The next morning, after a long sleep, blissfully uninterrupted by torrential rain in the night, I found a party of four Tbilisi-ites who had arrived late. They had climbed up to Udziro Lake, the same iconic Racha hike that Terri and I had done the previous summer, and like us, they had been hammered by awful weather at the top. I set off for another day hike while they wandered off to smoke a large joint and then start the drive back to Tbilisi.
This hike was much more successful. I walked north along a river valley that led directly towards the wall of glaciated peaks that marked the Russian border. Again it was sunny and pleasant and a profusion of wildflowers lined the dirt road that led to the tiny semi-abandoned settlement of Gona. As I passed through the village, I ran into a Border Police post where I was politely but firmly told that I couldn't go any further along the valley. I sat atop a boulder and ate lunch, watching the clouds over the Caucasus grow steadily darker as I wrote up my diary. When they got sufficiently menacing, I shouldered my daypack and started back downhill, arriving back in Ghebi just before the heavens opened. I hadn't seen quite as much of this northwestern corner of Racha as I had hoped, but what I had seen had been lovely.
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| Zia, my hostess in Ghebi |
(It was just as well that I saw Ghebi when I did, as several weeks later massive floods swept away the road between Utsera and Ghebi so completely that it would be at least a month before land access could be restored, and stranded tourists and locals had to be evacuated by helicopter.)
Roads Less Cycled
I left Ghebi early on the morning of June 23rd, determined to make it all the way to Kutaisi, 145 km away, in a single long day. It looked simple enough, as the road followed the Rioni River all the way, and so would be almost entirely downhill. It started out well enough, bumping back to the pavement and then racing downhill through Oni and Ambrolauri before continuing downstream to the famous wine village of Khvanchkara (producers of Stalin's favourite tipple) and racing along to the 80 km mark. Here was where things started to get more complicated.
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| The mountains around Udziro Lake, where we hiked last summer |
First the road climbed almost 200 vertical metres above the river to avoid an impassable gorge; as I pedalled uphill, I wondered why I was panting so hard. When I looked at the thermometers on my watch and cycling computer, I realized that it was 44 degrees and that I was overheating rapidly. I crawled onwards to the next village, then drank bottle after bottle of cold drinks to rehydrate. Having restored some thermal equilibrium, I then ran into 26 kilometres of unpaved road which took hours to navigate, as it was rutted, covered in places with freshly-laid soft gravel that was impossible to ride, and generally a nightmare to cycle. As the sun slipped lower in the sky, I began to despair of getting to Kutaisi, but there were no good options for camping or staying indoors either. Finally I hit pavement again, did a few more gratuitous climbs high above the river, and rolled into town around 8:00 pm, having been on the road for over 12 hours. I found a guesthouse, ate a large supper, and collapsed into bed.
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| The rather vertical landscape leading to the Zekari Pass |
The next day was shorter, but not necessarily easier. I wanted to get to Akhalstikhe, and rather than taking the paved highway the long way around, I planned to go directly south over the Zekari Pass along what I assumed would be a pretty rugged dirt road. First, though, I had to get out of Kutaisi and into the Lesser Caucasus. Kutaisi sits at an elevation of less than 200 metres and in the summer, it's unbearably hot. I got off to a late start, and trundled south out of town through surprisingly heavy traffic across a baking agricultural plain. When I stopped for cold drinks, the thermometer showed 39 degrees and I cast a longing gaze at the blue peaks in the distance. At the town of Baghdati, the road started to get serious about climbing while still keeping its immaculate new pavement. It was a pretty river valley, with lots of Georgian families parked along the road for picnics and swimming. The road led to the hot spring resort of Sairme, and continued to have a perfect asphalt surface. I climbed 700 metres to get to Sairme, by which time the heat of the plains was a fading memory and I was shivering in a cold, dense mist. There were no restaurants serving hot food in Sairme, so I settled for cake and hot chocolate before resuming the slow upward slog. The road turned to rutted dirt just above the resort, and I made very slow progress before finding a flat spot on the edge of the road and calling it a day after 55 kilometres. As I boiled up some pasta and topped it with tomatoes and sardines, I realized that the night was alive with fireflies, and I sat watching them choreograph their light show before falling asleep.
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| Getting a bit higher |
The next day was a long, hard grind over the Zekari Pass. I lingered in the tent, waiting for a couple of morning rain squalls to abate before resuming the struggle. When I finally got going at the leisurely hour of 10:15, I climbed steadily at 5 km/h, watching the landscape change from dense hardwood forest to conifers interspersed with rhododendrons and wild strawberries. It took 23 km to get to the top of the pass, in open summer pastures, with sweeping views and meadows of wildflowers. It was cold and windy, so I didn't linger long before bumping down towards Abastumani. I noticed that despite the fact that the road was a dirt track, most of the cars that passed me were low-clearance two-wheel-drive sedans. The descent was steeper than the ascent had been, and new road construction made part of it miserable, but I got to the valley bottom just short of Abastumani, found a trout restaurant and settled in for an enormous feed before pitching my tent in a bucolic glade beside a rushing stream after 35 mountainous kilometres
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Lovely open pastures at the top of the Zekari
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I rolled through Abastumani the next morning, past the reminders of a time a century and a half ago when the Romanov tsars came there for summer holidays. Now the town is a scruffy construction site full of dust, noise and potholes, so I didn't linger but sped off to the big city charms of Akhaltsikhe, the capital of the southwestern region of Samstkhe-Javakheti.
Riding the Plateau Home
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| Rabati Castle, Akhaltsikhe |
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| Rabati Castle, Akhaltsikhe |
I arrived in Akhaltsikhe at 11:00, found a cheap hotel right in the centre of town, and set off for a poke around town. My first priority was food, so I was pleased to find a shawarma joint on the main street. The owners turned out to be an Egyptian-Georgian couple who met while working in Dubai. They were very proud of their falafels, so they gave me a free sample to eat with my shawarma. My hunger pangs assuaged, I set off to reacquaint myself with the town, once the seat of Ottoman power in western Georgia. I had visited once before, in 2009, but at that time the Rabati, the central fortress, was under reconstruction. It was recently finished and is now a gleaming tourist attraction whose polished facades may owe more to Disneyland than to historical accuracy. It was a fascinating place to while away a few hours, though, especially in the new Javakheti Historical Museum, easily the best historical museum I've seen in Georgia, full of artifacts excavated from all over the high plateau country of Javakheti. An early dinner in a restaurant in the Rabati led to an early night
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Rabati Castle, Akhaltsikhe
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| Seventh century church at Akhalsheni |
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| Saro megalithic fortress |
Over the next six days, I made my way in a slow, meandering fashion back to Tbilisi, enjoying the wide-open vistas and cooler temperatures of Javakheti while trying to see as many historical sites as possible. I started with a ride upstream along the Mtkvari, through an attractive canyon, past old ruined churches, before turning off steeply uphill to the megalithic site of Saro. It was starting to rain by the time I got up to the village and found the megaliths, tucked away behind a 7th-century church and a modern abbey. They were a bit underwhelming, hardly in the same league as Abuli fortress, but still atmospheric. I made it as far as Khertvisi Castle before throwing in the towel and taking a room in a small guesthouse where the owners were busy boiling down mulberry juice into a thick, sticky syrup called bakmar.
Khertvisi Fortress
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Boiling up green mulberries to make bakmar
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| Vardzia cave monastery |
June 28th saw me pedal upstream on the Mtkvari, almost to the Turkish border, to the spectacular medieval cave monastery of Vardzia. I had visited in 2009, and it was every bit as spectacular as I had remembered. I had the site entirely to myself for most of my visit, as the few Georgian tourists arrived just as I was leaving. I had fun clambering around the various chapels and refectories, and found a long, spooky passageway that led from the main church to a point high above. On the way back towards Khertvisi, I stopped to take pictures of the scattered ruins of Tmogvi, perched high above the river. Then I turned upstream on the Paravani River and climbed all afternoon steadily uphill for 500 vertical metres until I reached the Javakheti plateau at Akhalkalaki. I had entered the Armenian-majority part of Georgia in Akhaltsikhe, but Akhalkalaki was much more uniformly Armenian, with more Russian and Armenian than Georgian visible on signs, and the grocery store stocked with products from across the Armenian border. I had a delicious supper of khorovats, the grilled meat that Armenians seem to do even better than the Georgians, then cycled off towards the Turkish border where I wanted to go birdwatching. I ended up camped behind a clump of trees after 77 km of cycling.
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Kartsakhi Lake
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| Winter fuel supplies drying in the sun, Kartsakhi |
June 29th was a beautiful day for cycling, spent riding out towards the wetlands of the Javakheti Protected Areas. I rode through isolated, visibly poor Armenian villages out to a spectacular lake at Khartskakhi, right at the Turkish border. I had hoped to see cranes and storks, but none were to be had. There were plenty of other species to compensate, though, with great white pelicans, great crested grebes, buzzards, wheatears, egrets, redfinches, warblers and yellow wagtails all making an appearance. The scenery reminded me of Tibet or Central Asia, probably because of the high-altitude light and vivid colours. On my retreat to the main highway, I spotted a few white storks at a great distance, along with several eagles and buzzards riding the thermals.
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| Stork nest, Ninotsminda |
At Akhalkalaki, the beauty of the cycling came to a horrible end, as the entire 18 km of road to Ninotsminda had been torn up into a miasma of dust, construction, traffic jams and chaos. It was the most unpleasant cycling I had done for years, and I was traumatized by the time I emerged onto asphalt in Ninotsminda. Ironically, after all the effort to find storks, there were stork families in giant, untidy nests on top of every telephone pole along the main street of Ninotsminda. I gobbled down some mediocre pizza and turned north to find a quiet campsite a few kilometres from town, where a fox came bounding by my tent at dusk.
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Pelican, Saghamo Lake
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| Obsidian menhir near Paravani Lake |
June 30th was a banner day for megalithic sites and for cycling in general. The road stayed paved and quiet all day as I swept along past high altitude lakes with pelicans and storks galore, and eventually I reached Paravani Lake, at the northeast corner of which was once the world centre for obsidian, the volcanic glass that was such a major trade item in the Neolithic period. I walked along ground that crunched underfoot with obsidian discarded by prehistoric artisans. The Javakheti plateau is flanked by a dozen or more extinct volcanoes which spewed out obsidian in vast quantities millennia ago. The obsidian area also featured a couple of standing menhirs, monuments to whatever belief system the craftsmen and craftswomen had long ago.
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Sizeable chunk of obsidian near Paravani Lake
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| Larger menhir near Paravani Lake |
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| Avranlo megalithic fortress |
From there the road swept around and then endlessly downhill to the Tsalka Basin, another centre of megalithic culture. I bumped along a dirt track to the village of Avranlo and its megalithic fortress, where I set up camp, had a dip in the river (along with half the population of the town) and settled in for a quiet night's sleep, lulled by the burbling water.
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Lodovani megalithic fortress
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Lodovani megalithic fortress
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| Lodovani megalithic fortress |
July 1st, the penultimate day of cycling, featured more sweeping views and easy riding along almost-deserted roads. I passed through the old Pontic Greek settlement of Tsalka, seeing for the first time the blue dome of the Greek Orthodox church and some scattered Greek language signs. From there, I climbed steeply over a pass, then rode downhill to the turnoff for Lodovani, my last megalithic site of the trip. I parked my bicycle, negotiated safe passage past some ferocious sheepdogs, and walked 45 minutes uphill in search of a megalithic fortress. It took a while to find, but once I had dialled in my search image, I found megalithic structures, mostly graves, all over the top of the hillside. The ruins were extensive, and it took a good hour and a half to do it justice. I returned to my bicycle, resumed my downhill progress, stopped in for dinner at a little roadside restaurant, and ended up camping beside the Algeti River for the night after 60 enjoyable kilometres.
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Lodovani megalithic fortress
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Verbascum wilhelmsianum (mullein, or Aaron's rod)
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| Looking down on Didgori Battlefield |
July 2nd was the last day of cycling, and involved a very long climb up and over the Didgori Battlefield Memorial (site of Georgia's greatest military triumph, back in 1121 over the Seljuk Turks) before descending steeply to the Mtkvari River and the stifling heat of the lowlands. By 2:30 pm I was back home in Tbilisi, dusty, tired and a fair bit skinnier than I had been two weeks before, and happy to have done my first long bicycle tour in four and a half years (since my
trip with Terri through Paraguay in February, 2016). I had covered just under 1000 km in 14 days of riding, climbed 17,650 vertical metres and averaged a rather measly 12.7 km/h over the trip, testament to the amount of slow, steep climbing that I had done.
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Didgori Battlefield, two hours from home.
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Verbascum speciosum and Echium vulgare
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