December 18, 2020
Ordinarily, this is one of my favourite blog posts of the year, as I look back on the year that is finishing, remembering the journeys that have enlivened this lap of the sun. This year, however, has been different. The Year of Coronavirus has destroyed lives and livelihoods and completely changed the way that so many of us live, In the greater scheme of things, my own losses have been pretty mild: no illness, no enforced unemployment, friends and family untouched by illness. However the plans that Terri and I had laid so elaborately have been laid waste by the effects of covid-19 on international travel, so this year's post will be shorter and less full of the joy of wanderlust than usual.
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Saakje, my mother, myself and Henkka in Panama
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| Terri and I near Boquete |
2020 began, as usual, with travel; Terri and I spent nearly three weeks exploring Panama and having a Christmas rendezvous with my mother, my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka. It was a fun trip, with lots of nature and beaches and plenty of pina coladas on Bastimentos Island. I'm very glad that Terri and I were able to see my mother, as we had planned a full family get-together for the summer of 2020 to mark her 80th birthday, and that obviously didn't happen, so at least we got to spend time with her before covid closed down travel. We enjoyed Panama, but if I were to go back, I think I would spend more time birdwatching in the jungle and less time on the beach.
On the way home to Tbilisi, Terri and I stopped off in Qatar for one night, just long enough to visit the wondrous Museum of Islamic Art and to eat fabulous Indian food. It's hard to believe that less than 12 months ago this sort of flying visit was easy to do!
Once back in Tbilisi, the year began to go downhill. There was, for a second year running, almost no snow in the mountains of eastern Georgia. We tried to go skiing one weekend, and ski touring the next, but there was so little snow that it wasn't worth it. That made for a less amusing winter than we had hoped. We got out of town for a couple of weekend trips to look for castles, or to go hiking, but without skiing, winter in Georgia can be a bit grim. Instead, we began to plan in earnest for our summer and fall of travel, once my teaching contract was over: a month in Iran and Armenia, another month in Canada, a third in Bali, and then to Cape Town mid-September to resume our explorations in our beloved camper Stanley. There were carnets to buy, routes to choose, visas to research, and all the homework that comes before a prolonged expedition.
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Terri and I at Gergeti Church: not much snow!
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Greg and I shivering on the Javakheti plateau
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In early March, my friend Greg came for a brief visit at the same time that Terri flew off to New Zealand to visit her family. Italy was starting to close down, but we didn't imagine that Terri would never be able to return to Tbilisi. We did some exploring, and even played tennis outdoors in unseasonably warm spring weather. Luckily Greg got out and back home to Japan just before travel ceased. Terri's 5 weeks in New Zealand stretched to 5 months, as Georgia sealed its borders to incoming foreigners, and regularly scheduled flights stopped entirely. I settled in for a few months of remote teaching. |
Spring brings our backyard cherry blossoms to life
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I can't really complain about being stuck in Georgia until mid-August. While I was there, covid case numbers were among the lowest in the world, and apart from a two-week period with no car traffic (wonderful for cycling!), much of the city functioned as normal. I ate well, went for bike rides and hikes and runs in the hills and played a lot of piano. The only thing that was sub-ideal was teaching online, which I found an appalling waste of everyone's time, and frustrating as well, especially given my poor internet connection.
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| The view down to the Mtkvari River above Mtskheta |
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Katskhi pillar church near Chiatura
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Lovely Lost World campsite near Tkibuli
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In mid-June I finished the teaching year and with it my two-year contract. I still couldn't leave the country as flights were non-existent, so I went off for a two-week bicycle tour around the country, filling in a few blanks on my map of Georgia. It was good for body and soul, and at the beginning of July I returned to Tbilisi refreshed and ready to figure out how to be reunited with Terri. It was a challenge: she couldn't return to Georgia as the borders were closed, I couldn't go to New Zealand for the same reason, she couldn't come to Canada, and I couldn't leave Georgia until flights resumed. I busied myself selling the contents of our house and packing things into seven suitcases, two ski bags and a bicycle box. It was hotter than Hades in the city, and I found myself listless and unproductive, especially once I had sold my piano. I got out from time to time on short road trips or bicycle loops, but not as much as I should have.
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Kartsakhi Lake, on the Georgian-Turkish border
 | Hiking near Abudelauri Lakes near Roshka
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Caucasus scenery above Roshka, on the road to Akhieli
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Eventually Terri and I figured out that we could be reunited in Europe, as I have an EU passport and she has a Swiss passport. Flights resumed in early August, and I bought a ticket for August 13th to Geneva. My school kindly let me stay on in my house until the beginning of August, when I had to vacate to make room for my successor. I packed up the house, stored my mountains of luggage at a colleague's house for a week, and drove up to Kazbegi for a farewell to the Caucasus. A few days of hiking and exploring remote mountain roads made for an excellent finale to two years in Georgia. On August 13th I headed to the airport with 8 bags (I had had to send one ski bag and the bike box by air freight), left my beloved van Douglas the Delica for my successor, who had agreed to buy it, and flew to Geneva for a reunion with Terri, whom I hadn't seen in over five months. |
Farewell to the Caucasus: Gergeti Trinity Church above Kazbegi
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Leysin reunion with my sister Audie and her daughters
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We spent two weeks in our old haunt of Leysin, helping pack up Terri's life for shipping a huge volume of possessions to New Zealand and buying a car, a Skoda Octavia station wagon that proved to be perfect for us. We met up with my other sister Audie and her family, and stayed with Terri's friend Julie-Ann. We got out for a few hikes and bicycle rides on the old familiar roads and passes around Leysin. At the end of August, we drove south into France for six weeks. Saakje and Henkka have a house in Guillestre, and since they were both in Canada, they let us live there until Henkka came back. It was a perfect place to catch our breath and to enjoy the best of France: good food and wine, amazing mountain hiking and some of the best road cycling in the world. We had a fabulous time, with an eight-day trek around the GR58 hiking trail the highlight. We got out for our share of day hikes as well, and rode up a number of the local road passes too, although unseasonably early snow put paid to that earlier than we had hoped as the passes closed. |
Terri and Julie-Ann hiking near Leysin
 | Pain de Sucre, a mountain near the Col d'Agnel
 | Terri and I at the midpoint of the GR58
 | A campsite with a view, near the Col de Furfande
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| Mosaic of Emperor Justinian in Ravenna |
On October 9th we bid a fond farewell to Guillestre and drove into Italy as covid cases began to climb sharply all over Europe. We could almost hear the restrictions clanging borders shut behind us as we drove south, meandering through Cremona, Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, San Marino, Brindisi and Otranto before making our way to Sicily, where we had decided to wait to see what would develop in terms of travel possibilities. I was waiting for a New Zealand visa, and we had hopes that we might be able to get to Terri's house in Bali. We spend a few days in Agrigento, hoping to find a cheap place to rent by the month, but we ended up finding a tiny yellow house by the sea in Biscione, on the outskirts of Marsala. We spent an idyllic month holed up there, eating well, having sundowners on our roof terrace, swimming in the Mediterranean every day, going for runs and bicycle rides along the coast, taking the odd excursion to local archaeological sites, reading and (in my case) studying Italian. We also started feeding a local street cat and her three adorable kittens, and (briefly) a litter of 6 abandoned puppies. A week or so after we arrived, we realized that Indonesia was granting "business" visas, and that it made sense to get one of those. A frantic week of getting documents together and suddenly we had a plan.
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Halloween (Almost) Full Moon
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Selinunte
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"Our" kittens in Biscione: Scamp, Ginger and Dio
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The last forlorn abandoned puppy
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On the beach near Marsala
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We were just in time; France went into lockdown not long after we left the country, and Italy's restrictions got more stringent by the week. We took a ferry from Palermo to Genoa on November 19th, then drove along eerily deserted autostrade to the Swiss border. A few days lying low, selling our car and getting Terri's possessions sent off to New Zealand, and then we were on the train to Zurich airport. Flying Qatar Airways to Jakarta was surreal, with airport terminals virtual ghost towns and flights maybe 25% full. We waved our precious e-visas and negative covid tests around, and suddenly we had been stamped into Indonesia and were catching our connecting flight to Bali.
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| A male ribbon eel |
We've been back in our beloved Lipah Beach for three weeks already, and it's the perfect place to wait out the tail end of a pandemic. We swim, snorkel or go scuba diving every day, putter around doing home improvements, eat well and watch the world go by from our terrace. We will probably be here until April at least, at which point (travel restrictions and quarantine permitting) I might go to Canada and Terri to New Zealand before we rendezvous in South Africa to resume Stanley's Travels, one year later than originally planned.
I can't say that it's been a wonderful year, but at least it's ending with Terri and I reunited in a beautiful place. I have felt really listless and off my game since the pandemic erupted, and I haven't accomplished much with all the time that I've had on my hands. Having said that, I have managed to get a book which I wrote eighteen years ago into shape for publishing on Kindle Direct Publishing. I hope to have it out within a couple of months, so please keep an eye out for Pedalling to Kailash, the story of the 1998 XTreme Dorks mountain bike expedition from Islamabad, Pakistan to Lake Manasarovar in western Tibet. I am excited that modern publishing technology means that self-publishing is easier and (potentially) more profitable than it has historically been, and I hope that many of you, my faithful readers, will soon be able to read the book. Fingers crossed that it will become a runaway international bestseller (or at least sell more than two dozen copies!).
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Bali: a good place to finish 2020!
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I hope that everyone reading this has survived what has been a very unusual and challenging year, and that 2021 goes much, much better, allowing us to thrive and not just survive. From Lipah, Bali, Terri and I wish each and every one of you a Happy New Year!
