I have never started a bike trip so slothfully. After two days of indolence in Tbilisi, I rode all of 85 km yesterday, getting here to Gori, Stalin's birthplace, and promptly took a day off. In my defence, I had planned to get here early enough in the day to go to the infamous Stalin Museum before it closed, but heat, hills, my own slowness and a flat tire right on the outskirts of town put paid to that plan, and once I had to stay here half the day, I decided to make a day of it and see the fortress of Uplistsikhe too.
To recap from the beginning, I got to Tbilisi late on Monday afternoon, after bad weather made me miss a connection in Munich. After too few hours sleeping in the luxurious Movenpick Hotel bed that Lufthansa gave me, I flew through Istanbul to Tbilisi and went to bed exhausted.
My two full days in Tbilisi were great fun. The last time I was here, 2 years ago, I arrived shattered from a series of big mountain passes on the bicycle, so I really just sat around and ate. This time I found the energy to explore the restored Old Town (quite Persian in its feel, although also a bit too cute for its own good), soak in the famous hot springs that were Tbilisi's original reason for existence (Pushkin's favourite bath of his life happened there) and look at the impressive collection of gold and silver ornaments at the remarkably empty National Museum. I also ate lots of good food (khinkali, khachapuri and shashlik) and had perhaps one or two too many beers the last night while listening to live music at the Irish pub Dublin.
I have been feeling very tired since the end of the school year, perhaps relief from tension, and so this was probably not the best way to start my bike trip: already tired, and with too few hours of quality sleep. Whatever the reason, it was a slow, surprisingly tiring first day from Tbilisi to Gori. I took a back road south of the Mtkvari river, and so at least missed the appalling post-Soviet driving on the main road. A tourist I met called the way Georgians drive "apocalyptic", and he's not far wrong: weaving randomly around, taking corners at speeds incompatible with the miserable brakes and tires that their antiquated cars sport, never signalling, and treating traffic lights as a mild suggestion. I was tired by the time I got within sight of Gori, only to run over a thorn and lose 30 minutes of Stalin-gazing to repairing the flat tire.
The museum today was disturbing. A lot of money and effort was put into the museum in Soviet times, building a big edifice vaguely reminiscent of El Escorial, putting the old shack in which young Iosif Jugashvili spent his first few years under an Egyptian-style temple enclosure, and building up a comprehensive hagiography of Saint Joseph Stalin. There are a few glaring omissions in the story of The Man Who Saved Russia And The World. Look as I might, I could not see a single picture of Trotsky, Stalin's rival whom he had ice-picked to death in his Mexican exile. There was not a single mention of the Ukrainian and Kazakh famines, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the Gulag or any other possible character flaws. Lots of Father of the Nation photos, but no mention that most of the people in pictures with him in the 1920s would be shot in the purges a decade later. Only at the very end, after the room with his death mask in a circular Pantheon-like enclosure, is there a brief display of books about Stalin, not all of which are complimentary. But then outside, at the gift shop, they seem to be doing a brisk trade in 20-dollar busts, 15-dollar beer glasses and commemorative plates. It made me fairly nauseous, especially the faux-religious atmosphere (shared with the Maosoleum in Beijing and the tomb of Ho Chin Minh in Hanoi).
The ruins at Uplistsikhe, on the other hand, were much better than advertised. Like Vardzia and Davit Gereja, these are cave churches hollowed out of the soft sandstone cliffs beside the river outside Gori. The rock is soft enough that most of the ceilings have collapsed, but the walls and floors still stand, showing both early Christian churches (as in Cappadocia, in Turkey) and pre-Christian temples. It was pretty and breezy and there were great views, so it was a lovely spot to wash away the post-Stalin-Museum aftertaste from my mouth.
Tomorrow, it's back to the bike, riding towards Svaneti. I finally have my Abkhazian "visa" so I should be good to ride through that breakaway republic and out the other side to Sochi. If that doesn't work, I'll have to hop a bus to Trabzon in Turkey and catch a ferry from there to Sochi.
Peace and Tailwinds
Graydon
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