Tbilisi, June 15, 2019
It's a sunny, Saturday morning, the day after the last day of classes. Our house here in northern Tbilisi is adorned with piles of luggage and full of cherries plucked from the branches of our trees last night in a last-minute megaharvest; we're trying to freeze as many as our freezer will hold.
It's been five months since I last posted, which is never a good sign. I found this year's teaching to be hard work that left me tired and uninspired for blog writing. I woke up many mornings feeling not substantially more rested than when I'd gone to bed the night before. Partly this was due to the ski season in the Tbilisi area being dismally disappointing, with almost no new snowfall in January, February or early March. Given that skiing was a big factor in choosing Tbilisi as a place to live, this did nothing for my state of mind. My sister and her partner were supposed to come to Georgia this March for some ski touring, but we ended up bailing out on this plan and I flew to France instead to join them for some mountain adventures in the southern Alps. There too it had been a warm, almost snowless winter, but my sister, through diligent research, was able to find remote north-facing slopes that made for amazing powder descents when we were was 20 degrees in the sunshine at the bottom. I will write up a blog post about it when I get back to work in August, rested and refreshed after two months of trekking (I hope!!).
So the piles of luggage and the end of school mean that it's time to hit the road again. This time it's not to a new country (at least not for me), but to a country that I've visited a couple of times and which I think still has a lot of new places to explore. I first visited Kyrgyzstan by bicycle in 2004 during the second leg of my Silk Road Ride, and went back again in 2012 for some trekking and attempted mountaineering with my friend Eric. On both occasions, I left thinking that there were still so many places to explore, and the Inylchek Glacier in particular has been on my to-explore list for years. This time around, Terri (for whom the ex-Soviet Central Asian states are new territory) and I will spend the next six and a half weeks hiking to various remote valleys, high-altitude lakes and to the upper end of the Inylchek Glacier where mighty Peak Pobedy and Khan Tengri, both 7000-metre-high mountains, tower over the rest of the central Tien Shan range.
It will be good for my soul after a somewhat trying year of teaching to get out into the great outdoors and spend days walking, taking photos, looking at birds and flowers and butterflies, and sleeping at night under a canopy of stars surrounded by amphitheatres of mountains. I can't wait!