The Long Road Home

This afternoon I crossed into TURKEY at a quiet border post in the mountains between georgia and north eastern anatolia.
I saw my first western Europeans yesterday - a REAL FRENCH CAR! so I’ve finally reached places where the farthest-flung European tourists reach, a family who’d driven to the Caucasus from Clermont Ferrand (hello patricia, thierry, leo and lu) And then there were three Italians on motorbikes near the turkish border today.

Goodbye to the Caucasus! Actually I realised today that for a few days now there are no more hoopoes flapping out of the yellow grass, no more bee-eaters on the wires, or blue rollers doing fancy flying, or Egyptian vultures over yellow hills. I guess these steppe birds are over. Now in these mountains on the border of Georgia and Turkey, I’ve got wood and field birds like flycatchers, magpies, woodpeckers, and harriers and buzzards.

>From Borjomi where I wrote the last post, I rode through the Lesser Caucasus mountains up a glorious valley of pine trees and oak trees and birch trees all ruslting and rattling in a gale from the east ie TAILwind for me. There was a green river going quickly over pebbles, cattle grazing by it with bells (even), nice green meadows, birch trees and ash with bright yellow leaves. There must be almost nothing more enjoyable than riding along a road like that, warm sun, wind loud in the trees and blowing your hair etc etc. I’ve had plenty of rough days; this finally was a totally easy day and a gloriously lovely road to enjoy.

Then there was a castle high on a crag, a good proper one with tower and walls, and a small town below. After that the valley suddenly changed from green to yellow, and the hills became bare and the sun was in my eyes and hot reflecting off golden brown rock walls at the roadside. I dropped into Akhalsiche, the last town in Georgia before the Turkish border. Actually Akhaltsiche was apparently an Ottoman regional capital from the 17th C ruled over by a pasha. Then it was captured by the Russians in 1828. It’s got a great castle, wooden houses with overhanging balconies with fancy carving, and a weird big Russian music hall or something, classical columns.

In the villages around here half the buildings are derelict. Empty soviet blocks of flats with blank windows, abandoned wooden villas with the grape vines going mad pulling the wooden verandahS down, big old mansions that used to be pink with stone lintels above the doors but the doors are hanging off and the pink is going green as the trees get thick around them. There are shops with wood shleves and an old glass counter but with a single tube of toothpaste and a few packs of biscuits and a couple of cigarette lighters and an old man vaguely running it. You see lots of cars with the bonnets up and big women inside waiting while a man tries to fix it. Lots of cars being towed, minibuses being towed, groups of men people pushing cars by hand. Donkey carts. Ox carts. Beaten up old buses that are all different colours, blue roof, a brown strip on one side, some yellow panels, all patched together.

Today I found out that the reason the road to the Turkish border from Akhaltsikhe is printed as a track on my map, is because it IS a track. I battled 20km uphill through rough stones and gravel slipping and falling off and having to be very patieent not to get fed up. It was all uphill, and it’s really hard climbing uphill in stony gravel because the back wheel skids if you get out of the saddle and stand on the pedals. There were a couple of donkey carts struggling up with men shouting at the donkeys, and massive Turkish container lorries in little convoys grinding and crunching through. It seemed odd to have container lorries on small dirt tracks. It’s 35 degrees still and sweat was dripping down my face. Quite hard. The lorries were as slow as me.
The drivers helped me get a visa when I finally reached the border. The Turkish border guards here didn’t do any singing but all honked the bike horn. This horn has been very useful purely for amusing people. Not quite sure why a horn should be so amusing but it clearly is to lots of people.

Suddenly on the Turkish side of the border everything went green, there was intense green grass like a lush golf course with trees and a thick oak forest above. The road was lovely smooth tarmac. But it was still uphill and I climbed on and on above a green wide valley with blue mountains beyond to the south in georgia. This is part of North Eastern Anatolia is lovely lovely scenery but I was dead tired. I stopped at Posof a village and ate pide hot bread from a charcoal oven at a little restaurant. There was a huge full yellow moon and crows cawing and calls to prayer from the mosque. There was also a power cut so I’m writing this by torchlight.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 12:08 pm and is filed under On the Road, Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.