Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Christmas in Panama (Retrospective: December 2019)

Click here for a Google Map of our Panama trip

Guillestre, September 22

Life here in Guillestre has settled into a comfortable routine of cycling, hiking, eating well and reading.  We are in a bit of a holding pattern as we wait to see whether my New Zealand visa will come through, or whether we will be able to head to Africa to resume Stanley's Travels.  In the meantime, my thoughts are drifting back to those long-ago days when international travel was simple and we all took it for granted.  I realize that I never wrote up my Christmas 2019 trip to Panama with Terri to meet up with my mother, and with my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka, so here is an attempt to remedy that situation.

The Plan 

My mother turned 80 this summer, and we 4 kids decided that we should make an effort to get everyone together for a big celebration.  The plan was to rent a cottage on a Canadian lake in late July, and once we had decided that, we also thought that we should plan a Christmas get-together as well.  The original idea was to fly to the Cape Verde islands, and initially flights looked pretty reasonable, but prices soon rocketed up and it looked like a long, miserable connection for my mom coming from Canada.  We quickly pivoted and decided to fly to Panama instead, since it's an easy connection from Canada, not too expensive from Europe, has great nature, and none of us had been there.  Not everyone in the family could make it; my sister Audie and my brother Evan both had bail out, but we still had my mother, Saakje, Henkka, Terri and I.  My mom insisted on renting a comfortable beach house, and we settled on a house on Bastimentos Island, in Bocas del Toro province, for a week.  Terri and I would fly in first for five days of exploring on our own before we rendezvoused with the others.  Once we'd bought tickets and guidebooks, we were more or less set.

Panama City and Santa Fe

Ruined Dominican church, Casco Viejo
Terri and I took a very roundabout route to get from Tbilisi to Panama, flying Qatar Airways to Doha and on to Miami before hopping across to Panama.  It took a long time (two nights) but it saved us a few hundred dollars.  It also allowed Terri to buy a new mobile phone in Doha airport before we grabbed a few hours of interrupted sleep on our air mattresses in the terminal, and then to catch up with my friend Rob for dinner in Miami before a few more hours of catnapping in Miami airport.  We were pretty bleary-eyed by the time we got to Panama mid-morning on Sunday, December 15th.  We caught a bus into town and, sleepy as we were, we hopped onto the wrong bus, one of the brightly-painted Diablo Rojos local buses that took the scenic route into town.  We alighted in the centre and walked half an hour into the Casco Viejo neighbourhood where our AirBnB was located.  The contrast between the crowded, slightly dingy area around the bus terminal and the charming upmarket gentrification of the old colonial Casco Viejo neighbourhood was striking.  Our room was just what we needed, and we passed out for a few hours of much-needed sleep.  

Colonial architecture, Casco Viejo


We woke up in time for a dinner date.  One of Terri's former teaching colleagues in Switzerland had subsequently joined the US State Department and was working at the American embassy.  We met up with him, his Colombian wife and their two children at a seafood restaurant, Finca del Mar, right on the waterfront three blocks from our accommodation.  We had a good evening of stories and reminiscences and ideas before our eyelids grew heavy and we had to wander back for our first sound night's sleep in three days.


Swimming hole, Santa Fe

We didn't have to be in Bocas del Toro for until Friday, so Terri and decided to head west to the town of Santa Fe in the interim, as it sounded like an interesting town in the highlands.  A couple of buses got us to Santa Fe by mid-afternoon, where we took a room in an almost-empty hotel just downhill of town (the Hotel Santa Fe).  We had time for a walk before it got dark, so we wandered along to a swimming hole just east of town.  It felt good to stretch our legs after too many days spent crammed inside airplanes and buses, and there were plenty of wildflowers and butterflies and birds to attract our attention along the way.  It felt good to swim, although the air was surprisingly cool and we were almost chilly.

Cerro Tute

Terri atop Cerro Tute
The next day we set off on a hike up to the summit of Cerro Tute.  It was a long way up under a pretty fierce sun, but the views from the top were worth the effort of getting there.  The landscape sloped away to the south towards the distant Pacific Ocean; it was a bit disconcerting to realize how much of the native forest had been cleared for farming and ranching.  The villages we walked through had tidy-looking homes surrounded by fruit orchards (the oranges were in season, and we scrounged a couple of fallen oranges from the ground before being invited to pick some from the tree by the owner.    We had a picnic lunch on top of the granite boulders at the top before trudging back down, a bit footsore, to have another swim at a different swimming hole (this time we were warm enough to appreciate the cooling waters.)




Alto de Piedra
Our hike the next day was another long, sweaty affair, this time up to the waterfalls of Alto de Piedra.  Sadly our trail was mostly along a paved road, but the views were fine and the waterfalls were really quite pretty.  We swam in a couple of them, trying out Terri's new GoPro.  The trudge back to town was a bit unappealing, so we ended up flagging down a passing pickup truck to shorten the walk and save our knees.




Alto de Piedra

Alto de Piedra
We spent much of Thursday on the bus to Bocas del Toro.  Crossing the central spine of Panama from the well-populated Pacific slope to the much wilder Caribbean slope take quite some time.  We had to retreat from Santa Fe south to the Panamerican Highway at Santiago, trundle along the Panamerican to the town of David, and then catch a third bus up and over the watershed to Bocas.  It ended up taking most of the day as we dozed in our seats listening to podcasts and nodding off.  The road across the mountains was chilly and foggy and quite dramatic, before we dropped into the lowlands.  It was noticeably less affluent on this side of the country, and the villages we passed through looked much scruffier.  We arrived in the banana port of Almirante (dominated by a Chiquita banana processing plant) just too late for the last commercial ferry across to the island of Bocas del Toro, but we managed to catch a lift with a small water taxi that was taking a few other stragglers back to the island.  It was slightly disconcerting to make the crossing largely in the dark, but we arrived without incident in the main town of Bocas del Toro, found a small, inexpensive hostel for the night, had a delicious seafood dinner and fell into bed tired out.

Bastimentos Daze

In the harbour
We spent the next seven days on the island of Bastimentos, in a big beach house called Casa Shorebreak.  Terri and I stocked up on groceries in town before meeting up with the property manager and catching a boat across to Bastimentos.  While Bocas del Toro was sizeable, full of restaurants and shops and people, Bastimentos was small and far less populated.  We lugged our grocery bags and backpacks into the house, met the caretaker (a rotund local man who stayed in a small room underneath the house as a nightwatchman), got settled in, then went back to the main island to wait for Saakje and my mother to arrive at the tiny airport.  We ordered lots of Indian food from a restaurant run by a Canadian expat (Bocas is full of expatriate Americans, Canadians and assorted Europeans, then walked over to the airport to meet my mom (whom I hadn't seen in over a year) and Saakje.  We ambled across, picked up our food and caught a water taxi back to Bastimentos to settle in for food, rum and catching up. 


Sundowners during a rare sunny patch
Bocas del Toro feels very distinct from the rest of Panama.  As in Costa Rica and Honduras, the Caribbean coast of Panama has a definite English Caribbean feel.  More people speak an English-based pidgin than speak Spanish, and the sound is pure Jamaican.  Many of the people are either black or indigenous, rather than the mestizos who prevail numerically on the Pacific slope of the country.  It really feels like a different country, and for me and Terri it was our first-ever taste of the Caribbean.  



Terri paddling into the mangroves

Saakje, my mother, myself and Henkka

Sadly, it was an exceedingly wet taste.  December is part of the rainy season on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and this week was exceptionally rainy.  We were glad to have a solid roof over our heads, and also glad that the house was built up off the ground on concrete pilings, as the yard turned into a flooded swimming pool around us.  Luckily it didn't rain all day every day, and we did manage to get out and see the local sights, but it was generally very soggy.  

Our days passed with lots of good food cooked by whoever was seized by inspiration at the moment.  We ate well, and drank lots of pina coladas.  Henkka arrived from France the day after Saakje and my mother and the five of us played cards, told stories, read books and generally relaxed entirely.  It was precisely the sort of vacation gathering that my mother had had in mind.

Trying to do stand-up paddleboarding
We did manage to get out to explore, although our first expedition, hiking with my mother to Red Frog Beach, had to be abandoned as the path turned into a treacherous mudhole that eventually defeated my mother.  A more successful expedition was taking a water taxi out to Sloth Island to take photos of the iconic animals.  Our first trip gave us 2 sloths to photograph, but a later trip yielded 7 or 8 individuals.  We also took a water taxi out to Starfish Beach one day to snorkel; there wasn't much to see, other than the multitudinous starfish, but it was great to have calm water for swimming.  Casa Shorebreak had some pretty sizeable waves pounding in from the open Caribbean and was not a place for a peaceful paddle.

My mother adopting the island lifestyle
The owners of the house were surfers, and there were surfboards and a standup paddleboard stored in the rafters.  We took the paddleboards out a couple of times on the calmer inland side of the island and rented kayaks to go along with them.  We explored some of the mangrove swamps leading inland, and saw lots of interesting birds.  We also tried surfing the waves one day, but it was not enormously successful, as we were on quite short boards suitable for experts, which we were not.  It was fun but frustrating.


One day we dolled ourselves up and wandered along the beach to the Firefly restaurant, a Bastimentos institution run by a couple of Americans.  The food was great (if a bit pricey) but the highlight was a live musician who played a mix of calypso and reggae, including a few of his own original songs, while bantering good-naturedly with us.  

Sloth island inhabitant
And then, suddenly and all too soon, our week was up and it was time to take the water taxi back across to Bocas del Toro town, walk my mother to the airport and say goodbye.  It had been a fun week, and we were already looking forward to the summer's full-scale reprise.  We had a couple of hours before our bus to Boquete left, so Henkka, Saakje, Terri and I rented bicycles and explored the main island in a rare patch of sunshine.  We realized that beyond the somewhat seedy main town, there were dozens of beautiful beach houses looking out onto surf beaches that we hadn't seen at all during our brief visits to the main town.  Maybe, if we ever come back to Panama, we can explore that part of the archipelago.

Bicycle expedition on the main island

Boquete Hiking and Mariato Surfing



On the Sendero de los Quetzales

With my mother on her way back to Ottawa, the rest of us decided to head away from the rain into the central highlands, to the town of Boquete, well-known for coffee plantations and retirement communities for gringos.  It was a longish afternoon on a somewhat overpriced tourist bus to get back over the central cordillera to David and then onto a smaller road leading north again into the highlands.  We had rented a small house on AirBnB that proved perfect for our needs, with a couple of bedrooms and a well-equipped kitchen that we put to good use.  


Our two full days in Boquete, a town with a very cool hippy traveller vibe, were devoted to hiking.  The first morning we caught a taxi up to the end of the road above town to access the Sendero de  los Quetzales (the Quetzal Trail), a famous hike.  Many gringo tourists get talked into taking a guide (at considerable expense) to walk the trail, but we figured that it was pretty well marked and couldn't be that fearsome, so we went by ourselves.  It was a lovely day of walking, leaving behind the coffee plantations cleared from the native bush and entering some fairly undisturbed cloudforest.  We never spotted any of the resplendant quetzals for which the trail is named, but we did hear several of them calling, leading to long minutes squinting through the dark canopy for birds that had no interest in being seen.  The walk was pleasant but by no means challenging, and we returned to town happy with a relaxed day in nature.


Saakje and Henkka were keen to climb Volcan Baru, the highest peak in Panama, the next day, which meant leaving at midnight to catch clear skies at the summit at sunrise.  Terri and I were less interested, so we waved them goodbye and went to bed.  Instead we slept late and welcomed back the conquering summitteers that morning before heading out for a much easier walk, up to the Lost Waterfalls.  It was a fun but very muddy hike leading to a series of spectacular cascades fountaining down out of the mountains.  As we got back to town, we arranged to meet up with Saakje and Henkka at the Boquete Brewing Company, a fabulous  brewpub, for a farewell to the town.

One of the Lost Waterfalls

A Lost Waterfall
Although we had enjoyed our time in Boquete, Saakje and Henkka were keen both to see more of the Pacific coast and to try their hands again at surfing, so we decided to make our next stop somewhere on the Pacific coast on the way back to Panama City.  It was approaching New Year, and so we were competing with all of middle-class Panama for accommodation.  We were almost despairing of finding a place when we finally located a hotel with rooms available in the little town of Moriato.  It was a long series of buses (to David, then along the Panamerican to Santiago, and finally a crowded local line to Moriato), but we got there in the end and decided that we had made the right decision.  Our little hotel (curiously empty given the season) was just inland of a beautiful natural beach with waves breaking all along it, and with an estuary full of seabirds at the far end.

Another Lost Waterfall



Playa Reina


Brown pelican

Our three days on the beach passed in a bit of a blur.  We rented much longer boards than we had had on Bastimentos with much better flotation, and it made all the difference.  We were much more able to paddle fast enough to catch waves and started to stand up on them.  Saakje proved herself to be the fastest learner, while Henkka wasn't far behind.  I was the least gifted of the three of us; Terri elected to watch from the beach.  We surfed as much as waves and tide allowed, and the rest of the time we wandered the beach and the estuary in search of bird life, or walked into the town centre of Moriato in search of pizza and fruit juice.  It was a relaxing time, punctuated by chats with the other guest in the hotel (an American guy on a motorcyle trip around Panama), card games in the evening and yoga sessions to loosen up muscles that were tight after the unusual activity of paddling a surfboard.

Cool toad from our hotel restaurant

Ibis and cormorants

Panama City, Pipeline Road and the Canal


Crimson-backed tanager

Crimson-crowned woodpecker
Our days in Panama were rapidly running out, and so regretfully we bade farewell to the coast and caught a bus into the city.  Terri and I booked a room in the same place as before in Casco Viejo while Saakje and Henkka stayed in a sister property a couple of blocks away.  Terri and I raced off to the Parque Metropolitano, the magnificent patch of rainforest in the middle of the city, and had a fun speed hike around the park before it closed, spotting lots of turtles and various birds (including a dramatically coloured crimson-crowned woodpecker, Campephilus melanoleucos), but none of the giant anteaters that Henkka had seen a couple of weeks before on his way through the city. An agouti (a large and rather endearing rodent) had to serve as a consolation prize.  We dined together with Henkka and Saakje in Finca del Mar, then arranged to rendezvous early the next morning for a day of birdwatching in the Canal Zone.

Black-striped woodcreeper (by Henkka)

Chestnut-mandibled toucan (by Henkka)
An Uber drove us inland from the capital along the main road through the Canal Zone, and we were soon deposited just past the town of Gamboa, at the start of a dirt road with the rather prosaic name of Pipeline Road.  This is known as the best birdwatching spot in Panama and one of the best in the world, so it seemed like a good place for Terri and I to spend our last full day in the country.  As soon as we stepped out of the car, we were already surrounded by wading birds in a marsh beside the road.  After spending a while photographing them and trying to identify them (our favourite was the rufescent tiger heron, Tigrisoma lineatum), we ventured into the embrace of the forest.  There were birds galore to be seen, including Central American specialties like antbirds, motmots, antwrens and caciques.  Since this is such a famous birding spot, there were a number of parties of serious twitchers, some with local guides, and we shamelessly parasited off their knowledge and their tips.  

Hideous facial deformity on baby howler monkey

Perhaps the most memorable encounter of the day was also the loudest.  We passed underneath a party of black howler monkeys and while we were watching them and trying to get a decent photograph, they began their howling.  For ten minutes, the forest was filled with their deafening calls until they ran out of interest and returned to eating leaves.  We managed to get a few monkeys to pose in small patches of sunshine, including a mother with a youngster on her back.  It wasn't until a couple of weeks later, looking at the photo more closely, that Saakje realized that the baby had hideous facial deformities, probably due to papillomaviruses.  I hadn't noticed them at the time through my binoculars or my telephoto lens, but once I'd seen them, I couldn't forget their nightmarish appearance.
Female slaty-backed trogon (by Henkka)

Juvenile rufescent tiger-heron

Terri looking pleased with herself at Miraflores Locks

In addition to birds, there were leafcutter ants wearing paths through the undergrowth, spectacular butterflies and big dragonflies to admire, and sooner than we would have liked it was 1:30 pm and we were hungry, thirsty and tired.  We trudged out back to town and raided a convenience store for overpriced snacks and cold drinks which we ate in a nearby city park that was itself full of bird species.  Henkka and Saakje were staying in Panama after we left, so they had booked a room in Gamboa so that they could return to Pipeline Road the next day.  (They had spectacular birding luck the next day, leaving us quite envious and keen to return one day.)  Terri and I headed back to Panama City, but with a stopoff at the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal.  Terri was keener than me to see them, but I ended up glad that we had stopped in and paid the 15 US dollar admission price.  We spent a good couple of hours sitting in the bleachers watching huge freighters make their way through the locks (and even bigger super-Panamax container ships passing through the expanded second set of parallel locks), and wandering contentedly through the excellent museum.  Terri's father had been fascinated by the Panama Canal and had taken a round-the-world cruise largely to experience the Canal, and he had passed this fascination onto his daughter.  We both really enjoyed the experience and were wowed by the engineering feat of building the Canal.

Sloth crossing Pipeline Road (by Henkka)

And then it was all over.  We returned to the city, had a delicious final meal at a Chinese restaurant, and the next morning caught a flight to Miami and on to Doha, where we splurged on a hotel room and found time to explore the Museum of Islamic Art just before closing time, and had a memorable Indian meal.  Six hours of sleep, and we were back at the airport, checking in for our Tbilisi flight, our Christmas holidays enjoyably spent. 

Little did we imagine that within two months, the world of international travel would be completely changed by covid-19, and that this would be our last trip in the world of the BC era (Before Coronavirus).  We have yet to do a real trip in the AD era (After the Disease), but Panama was a good spot to do our last trip for a while.  If I were to go back, I think I would want to have a vehicle (or a bicycle) to explore a bit further off the beaten track, and I would spend more time in the rainforests and cloudforests looking for birds and other wild creatures, as that's what I found most spectacular about the country.
 
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha


Sunday, August 30, 2020

A Farewell Bicycle Tour around Georgia (June 2020)


Guillestre, August 29, 2020

Segurigera varia (crownvetch)

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!
Vanessa atalanta (red admiral)

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.

Commelina communis (Asiatic dayflower)

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Dense Colchic forest draping the steep Imeretian gorges

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).  
Final steep grunt over the pass to Tkibuli

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.
The Racha Range towering over Tkibuli

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.
Wonderful carving, Nikortsminda

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

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.

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. 

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.  
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.

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.

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
Lovely open pastures at the top of the Zekari

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

Rabati Castle, Akhaltsikhe

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
.

Rabati Castle, Akhaltsikhe

Seventh century church at Akhalsheni
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

Boiling up green mulberries to make bakmar


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.

Kartsakhi Lake

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.  

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.  

Pelican, Saghamo Lake

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.

Sizeable chunk of obsidian near Paravani Lake


Larger menhir near Paravani Lake
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.





Lodovani megalithic fortress

Lodovani megalithic fortress

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.

Lodovani megalithic fortress

Verbascum wilhelmsianum (mullein, or Aaron's rod)

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.
Didgori Battlefield, two hours from home.



Verbascum speciosum and Echium vulgare