"On the Road to Nowhere"
Friday, May 14, 2010
Now is the opportunity to get nice and smelly and have 2 bush camps in a row, as we make our way east towards Georgia. It’s amazing how the scenery changes every few hours, from vast open rolling hills and then hitting seriously high mountains in the east. It was on top of a mountain where we set up our first bushcamp in the Egribel pass at 2,200 metres and even had some snow beside our tents. It was the first time everyone had to fish out the cold weather clothes as we made Risotto for dinner and had a movie night in the truck.
We covered an extra 200km than we had intended to, so the next day was a leisurely drive to our next bushcamp behind a restaurant next to a river in the middle of nowhere, we descended 2km in an hour.
On route towards Sumela monastery we docked into Trabzon for a few hours, which to be honest there wasn’t too much to see but was nice enough to stroll around, drink tea and stock up on the essentials as these will become hard to find from now on. Everyone agreed that the highlight of Trabzon was a guy about to throw himself of a building and a large inflatable mattress being set up for him to land comfortably and perhaps have a snooze!
Today we have hiked up to Sumela monastery which is built into the side of a cliff; the pictures do most of the talking for this. People are genuinely intrigued by us now and have no qualms about coming up and asking us where we are from and are amazed by what we are doing as western tourists are quite rare around these parts. It’s taking a bit of getting use to as we automatically think they are after money or want something from us, but they are just intrigued by us and also want to practice their English.
Tomorrow we are setting off early to enter our first tricky border crossing into Georgia, and apparently stay on a “luxury yacht” in Batumi so we shall see what that holds……
P.S. Ned has had his first operation to reconstruct his face and leg and is currently in recovery, although he did meet the Turkish army who wished him well and are adding him on facebook!
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