Implications of War in Georgia

11-Aug-08 to 16-Aug-08: War Evasion Mission
Turkey/Azerbaijan: Kars to Ankara to Istanbul to Baku to Saki
26.5h bus time, 4h flight time, 7h airport lounge time!

Well, where to start…the past week has been a whole different kind of adventure and a lesson in what happens when a war breaks out in a country you are about to enter on tour!

11-08-08: Kars – Rest Day: The whole purpose for us being in Kars is due to it being a larger town with greater facilities required to secure alternative transportation arrangements, to transport us and all our luggage around Georgia and avoid being caught in the war crossfire. Accordingly, this morning we packed our bikes into one of our support vans for their journey to Ankara and we all purchased our flights from Ankara, Turkey to Baku, Azerbaijan.

The afternoon in Kars was spent on an excursion to the ruins of the ancient city of Ani, which was founded in the bronze age and at some point in history used to be the capital of Armenia…obviously the Turks won it back at some point because it is now located about 1km inside the Turkish border. It was a good way to kill an afternoon but they were not exaggerating when they said they were ‘ruins’…there wasn’t a great deal left and what was left could not hold my attention over and above my desire to escape the baking afternoon heat, so I took a quick wander about and spent the rest of our time there sitting in the shade!

12-08-08: Kars to Ankara, 18.5h bus time!: We were on the move again at 6am this morning…or at least that was the plan…our charter bus was late to arrive and then we spent a good half hour shuffling 20 people, 4 bikes and 40 (800kg of) bags around the luggage holds and seats in a 30 seat bus so that the rear axle was not under too much strain and we all had somewhere to sit! We finally found the right balance which resulted in a tangle of bikes and wheels in the luggage hold and the majority of bags taking up the last 4 rows of seating from floor to ceiling on the bus!

And then the fun started…18.5 hours on a bus…there was no doubt in my mind by the end of the ride about why I am so vehemently opposed to bus touring! We spent the whole day and half of the night squirming about on bus seats trying to find a comfortable position. Every 3 hours or so we stopped at a service station to visit the bathroom and pick up more chips, chocolate and jube lollies to fuel all the exercise we were getting . We finally arrived into Ankara at about 1.30am in the morning and after driving around lost down narrow backstreets we piled out and checked into the Best Western Hotel and went straight to bed.

13-08-08: Ankara – Rest Day: After a well deserved sleep in, time today quickly evaporated as we visited a couple of bike shops and wandered the shopping district in the hope of finding new and mould free water bottles…in the end I settled for a clean 750ml bottle rather than the 1 litre I was hoping to find. In the evening we met with Henry, the company founder, who had come to join us until we got back on track and laid out what he knew of our upcoming plans.

14-08-08: Ankara – Rest Day: After another meeting to advise us of specifics regarding airport transfers for tomorrow, we spent some time wandering through the dynamic and lively food markets in the ‘old town’ and went to see the latest Batman movie. The evening was spent boxing up bicycles in preparation for our flight to Azerbaijan.

15-08-08 to 16-08-08: Ankara to Baku to Saki 4h flight time, 7h airport lounge time, 8h bus time: Friday morning was whiled away just making to most of a 1pm checkout at the hotel and getting ready for our departure to the airport. Despite all holding a booking for the same flight we decided to break up our arrival to the airport into 3 timeslots in an attempt to get an earlier flight so that all our luggage and bikes had a greater chance of making the transition between planes in Istanbul…the gamble paid off, with 14 of us managing to check on to a 7pm flight and 6 catching the originally scheduled 9pm flight into Istanbul.

Check-in was an entertaining chaos of 6 people, 6 bikes, 12 bags and 1 English speaking Turkish Airlines check-in staff member, and could only have benefitted from us arriving in groups of 6 rather than all at once! In the end and despite an alternative baggage policy, contradicting prior advice from the airline and failed attempts to charge some and not others, we all ended up paying no excess for our baggage and a fixed 30 Euro charge for each of our bikes.

After sitting around in 2 airports and catching 2 flights all night long, we finally arrived into Baku, Azerbaijan at about 6am, sleep deprived and starving. We were then given about an hour to rearrange our bags in the carpark of a hotel so that we had one bag to last us 3 days and another to leave at the hotel to which we will return to in a few days. After repacking we loaded all our bikes and 1 bag each onto another bus…a 50 seater this time…and spent another 8 hours driving west, towards the border of Georgia and Azerbaijan to resume our cycling itinerary in the ancient town of Saki.

From the moment we entered the airport terminal it was very clear that somewhere between Kars in Turkey and Baku in Azerbaijan we crossed into a less civilized world. Granted it is still has elements of a big city, but what we have seen of Baku has much more of a 3rd world feel than anything we have seen so far…and it is dirty…there is rubbish carelessly strewn everywhere and the air is so full of dust that the simple act of breathing is hampered by a dry, scratching sensation at the back of your throat.

As we drove west through Azerbaijan the lower standard of living was very obvious. The roads are in bad repair, to the point where it took the bus 8 hours to travel just over 300km and most small towns we passed through felt like not much more than shanty towns, with the ancient town of Saki being an exception. Saki is located at the foothills of the Caucasus mountain ranges and is a well preserved ‘old town’ which is a popular destination for tourism, particularly that of other Azerbaijanis on their summer holidays at this time of year. On arrival into Saki we sat about for about 1.5 hours (in a beautiful old restored building which we would have stayed at if the booking had been confirmed) waiting for further instruction as to where we would be staying.

At about 5pm we were finally instructed to unload the bus and pack our bikes and bags into a smaller truck as we were going to walk to a nearby homestay at the top of a steep cobblestone street which the bus would not make it up. We were accommodated over a number of rooms and over a variety of beds, lounges, cots, etc. and had access a cold shower downstairs, a few hideously smelling squat toilets and a hot shower down the street and around the corner in the basement of the ‘sister’s’ house where the giggling little children turned off the light while you were in the shower! Overall better than camping and a place to assemble bikes and get some much needed sleep after a long haul of travelling, but no Sheridan hotel…

17-Aug-08: On the Road Again
Azerbaijan: Saki (pron. Shecki) to Gabala
91km, 4h 45min ride time

Having driven the majority of today’s route on our bus trip west, we departed this morning pleased to be on our bikes rather than another bus and with high hopes for a mostly downhill run…unfortunately they turned out to be false hopes built on an incorrect perception of the lay of the land. Despite a couple of good downhill runs totaling about 16km, the majority of the day was spent gradually climbing so that by the end we had done a total ascent of 750m and finished at an elevation of 2000m, higher than where we started! Comparatively, the day should have been quite an easy one, but combine temperatures in the 40’s with general weakness resulting from a couple of days of battling a stomach bug and it was quite hard enough…that it ended 25km shorter than advised was a very welcome error of calculation.

The people in Azerbaijan appear just as friendly as those in Turkey and we have been excitedly honked and waved at by most cars passing us today and the children also run out to say ‘hello’. Differences noted are that the country is not so visibly dominated by the Muslim religion, the presence of English is noticeably less and that intrigue that we are regarded with is more likened to that of an alien than that of a slightly different and interesting cycle tourist.

We are camping under shady trees and adjacent to a hotel/restaurant, 2 rooms of which provide us with showers and toilets. The challenge for TDA staff at present is to find a source of food for us, as our chef Miles is currently driving our primary support vehicle (equipped with kitchen and water storage) about 2000kms from Kars in Turkey to Turkmenistan via Iran and will rejoin us in a few days on the other side of our Caspian Sea crossing. So, we are currently being fed by restaurants near to where we are staying…so the food has been pretty ordinary and on the whole extremely insufficient…I for one can’t wait to have Miles back in our midst!

18-Aug-08: Second Impressions
Azerbaijan: Gabala to Shemkha
95km, 5h 14min ride time

Writing these entries is quite a time consuming task and one which is becoming increasingly difficult as our access to power and internet becomes more infrequent…as does our spare time as the cycling days stretch out late into the afternoon. As we are still without Miles our chef, our days have been starting later, dictated by the earliest time at which the hotel is prepared to serve breakfast…and so we tend to not start riding until at least 8am which means we are not arriving at our destination until 3-4pm, leaving little time to clean up and rest up let alone complete all the other ‘necessary’ tasks. But I hope that my persistence will pay off in the end by providing a good record of my travels.

And further to that thought is my acknowledgement of how the time that has passed between my experiences and the time at which I get the opportunity to recount them effects my perception. My record on events recalled with the benefit of a ‘cooling off’ period tend to differ markedly from those that I report whilst the emotion is still fresh…I am yet to conclude which scenario provides for more enthralling reading but I am nervous that a negative state of mind can cloud my recall of positive experiences…on that note I will try and recall the next few days with a balanced view…I will try…

Today started with departing our homestay accommodation with the knowledge and mindset that we were in for a day of climbing. In trying to recall the outstanding details of the day I am conscious that I have made little mention lately of the environment, vegetation wise, that we are riding through...on giving it some thought this is perhaps because it has had little impact on me comparatively speaking. We have seen some spectacular scenery over the past couple of months and it seems that the more prominent issues now are the increasing heat and the declining standard of living.

However, as tends to always be the case, climbing does result in great vantage points and today was no different. We are riding through reasonably desolate landscapes scattered with shanty like built environments. ‘Markets’ which are our only corner store equivalent and source of water and snacks are becoming few and far between and there are no longer the proliferation of roadside spring water sources that became life savers on a few occasions in Turkey.

It is common to ride down a straight stretch of road and pass numerous young boys and old men every 100m…they see you coming and race out from under a shady tree to thrust a plastic bag full of hazelnuts almost in your path in the hope that you will buy their half day’s work for the equivalent of $1…their fingers are stained a brownish-green from the task of removing the soft outer coating from the hazelnut to reveal the shelled nut inside.

Shade is also becoming more difficult to find and so we are getting a taste of the desert landscapes to come as we make our way further east. The sun is baking hot and being out in it is like being under a sandwich grill…the temperatures in the sun have hit 50 degrees! The hardest part of being in temperatures of this extreme is that there is just no respite in any respect…even the water in our drink bottles heats up to temperatures warmer than most our showers in the space of 5 minutes. Today’s route included a number of climbs, the hardest two being at the end of the day and in the peak of the heat. The final climb took us up 500m over only 5km…but I think the worst part of it was seeing it in the distance ahead of us as we rode over the peak of the penultimate climb!

Our destination for the day was a hotel/restaurant that we had stopped at on our way west in the bus…our first impression was that it was a filthy dirty roadhouse with chickens running about randomly everywhere and no one noticed the hotel. Impression on our second visit was that we were a bit harsh the first time around…we seem to have gotten over our initial shock of arriving in Azerbaijan. There were still chickens running around everywhere, we only had one shower between 20 and the squat toilets still had a smell in them ‘that will outlast religion’ (source: ‘Kenny’ the movie), but by comparison even to the homestay of the previous night, the place was not all too bad. An insight that proves how prior experience can influence perception!

Another insight gained today was how an act of ill will by just one person can undo the good will built up by the acts of a dozen others. Overall, in Azerbaijan we have had kindness displayed towards us…not as overwhelming as that of Turkey, but kindness even blended with intrigue and a degree of cautiousness is still kindness. Unfortunately my opinion was marred by two acts of ill will today…the first being a car load of hoons thinking it was funning to drive their car directly towards me whilst I was climbing my way up a steep incline and unable to move quickly…the second being a young guy in the back of a moving truck hurling a handful of gravel at us as we rode by! I remind myself of similar incidents that happen back home and am trying to not let the minority ruin my perception of the majority…

19-Aug-08: Why?
Azerbaijan: Shemakha to Baku
119km, 6h 40min ride time

Today was a day that left me asking myself and others ‘why would anybody in their right mind choose to live in this country!?’…by the end of our riding day I was convinced that Azerbaijan had little to recommend it...

Our route took us through the most desert like country we have seen so far…hot, dry, dusty and barren. The roads were in terrible condition, much of which was ‘under reconstruction’ to some degree or another, which resulted in air thick with dust for kilometers on end. Temperatures soared very quickly to 50 degrees in the sun…combine this with a seemingly continuous upwards gradient and we knew we were in for a long day. We had mistakenly assumed that as we were starting out at an elevation of about 1700m and heading towards the Caspian Sea that we would be heading downhill for the majority of the day…by the end of the day it became apparent that the Caspian Sea, being an inland water body, is not at sea level and whilst we did ultimately loose 500m of elevation, we climbed over 1000m over the course of the day!

20 kilometers out of Baku we all grouped together and rode in a long and tedious convoy into town in an attempt to be ‘safer’…on a road with no real demarcations, only one lane in each direction and seemingly no road rules I am not sure how successful the convoy was at minimising the risk! As we blocked an entire lane we had cars controlled by aggravated drivers pushing and shunting to get through in any way they could. But we made it finally and I for one was completely exhausted by the time we did! The heat is really starting to take its toll and on top of battling a stomach virus for the past few days I am now preaching my anticipation of colder weather…something very out of character for someone who also does not cope well in cold weather either!

We are staying in a dump of a hotel in the outer slum-like suburbs of Baku, next to the outdoor cycling velodrome. The hotel has no airconditioning, no toilet paper, no towels, no curtains, sheets which are too small for the bed, cigarette butts between the mattress and the wall, suspicious looking brown substance on the toilet seat…need I go on...but apparently it is in an easy to get to location. Without hesitation at least half a dozen people headed off to find alternative accommodation in the centre of town…had I not been completely shattered I would have done the same. But tiredness won out and I braved one night in the hotel…but only one…

20-Aug-08: Renewed Opinion
Azerbaijan: Baku – Rest Day

After a night of trying to sleep in a lather of sweat, minimised only by the efforts of one pedestal fan which was missing its front safety cage and sounded as though it was about to explode, I had already vowed that I was not staying another night in the velodrome hotel. So, the discovery that we also had no power and no water on waking up did not dissuade me one bit!

Our first task to attend to this morning in our un-showered state was to meet with Henry et al for the latest round of jumping through the Chinese Visa hoops…the final verdict is to be advised but is not far off…to actually get a visa issued after all the obstacles that have been put forward will be a miracle.

After we arranged the necessary task of laundry we headed off into the Baku town centre to find breakfast, a pharmacy and the DHL office to collect a ‘care package’ sent to Dan from home. The first two tasks were relatively painless…the latter was a shambles of misdirection complicated further by a very bad city map and made unbearable by the baking heat. After too much walking in every direction we were finally rescued by a local who spoke perfect English and who walked past us trying to ask a Taxi driver for directions and could see we were in distress. The local made a few phonecalls for us and put us into a taxi with precise direction and 10 minutes and 5 Manat (=$6) later we finally found the courier office…halleluiah! The saving grace for my having spent valuable rest time taking part in the expedition was that the DHL office was airconditioned…and that later in the evening (ie. as I write this) I have opted out of the laundry collection expedition in lieu…so the karma evened itself out eventually.

After a morning of running about we returned to the hotel from hell to pack an overnight bag to take with us on our return mission to our alternative hotel for the evening…35 Manat each (=$45) bought us comfortable and clean beds, airconditioning, cable tv, a shower screen, a kitchenette, fitted sheets, etc etc…and a location right in the centre of the ‘old town’ which is a beautiful area and so far has saved Azerbaijan from my earlier opinion of it having nothing to recommend it. Contrary to its title which is in reference to the age of the buildings, the old town area is very modern (complete with Armani store) and a world away from the slums only 4 metro stops, and 11 Manat cents, away…

And so I am back up to date with our current position…we are to spend much of the next 48 hours enduring the process that is the ferry crossing from Baku, Azerbaijan to Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea…and no doubt will have some stories to tell from the experience.

21-Aug-08: Limbo Land
Azerbaijan: Baku – Travel Day

What a day…it started with us rising bright and early to ensure we left plenty of time to transfer between our old town hotel back to the velodrome hotel to make our 8am bag loading deadline and our 9am convoy ride to the ferry terminal…lies, all lies. We arrived back at the hotel in plenty of time and proceeded to sit around waiting for the following 4 hours…whispers were that one minute we were riding to the terminal, the next we weren’t but none of the staff really knew what was going on either!....eventually our local support arrived with a 50 seater bus into which we were expected to pack our bikes and bags and us for the 8km downhill journey to the ferry terminal. We all thought it ludicrous that we had waited about all morning and were now being told that the traffic was too bad to ride through…there was not a stitch of traffic on the roads at 8am when we were all sitting about!

We were told to change because we weren’t riding…then as we loaded the bus it became obvious that not all bikes and bags were going to fit and the bikes were having to remove wheels and seats to do so anyway…what a palaver over a 8km ride! In the end one person decided they had had enough of the circus and were going to ride anyway, many others joined him and the rest of us would have loved to ride but now did not have the choice as our cycle shoes and bikes were buried on the bus. So half the group rode in a convoy as originally planned and the rest of us sat on the bus…and we all arrived at the same time. We are told the ride was simple and still no one can understand why it would be deemed unsafe for us to do as it was no worse than many situations we have encountered before. Not happy Jan!

So after 4 hours of sitting about at the hotel waiting to leave we finally arrived at the ferry terminal at 11am and proceeded to sit about in the dusty unwelcoming ferry port carpark and occasionally escape to surrounding restaurants and supermarkets fuelling up and buying supplies whilst waiting for the ferry to leave. After trying to escape the baking heat all day and now tired, dirty, sun burnt and irritated it became obvious to many of us that there was not even a hint that the ferry was going to leave any time soon…and it became exasperatingly frustrating to see that no effort was being made to contact our local support and find out what was going on. Finally at about 8pm our local support showed up and it became obvious that it had been confirmed that the ferry was not going to leave today and further investigation revealed that it had not left for the past 3 days…all the cargo that it ships has been held up due to the war in Georgia and they ferry does not leave until it is full.

We then proceeded to sit about for another hour with little more information other than the obvious fact that the ferry was not going anywhere. TDA staff were off trying to make arrangements for accommodation and luggage storage etc…which as it turns out were issues both solved by members among the group anyway and would have been solved much faster had we been consulted in the process! A few very kindly volunteered to camp at the ferry stop and guard our luggage and bikes whilst the rest of us caught a taxi back to the hotel in the old town which TDA had booked us into…knowing full well that they would have had a revolt on their hands had they attempted to send us back to the velodrome hotel.

Back at the hotel there was some confusion as to how many people they could accommodate but after some shuffling of foldaway beds and redirection of some people to a partner hotel everyone could finally get to bed at about 11pm. Tomorrow holds promise of another day of waiting about for the ferry to potentially leave, failing which we will resort to plan B which is to abandon the ferry crossing and try and fly from Baku to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan…meaning we will skip a further 4 riding days…this war in Georgia has had knock on effects that no one had anticipated!

Chinese Visa Update

Some good news in all the drama that has been unfolding over the past couple of weeks is that we managed to get a Chinese Visa…of sorts. We are told that we have been issued with a group visa…which is good to get us in at the same time, but technically we are all supposed to leave at the same time which could prove a problem. But we figure getting out has got to be a smaller hurdle than getting in so we will deal with it once we are in. The unsettling part is that we have nothing to show for our US$100…no indication in our passports whatsoever that we have a visa, just some alleged document floating about that none of us have seen or have a great deal of faith in…but we will see.