Week 10 – Familiar roads
Turkey (Erzurum) – Georgia (Batumi, Akhaltsikhe)
This time I took a different route back from eastern Turkey to the Georgian border. I drove from Van to the city of Erzurum, five hours away. It's home to one of Turkey's biggest ski areas: Palandöken. Getting there was a bit of an adventure, as the road crosses a mountain range – and unfortunately I was driving in the dark again, in heavy snow.
The ski area was quite well developed, but because there wasn't enough snow only half the lifts were running. Still, skiing there was lovely and varied. Lift passes and equipment hire cost about a third of what they do in Austria.
In Palandöken you can also go ice climbing without any experience. For the equivalent of just €3 you can climb an artificially made ice wall. Besides the harness, you need ice axes and stiff boots with crampons. The climbing was actually pretty easy – you just have to trust the equipment and swing into the ice with enough force. The conditions and the difficulty of the route were perfect.
Because of the cold, in Erzurum I didn't just sleep in the bus but also treated myself to the luxury of a shower in a holiday flat – which was really more of a room in a student flatshare, but that was plenty. In this university city I also did another PCR test, which was required to enter Georgia.
Heading further north, I was reminded of the question from the parts dealer in Ankara who'd sold me the starter motor: "How do you handle the snow?"
Driving north, it snowed enormously, and many cars were using snow chains. I wanted to print out the PCR test result in Hopa, a town on the Black Sea, but that didn't work because the snowstorm had knocked out the town's power. At the border the officials accepted the PDF, and once again I was in Batumi, Georgia, where I stayed for a day.
The following night I spent on the beach of the Black Sea, which was unusually black too. Here I met a British woman who told me about her terrible drive from the capital, Tbilisi, to the sea: on top of the risky driving style common in Georgia and the bad roads, there was snow and ice. The upshot was that she'd had a small accident, and she was still a bit shaken as she told me about it.
On the way towards the capital, I went to some hot springs that the hosts of our Christmas dinner had recommended. They were special because you could stand in them. I'd actually planned to spend the night there. But although they were very remote and only reachable via a snowy dirt track, they were surprisingly busy. A Georgian who worked in Germany and was also visiting the springs advised me not to stay. Even though it was almost midnight, Lada Nivas kept arriving with men inside who first drank wine and the grape brandy chacha and then went bathing … And it stays like that, the very friendly Georgian told me in good German … Yes, probably not the safest place to spend the night, in a remote forest with drunk Georgians 😀
In the nearby town of Akhaltsikhe I spent the night by the castle, which I visited the next day.
Then I drove on to the beautiful capital, Tbilisi. There I wanted to meet people from the local T3 community to explain my plans for the bus and talk about the parts I'd need. The bus had suffered quite a bit from the road salt, and the body wasn't in great shape anyway. That's to be fixed when I'm back in Tbilisi.