RosieBell

The Caucasus

The Caucasus  - how romantic.  High mountains and glaciers at the edge of the old Russian empire.  It sounded remote and mysterious.  In fact its most accessible part, Kazbegi, is about two hours north of Tbilisi.   A taxi took us to the mini-bus station, which was really just a huge parking space for hundreds of mini-buses, with no ticket booths or platforms.  There must have been some organisation somewhere as our hotel had rung up and given us a time of departure but it certainly wasn't apparent.  The mini-buses sat there and you went and found yours - difficult when the notices of their destination were in the Georgian alphabet.   However, our taxi driver inquired of people who told him where to take us, and then when he tried to rip us off, people shouted him down - he reduced his proposed fare by 300% or so.  We paid about £5 for the bus ticket.

The mini-bus was full and had a strip of low, narrow windows, which meant to see anything you had to crane your neck sideways.  We set out on the main highway north, the E117, which is the main route to Russia.  It was busy, with plenty of lorries, and reasonably wide, but there were patches when its surface was in very poor condition. 

We drove past huge reservoirs and up into the mountains, stopping by a spring falling from a steep slope and forming a pool which was edged with concrete.  At stalls women were selling felt hats and a kind of sweet, which is long fingers of a tasteless gelatinous coating around walnuts..  There were toilets there, which C. said were unspeakable.  I had a cold and I was feeling travel sick.  

 C.  does not like heights and was made nervous by the long steep drops at the edge of the road.  We continued past avalanche tunnels which are used in the winter and a ski-resort, with the dishevelled, sad appearance of out of season holiday spots.  Occasionally the driver (thankfully sober-looking and middle-aged) would slow down and swerve past groups of cows which wandered along the road, as sheep do in the Scottish Highlands.   They were healthy, well-fed cows and placid, and didn't seem to care about the container lorries that were passing them. 

Nearing Kazbegi the driver stopped to pick up locals from the roadside who didn't seem to pay for their trip of a couple of miles.  

In the town square the owner of our guest house met us and took us the few yards to where we were staying - a  basic room painted blue with mould creeping along the walls, a squat toilet (clean) and shower (non functioning).  The owner was a friendly fellow and his daughter spent her time cooking some kind of cabbage soup in the kitchen.   They like the village and area looked poor and we were glad to punt some money their way.

 

House in Kazbegi

Frieze, Kazbegi

We walked around Kazbegi, a large village of scattered houses and not attractive, except for the setting.  We looked east and our eyes were filled with mountainside, steep and gullied and scree-sloped. The mountain range is young and reminded me of the Remarkables in New Zealand, only higher - about 5000 metres.  Looked south, down a beautiful river valley.  Looked north along the highway to Russia and Chechenya very close.  Looked west, and on the top of a steep hill was the Holy Trinity Church, famed in pictures of Georgia, and as fine a sight as I've ever seen. 

Church of Holy Trinity, most wonderfully placed

There are a couple of hotels in Kazbegi, some cafes, and shops that are just long rooms.  It's a tourist town - not just for mountaineers and trekkers who can hire climbing gear here but for sight-seers and religious pilgrims.  People make money from driving taxis, hiring out horses and selling access to the internet.  The surrounding agriculture was evidently cattle grazing, whether for milk or meat, and I would guess it's subsistence.

I spent the rest of the day and night sleeping off my cold and travel-sickness and woke at dawn.  I went outside.  It was cold.  The rising sun was lighting up the snowy peaks so they turned gold.   The landlord pointed to these and then crossed himself twice as the Holy Trinity Church appeared out of the mist.

After breakfast I set out to walk to the Church, up to the next village of Gergeti and then further up past men pitchforking hay into small stacks in the fields.  There were other people walking - mostly young Georgians (students I guessed).  Some were camping by the roadside.   Coming downhill was a priest in the full black tunic and hat, and with a long beautiful silky black beard.   He was a handsome sight, the only modern touch being his camouflage coloured daypack.  I continued up through the pinewoods.  The sun was out but it was not hot being so high up - about 2000 metres - and each time you turned there was a view of cloud and mountain or the church,.  So I climbed until I heard the sound of voices and there were people picnicking on the big grassy area before the final little hillock where the church stands.  Past the taxi drivers smoking,  some steep last few yards, and there was the Church of the Holy Trinity.  I can't judge Georgian architecture so can only say the Church is simple, pleasing - in fact that particular church shape, a square cross with its dome, is always attractive.  It dates from the fourteenth century.

Haystacks

 

View of Kazbegi, at the foot of the mountains

The road through the pinewoods

Dramatic setting for a church

Dinosaur like reliefs

Coloured stone and lichen

Decoration - don't know what those hand grenade things are

 

View from the church

I put on a scarf, there was a skirt to borrow and I went inside but these dark spaces and icons, candles and a priest selling religious bric-a-brac are a language I can't read.  So feeling an intruder I left the place to a few of the pious pilgrims. 

 I took photos of the lichened walls and the view, then walked back down to the grassy slope.  It was delicious to stand there and look up to the higher slopes and peaks where there are glaciers.  I would have loved to continue further but I'm not fit enough and didn't have a map so could only go downwards, avoiding the taxis and smiling at the occasional family ascending with children.    I went down past an old woman foraging for branches in the forest, the horses in the fields, the men piling up hay. Altogether a grand walk. 

Walking back

Gergeti Village

Funicular - the Soviets built it to take people to the Holy Trinity Church, but after the break up of the empire the Georgians tore it down, thinking pilgrims should walk there.  You can take a taxi though.

When I got back the clouds that had wreathed the mountains descended and coalesced and the village was chilly and grey.   C and I pottered around the rest of day and had dinner - fried  potato and sausage - in a cafe, where the waiter (called George) chatted good English to us - he had learned it off the internet he said - and to his mates, male and female who hung out there.  

The next morning we went to the square to catch the bus back to Tbilisi.  Other tourists were there - a young Latvian woman in the back-packers' hip trousers which are vaguely Turkish in shape, very baggy and with a crotch hanging to the ankles.  She had the Baltic look of fair hair and light eyes, and she said this journey was the first time she had spoken the Russian she had learned at school. 

We crammed into another uncomfortable mini-bus.  I was sitting behind a middle-aged Polish woman, who in bossy tones asked about our journey.  Did we speak Russian?  No, but we got by in English.   How can you travel here without Russian? she said accusingly.  I repeated my mantra that we want to buy things from people who want to sell us things, and we can usually work it out between us.  Besides, many of the young people speak English.  She went on about the food, saying how bad it was, which I thought rude since most of the people sardined in this bus were Georgian and some would understand English.  I said the bread was excellent and the produce very good.  She had been to the seaside resorts on the Black Sea and said they were terrible.  I make her sound nasty - in fact she was quite interesting about their travels. Her aggressive manner may have been how English comes out of a Polish mouth (though Poles I've spoken to in Edinburgh don't talk that way, come to think of it - nah, she was a belligerent cow). 

We stopped again at the line of stalls beside the spring, but lying on the road was a dog,  freshly dead and very large and bloody and most stomach-turning to look at, so I kept my eyes averted as far as I could.  C. said the toilets were better than last time though still disgusting.  A stream running down the hillside was full of rubbish.  We thought they should get their act together - at least they could get rid of the dog as a feature unlikely to attract prospective customers.

We returned to Tbilisi and though I found a few possible outings in the guide book the thought of squeezing into another mini-bus designed for Georgian sized people put us off, and in fact there was enough for us to do in Tbilisi for the next few days.

But I would be very happy to return to those pointed sharp mountains in the Caucasus, as beautiful as their name.

Have you ever been to Georgia? (ex USSR)

You haven't seen my holiday snaps yet, have you?

I took my holiday back in August.  For work reasons my sister C. had to go to the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia) and Zadar in Croatia and asked me to join her.  She wanted us to travel overland between Georgia and Croatia, preferably via Russia.   I had a look at the map and saw that if we went north of the Black Sea we would end up in Ossetia - and hadn't there been a war there recently? If we went south, it would mean going across Turkey.  I love Turkey but have been there several times, and we both wanted to see something of Eastern Europe.  I did research via the Lonely Planet, and it said that going north of Georgia was a no-no as it was occupied by Russian forces. If we went to the western side of Georgia on the Black Sea there were infrequent and unscheduled ferries that ran to Odessa and it would take 48 hours.   An hour in a boat is enough for me, so I chucked that idea, but figured we could fly to Odessa,  take a train to Kiev and then carry on westwards.   C. agreed to this and I got out the Lonely Planet guide for the Ukraine, which stressed that to do anything at all there you had better speak fluent Russian. 

C. then emailed the Ukrainian embassy in Australia about visas, and got back a snotty reply, saying that as Australia and New Zealand didn't hand out visas to Ukrainians why should they reciprocate?  It would cost her $500NZ, so she told me to spike the Ukraine and find another route.  More maps, and  Lonely Planet, and Romania looked like the best option - neither of us has been there.  So I then spent my time working out with the help of the Seat61 site how to get trains from Bucharest to Croatia via Hungary - God! the end of the Cold War.  Thirty years ago this would have been a mission for a John Le Carre character. 

The cheapest flight I could get had me leaving my Edinburgh flat at 5:30 am, a wait in Gatwick, a wait in Kiev and arriving at Tbilisi at about midnight.  I was very much taken with the city which appeared as brightly lit domes and bridges in the darkness, and then the taxi went through narrow, ramshackle, slightly worrying streets and stopped at a boutique hotel (the Villa Mtiebi).

C had booked it for a couple of nights (paid for by her work). It was elegant with an art deco interior and an air of declassing -  on the sofas the upholstery was torn and there were not many guests, so we would be the only ones in the dining room to be offered a huge spread at breakfast. 

All around the hotel were houses with cracked walls and distorted roofs.   Some were deserted and covered with creepers.  There had been an earthquake in Tbilisi a few years ago, and this part of their Old Town had been badly damaged.  Georgia is not a rich country and houses had been slow to be repaired.  Some of them had been rebuilt, but others were broken and crumbling, and people would come out of twisted doorways and sit on slanting balconies.  Our reaction was to find it highly photogenic.  We walked around for hours, our lenses poised.

 

Some places had been rebuilt, so you would get a battered facade next to a smart facade:-

 

Tbilisi is a charming, quirky city. Much was decorated - new things like water fountains and park benches as well the older buildings. 

This seat can be dated from the post-internet period

There were French-looking streets with elegant balconies and a grand boulevard of arched and facaded public architecture, but the old town is Ottoman, with wooden verandahs and lacework. To us they looked like the villas in the old parts of New Zealand cities - Kelburn in Wellington, Ponsonby and Mount Eden in Auckland.  The area which had been flashed up and chicified was like Auckland's Parnell.   A city with flair.

 

The Georgian Parnell

 

 

Decorated lamp-post

The main boulevard is Rustaveli Avenue, which has a set of handsome public buildings - Opera House, Parliament, National Museum and so on.  It is very wide, with heavy, fast traffic, which converges across Freedom Square - not much freedom for pedestrians as you have to descend into subways to cross the roads.  Some of the subways are lined with little stalls and were lively places where I bought tacky earrings but others were dark and stank of urine.

Freedom Square
I had the impression of official patriotism.  Topping the plinth in Freedom Square was a gold statue of St George that had replaced one of Lenin.   Georgian flags were used to curtain off a building site. 

The guide book pointed out where demonstrators had gathered for the gaining of Georgian independence, and for the Rose Revolution.  I took a photo of a plaque, assuming it commemorated events in the 1989 - 1991 period when the tanks rolled in and protesters were killed.   I have only noticed the date and wording now.

"This monument commemorates the participants of a peaceful demonstration rally gunned down by the Soviet regime on March 9 1956."

The peaceful demonstration rally was a protest against deStalinisation.  Google finds:-

Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization was a blow to Georgian pride if only because he cast aspersions on the Georgians themselves. Georgian youth, bred on the panegyrics and permanent praise of the “genius” of Stalin, was proud to consider him being a Georgian that ruled over great Russia, and, as believed widely, dominated the world. Now sudden shock of denigration of Stalin was considered as a révanche taken by Khrushchev over the dead giant of history, and as national humiliation.

Several days in advance of the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, groups of students participated in spontaneous demonstrations and meetings by the huge monument of the ‘Great Leader’ near the Kura embankment. The demonstrations in the capital triggered similar protests in other parts of the republic. The situation had become uncontrollable by March 5, when thousands of protesters accompanied by the cacophony of car sirens were chanting the slogan “Long Live Great Stalin, Long Live the Party of Lenin and Stalin, Long Live Soviet Georgia” near the Government House on Rustaveli Avenue. By 8 March, the protest had become apparently anti-Soviet. The most radical group of students demanded restoration of Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union. Finally the officials allowed the celebration of the anniversary to be held, but when crowds of students moved through the streets towards the monuments, frightened Vasil Mzhavanadze, the local communist leader, lost control and passed on the responsibility to the army. Suddenly the shooting started from several buildings, and the army soldiers and tanks pursued the escaping students. Although no precise numbers of casualties is known, at least 80 (and maybe over 150) young people were killed and several hundreds wounded and arrested.

The plaque is in Georgian and English, and that, and its references to the massacre by the Soviet regime, suggest it must have been placed post independence.   But presumably the army that did the shooting was Georgian, and this has been glossed as "Soviet."  Nor are the pro-Stalin reasons for the demonstrations mentioned.  The plaque gave information without context or meaning, to a foreigner anyway.

I don't know how patriotic Georgians are but they are certainly religious.  On passing their churches many people would cross themselves twice.  In the churches I went into there were young women in short skirts and scarves kissing icons and young hip looking blokes in jeans lighting candles.  Religion is part of every day life, as it must have been in most of Europe until very recently.  The street near our hotel had several shops selling religious bric-a-brac such as Maltese crosses  (the policewoman in immigration had been wearing an enamelled one and I thought it very pretty and wanted to buy one but never saw another nice one for sale). Popular were pictures which I would call "Byzantine" i.e. the faces of the saints and Virgin Mary were surrounded by gold plate. 

Shopping was very local.  In residential streets there would be  grocer's shops in basements every fifty yards or so.  People sold produce in the streets as well - an old woman might have a few watermelon for sale.   We bought very large, very red tomatoes and peaches that would not have been allowed by their looks into Tesco's, and they were delicious.  I could have gorged on those golden juicy peaches but it's a sad fact of tourism that you have to ration yourself to one item of fantastic ambrosial fruit per day for the health and safety of your stomach.

The bread was delicious - like nan bread, only a little thicker. 

At restaurants they try to make you eat enormous amounts of heavy, filling dumplings, or several large courses when one would be enough.  At one restaurant the woman who ran it was so keen for me to sample something that I hadn't ordered - some kind of dahl - that she was trying to spoon it in to my mouth.   At another, rather flash place, I requested "accompanying greens" - and got a great heap of raw vegetables and some bunches of herbs which I think the waitress found amusing to serve me.  The best meal I had was beans in a crock, which were kidney beans cooked in rich stock and lightly spiced. 

People were friendly, and the younger ones spoke some English.  We were stared at a bit - obvious foreigners and a head taller than the women there  Quite a few of the young women were very good-looking and went in for stilettos and short skirts.   The receptionist at our smart little hotel looked like Katie Melua, with a Georgian style of beauty - blue black wavy hair, long, oval eyes, slender nose, olive skin, and a pretty slim shape.  We went to a doll's museum and the dolls in in folk costume had the same kind of looks - one of the original doll makers had set out to make Georgian looking dolls.

A generic Georgian woman for looks if not clothes

There was no tourist information centre.  The spot where the map said it stood was under construction.   I had a map in my guide book but as the street signs were in the Georgian alphabet which is totally strange, I took a while to get my bearings.   Also, the recommended route through the Old Town was blocked by a building site. However we oriented ourselves by the shiny gold St George in Freedom Square and the river and otherwise got about by taxi.  There was one obvious tourist area of cafes and pricey coffee, with a few hostels.  

Up-market cafe, post Soviet irony. At the flea market you could buy Soviet knick-knacks, badges and posters.

We stayed two nights in the Villa Mbieti, then went off to the Kazbegi in the mountains.  On our return we stayed at a hostel called the Nest for which we had found a leaflet in the national museum.  I climbed the stairs to find a converted town-house with balconies around a courtyard - all charmingly ramshackle - and a beautiful half dressed young man called George (a common name) who was exactly like the chaps I used to pine for in the 1970s - tanned, bearded and green-eyed.  He just needed to be listening to Pink Floyd.  They had no twin room but he offered to empty a bunk room.  Well, they had a washing machine which we needed but otherwise a bunk room to yourselves is pretty miserable - preferable to one shared with strangers, but that's all.  There are no reading lights.  If you're in a top bunk you have to clamber down to go to the bathroom, if you're in the bottom bunk it's too dark to read. The room was huge and bleak.  Through the walls we could hear the young back-packers partying.  We were basically too old for this sort of caper so the next morning I went to the hang-out part of the hostel to tell George we were leaving.  He pushed aside the young woman lying next to him, got up and said that was fine and we said goodbye.  However if you are a young cool backpacker I could recommend the Nest as lively, well situated and with a gorgeous bloke in charge who speaks excellent English.

We moved into an apartment we had seen advertised in a cafe and had a room each. It was just off Freedom Square, on the ground floor of a tenement and very much shaded by trees, and we could sit and watch the woman in the balcony across the street water her plants. We picked up a map there which showed the location of museums in Tbilisi so one day we used it to visit a puppet museum which looked like it was round the corner, then a few streets along.  I am the map-reader when we holiday so I took us a fair distance until the map and streets diverged.  C. is the direction-asker.  I am shy and inhibited about asking foreign strangers how to find the way, she has no compunction at all.  So at the Metro, I fumble with the map, read the timetables, stare at the signs, try to work out how to pronounce our destination, she approaches a young man, says, "Excuse me Sir," and of course he speaks excellent English and tells us where we're going is within walking distance, and we part with warm hand shakes.   So here she pounced on someone, who said a few things and "ecclesia" which I took to mean "church" and we carried on, still unable to find the museum.  She dived into an upmarket hotel to find an English speaker - I fidgetted outside for a while, and then eventually slunk in self-consciously, and she and the receptionist were in front of a computer, looking at a picture of the receptionist's uncle who is a referee in the rugby world cup, due to be played in New Zealand.  Her holiday anecdotes are far more full of people and encounters than mine, and she leaves more good will behind her.  But no puppet museum, so we walked back towards our apartment.

When we get back to our street, we saw a notice saying "Museum" and entered.  It was semi-dark, but the attendants, who seemed surprised at seeing visitors, switched on the lights, and the guide, a young woman, took us around, pointing out the portrait of Stalin in the foyer.   It was an excellent folk art musuem, with little dioramas of the crafts, so a display of pottery would have a diorama next to it of tiny figures using potter's wheels and the wooden objects would have scenes from carpentry.  The guide was a nice, serious young woman with careful English, and showed us ceramics from Gori, pretty filagree and costumes, and it was a highly enjoyable visit.  When we left we looked at the sign which was visible from one direction only and highly discreet.  I'm fond of serendipity however I really think the Museum of Folk and Applied Art should be seen, and the pleasant guide listened to, by a reasonable amount of people, so could the tourist board and the city authorities publicise it a little e.g. by settiing up a larger sign, viewable on two or even three sides.

We saw this request four or five times.  I've never seen such polite graffiti.

At our apartment building the concierge locked the heavy ornamental main door late at night and opened it at 7am.  We had to catch an early flight and the landlord told us to call a number and say, "Open the door".  Natasha, he said, would understand those words but no others as she didn't speak English.  That of course made us nervous, and so that bad night's sleep you have before catching an early flight was even more fitful.  But Natasha and her friend banged on our window at 5:30 am and let us out into a wet morning - it's a humid city and when it rains, it rains hard - and we drove through the rundown looking outskirts of Tbilisi to the airport for the flight to Kiev and then Bucharest.  

Prevailing Winds

It’s been quiet here as I’ve been on a cycling holiday, staying a few days in Saffron Walden in North Essex with a friend, then heading north through Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, ending up at Hull.  I had thought that by going south to north I would be helped by the prevailing south west wind, but the wind turned north east, which meant going head to head with it through the flat, treeless, unhedged farms of Lincolnshire, or being side-swiped along embankments above wide deep drains.  I’m used to a hilly landscape so this was novel - very fertile, and also very dry.  The skies were astonishingly blue and cloudless and sunny and the local news was full of the drought and fire warnings and the disaster this dry spring has been for crops.

I’m not going to do a travelogue, so here are some highlights:-

Pretty rolling countryside around Saffron Walden.  There’s a fine-meshed network of little roads and lanes in this area near Stansted Airport, and agreeable villages with English names like Starling Green, Little Green, Cutlers Green or Ugley Green.  The cow parsley,  hawthorn and horse chestnut and bluebells were blooming, and houses were hung with bunting and Union Jacks marking the Royal Wedding in cheerful patriotism (as compared to BNP style resentful nationalism).   Not many tourists - my friend who lives here says they land at Stansted Airport and head to London, so it’s nothing like as busy as the Cotswolds. 

On May Day we went to a village which was celebrating with  children dancing round a maypole, hula hooping, line dancing, belly dancing and a dogs’ obstacle course, which the dogs, ranging in size from King Charles spaniel to mastiff, couldn’t see the point of at all.  They barged through the hurdles or left the track altogether, and wouldn’t go through a nylon tunnel unless pushed in at one side and hauled at the other by their owners.  We sat in the sun drinking beer and eating burgers or home made cake and enjoyed the do, which was evidently organised by the lively village pub.  The barman played the concertina for the maypole dancing. 

 

The women’s toilet had a suffragette theme. 

Heading north of Cambridge I got on to Lode’s Way.  This is a brand new route - opened September 2010 - that takes you through the fens and round and over the great drains.  Very dramatic and wide-skied and watery. 

A long route - 70 miles - from Ely to Boston.  The National Cycle Network 1, in order to avoid the busy A roads, goes back and forth through this endless flat country.  A line of hedges in the distance seems like an oasis, a clump of trees - poplars mostly - like civilisation. I found it an exhausting push in the blasting north east wind, taking ages, fearing as my shadow got bigger and wobblier that I’d still be cycling in the dark.  But I got to Boston just before twilight and stayed there the next day to recover - no hardship as Boston is an interesting market town with a good church and heritage centre.

Boston to Lincoln - the genteelest thirty three odd miles of cycling path you ever saw, called the Water Rail, part old railway route and part road beside the River Witham.  It’s quite new, and is full of boards telling  you the local history of the river folk who once depended on ferries and barges.  There is also outdoor sculpture, which on cycle routes in my experience is usually big abstract things or huge pieces of disused industrial machinery.   Here they went in for representative so you get sheep and cows made out of old metal or a big wooden pike or pigs, which were attractive and fun. 

Also, by then the wind had turned south so I was blown along northwards under cloudy skies.

North of Lincoln it starts getting hilly again.  I went over the grand Humber Bridge and ended up at Hull, where I did a bit of the Philip Larkin trail.  He lived by Pearson Park for most of his time there, a Victorian park, with statues of worthies, strolling areas by flower beds and big playing fields.  Hull has plenty of cycle stands and is flat - Larkin himself used to cycle a lot there.  I’ve been reading his Letters to Monica and though no-one made mountains out of molehills more than he- the thought of looking for somewhere to live would hang over him like a trial for murder, and he announced his efforts at cooking like he had discovered DNA - he never made a fuss about getting a puncture or breaking down.   Perhaps he was lucky?  However, the sense I had of the city is that the centre is very hemmed in by ring roads and busy arterial roads.  I constantly found myself among fast moving traffic.  

Modern times

I went out one day to Holderness, the peninsula east of Hull along the Humber estuary, to Spurn where the houses are disappearing into the sea.  The roads out there are fairly quiet so I returned on the A1033. Approaching Hull, the A1033 turns into a motorway but there is a good cycle and walkway beside it.  I had just got on to that after cycling 68 miles and was looking forward to getting back to the city and eating fish and chips, when I let out a yell as I was suddenly thrown sideways, landing in a hedge.  I got to my feet and examined the cycle.  The seat post had sheared straight off, leaving a raw sharp stump of metal.  I was not seriously hurt, only mightily bruised on the leg that took the impact, but the bike was unridable, at least not by me since I can‘t ride standing up. 

However I was, as they say, lucky - I hadn’t been going fast downhill in traffic, hadn’t had an artery cut by the post or been impaled on it and only had a five mile walk beside a dual carriageway to get back to Hull.  So I started pushing the bike on this unprepossessing journey, past flyovers and endless terminals and docks with occasional sights of the origami tower - well I called it “Hull Cathedral” but it seems it’s “Holy Trinity Church”.  I got to the Hull railway station where a taxi took me and the cycle back to where I was staying.  I was near the end of my holiday, saddle sore and sick of cycling and although I could have got the bike repaired and carried on further north, I caught a train the next morning back to Edinburgh.  How many of my trips have ended with me pushing my damaged cycle out of Waverley Station to the cycle shop to get fixed and a new collection of bruises.

The following day I took the cycle to be repaired.  This kind of accident does happen, I was told, but with this new improved seat post with its better fitting to the seat (highly padded) it shouldn’t happen again.  Really, England is a fine place for cycling - you’re never too far from a pub, a guest house and a railway station.

Stopping the leaks

I’m reading Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy which I’ll write about soon.  But I do have to note that if those diplomats who sent off long communiqués are now prevented from doing so for state security reasons, it is a great loss to good writing.  Here are the kind of well-informed, observant and waspish - even bitchy - letters that are a delight to receive, like those of Evelyn Waugh, say, or Kingsley Amis.  Who can these talents write to now?  Presumably they didn’t dare email these candid assessments to their intimates, and so officials in the state department were their only readers.  The ambassadors and their staff may have had stern reminders for more discretion, or, I hope, more encryption.  I’ve come across paragraphs that made me laugh out loud.

There is the famous description of the wedding in Dagestan.  It’s brilliant travel writing

Gadzhi's Kaspiysk summer house is an enormous structure on the shore of the Caspian, essentially a huge circular reception room -- much like a large restaurant -- attached to a 40-meter high green airport tower on columns, accessible only by elevator, with a couple of bedrooms, a reception room, and a grotto whose glass floor was the roof of a huge fish tank. The heavily guarded compound also boasts a second house, outbuildings, a tennis court, and two piers out into the Caspian, one rigged with block and tackle for launching jet skis. The house filled up with visitors from all over the Caucasus during the afternoon of August 21. The Chair of Ingushetia's parliament drove in with two colleagues; visitors from Moscow included politicians, businessmen and an Avar football coach. Many of the visitors grew up with Gadzhi in Khasavyurt, including an Ingush Olympic wrestler named Vakha who seemed to be perpetually tipsy. Another group of Gadzhi's boyhood friends from Khasavyurt was led by a man who looked like Shamil Basayev on his day off -- flip-flops, t-shirt, baseball cap, beard -- but turned out to be the chief rabbi of Stavropol Kray.

Describing a lack-lustre Labour conference with added cultural background for an American reader:-

The lack of energy that hung like a pall over the keynote speech was evident elsewhere, either because of low attendance or the party's financial woes. Labour members groused that conference organizers had chosen a bad weekend -- Welsh members stayed away to attend the March 1 St. David's Day festivities back home (St. David is the patron saint of Wales and his feast day is a Welsh nationalist obligation). And the March 2 observance of Mother's Day in Britain put many prospective attendees in the position of choosing between the Labour Party and their "mums." Judging by the turnout, Mum won in many cases.

(Is Mother’s Day so sacrosanct here?  I thought you could get away with a bunch of roses.   Dunno about the reliability of these leaky things. . .)

I know I've read these very late in the day.  However reading diplomatic cables was never really my thing.

Manchester

A friend from New Zealand is staying in London and we met up in Manchester because neither of us have ever been there.   Manchester gave me the impression of a spacious, good-looking city, with plenty  of civic pride and very friendly citizens.  We had a look at the Town Hall, with its Ford Madox Brown murals:-

 
Britons were tattooed then as now



Foreign workers are greeted with jubilation

Manchester Art Gallery is great, full of familiar pictures, and so unthronged compared to London galleries. I was chuffed to see Ford Madox Brown’s Work, and to be able to look at each detail.

We bought a Walkabout Easy Map & Guide to Manchester from the tourist information office.   It began “Walking out of the Visitor Centre, turn left and turn left again along Lloyd Street to the traffic lights.  Turn right walking in to Albert Square towards the Albert Memorial (1).”  So we tried that but it didn‘t seem to work.  We ended up at statues of Cobden and Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington and blundered around for half an hour until we asked for directions, which took us the opposite way.  Finally we found a building which was old, handsome and evidently disused - the former tourist information office.  The Walkabout guide had not been updated, and we hadn’t needed to blame our inability to read maps. 

Petratouristopolis

We caught a bus in Amman at 6:30am and drove for hours through a giant quarry of dust, sand and piles of rocks spreading up low hills.  Near to Petra the hills become higher and closer together. There are deep valleys and vegetation.  You get a glimpse of mountains of naked stone.  Then you arrive at the town of Wadi Musa.  As some towns smell of logging or coal dust, the odour of their main industry, Wadi Musa stinks of tourism.   The taxi ride was extortionate but the driver, having ripped us off, wasn’t huffy or annoyed, cheerfully chatting to us about his wife’s prospective degree in intellectual technology.   The guy at the mini-market was overtly charging us double the going price for water and snacks.   The tourists were about 98% European, those who catered to them about 100% Arab.

A 2 day ticket for Petra costs about £50.  It is an extraordinary place, as photogenic as your first grandchild, and we spent about 9 hours in total walking through the city, with hundreds of other tourists,  and with Jordanians urging us to use their camels, donkeys and horses. 

You walk along a narrow defile and then emerge to see the facade of the Treasury, the red sandstone unweathered

These salesmen ride their animals with great style and then to earn their living have to persuade lumpen tourists to cling apprehensively on to them.  Everyone is trying to sell you something - a ride, trinkets or refreshments - as no doubt they would have when Petra existed as a working city before it became a Unesco World Heritage Site, so this constant hustling adds to the atmosphere.

My sister got into conversation with a Bedouin who sold her some bangles and he said that the recent big hike in ticket prices had hit the private entrepreneurs as it meant people were less inclined to buy souvenirs. Some of the Bedouin still live in the caves in Petra but most have been moved into Wadi Musa.  He also said quite a few Western woman tourists have married Bedouin - one guy had three wives, an Italian, Swiss and a German.  “But we have a saying - East is East, and West is West.”   (Hey, that was Kipling, I muttered to my sister later.)

Anyway, this place is images, not words.

Plant life is sparse in Petra.

 

The weathered stone at the Sacrifice of the High Places

Tombs

Fine mosaics in a Byzantine church, which was dug up in 1992!

Dead Sea

Amman is a bit of a hole and the reason you stay there is to go to the Dead Sea, Petra and some castles in the desert.  The locals do go to the Dead Sea as an outing, but it’s only on a Friday that you can get a direct bus.  So, as with all travelling in Amman, you get a taxi somewhere to start off who took us to a strip by the side of the road where a couple of mini buses waited.  People hanging about there said "Dead Sea" to us and pointed to one of them.  The driver of the bus said, "Rama, 1 dinar [about a £1]  taxi Dead Sea 5 dinar.”  Given that there are no timetables and even if there were we couldn’t read them, we went as directed, and were driven out of the city through spectacular, terraced desert landscape, and past occasional shops selling brightly yellow flotation devices.  At Rama a taxi appeared and drove us past some Bedouin encampments and camels to the Dead Sea, a very calm, pale blue strip of water with high hills on the other side.  It was 11am in the morning and already very hot.

Downtown Amman

You pay to get into the beach (special rates for Jordanians) and there are places to change and woven umbrellas and chairs. 

Where you enter the place is kept clean and swept, but the edge of the beach has more litter than is reasonable for somewhere that is world famous. 

(My sister, with her New Zealand standard of clean beaches was disgusted, whereas living in Britain has blunted my squalor detector.) Anyway, I got into the water, and immediately felt I  was swimming in some other element in a planet with a different gravity.  As everyone knows, you can’t sink.  You lie on your back, your knees up to your chest and holding on to your ankles - try that in a swimming pool and see what happens - and you still can’t sink.  It’s an amazing sensation, which I found made me laugh hysterically and I stayed in the water for ages as  I love swimming in the sea, and I only get to do it once a year or so.   You are very buoyant but the liquid seems to put up resistance as you swim.

There weren’t many people at the beach.  Many of them were having mud baths, including hip cool young guys from Amman who were showing off and some female companions who were wearing Muslim beachwear that looked a bit like wet suits and hijabs in colours of shocking pink and turquoise.  Like practically every young Jordanian woman I saw they were very slim and good looking.  Like many young women wearing fashionable beachwear they didn’t let any salt water touch their garments. 

The other thing you do at the Dead Sea is take photographs of salt crystals on the rocks.  I imagine dropping your camera in the Dead Sea would be the quickest way of destroying it.

So having swum and photographed we had got through the attractions of the Dead Sea.  We thought we would look for a café but the taxi driver had been hanging around and took us back to Rama, where the people pointed us to the right bus and so we returned to Amman. 

I had showered to get the salt off my body, hair and bathing costume, but I forgot about the sarong I wear over the costume, and later found it was stiff with salt.  I never did get round to rinsing it so when I got home it lay around and got very damp, absorbing the moisture from the air, until I washed it.

Further travelogue

You can go to Amman from Damascus by bus but that would mean  waiting at the border while all the passengers go through immigration control, so a shared taxi seemed a better option.   I walked out of the hotel to the end of the street where a taxi driver stood to ambush a foreigners like me and said, “Amman? Jordan?” and drove me a few miles.  I expected some kind of station or taxi rank, but we stopped at the edge of the highway.  Another taxi driver said, “Amman for £10,” which was probably more than the going rate, but seemed cheap enough for a drive of 130 odd miles.  So I got into the front seat of his comfortable car, then a woman in a burqa accompanying a young man, and a middle aged man turned up and we took off, through miles of more or less desert. 

I knew one day I’d have a conversation like this:- 

Taxi driver:- Do you like football?

Me:- No.

Taxi driver:- Manchester United?

Me:- (shakes head and looks stupid)

Taxi driver:- (gives up)

After a while he said, ”BBC” and turned on to what was presumably the World Service.  It was in Arabic so I could only understand words like “Yemen”, but I appreciated the gesture.  He also shared round a bottle of water and in fact was being as hospitable and friendly as the situation allowed for.  After a while he gave up on the Beeb and switched back to Arab pop - either upbeat or plaintive quarter tones, and which I find fairly agreeable, vastly more so than a random selection of modern Western pop.  It helps not being able to understand the words.

 

So after miles of desert we stopped and swapped drivers, and so lost this personable driver for one who spoke no English at all.  Near the border this driver indicated that he wanted everyone’s passport and drove with one hand while flicking through the passports with the other.  We halted at the crossing where  there was some hold up which of course I didn’t understand.  We all got out of the taxi and sat on ramp things marking the lanes to the checkpoints.  The burqa’d lady sat away from the men and said to me, “Sit down.”  I sat down.  She spoke to me then showed me her passport so I could repeat her name, which was something like Sumeila Mahmoud Mohammoud.   I repeated that, tried her in French, and after that we could only look at each other uncomprehendingly, since “Sit down“ was the only English she seemed to know.  She had a kind of post box hole in the cloth around her face and was wearing glasses so she couldn’t express much in her countenance but by the tones of her voice she seemed a nice, friendly woman and I was sorry we couldn’t communicate. 

After a bit we drove on to an office where I paid an exit tax, £5, to leave Syria.  We were then in no man’s land and the rest went to the duty free, while I sat in the sun on the wall by the road.  I didn’t dare stray far though the chances of a taxi with respectable looking people in it dumping me on the Syrian border were remote.  Finally I went to grab a coffee but was hunted out and summoned back to the taxi and we then went through the Jordanian immigration (entrance fee to Jordan £10).  So though the land looked the same we were somewhere different and the pictures of Assad father and son disappeared/.  At the next city, Zaqar, there were masses of election posters instead showing the faces of the candidates and the passengers who had been rather quiet became very animated, evidently talking politics and politicians.

The rest of the passengers got off here, I and the taxi driver continued, we got to the edge of Amman where he stopped to flog off his duty free to a bloke who appeared on the roadside, and we then drove through Amman to a place with a fair amount of buses and taxis where he handed me over to another taxi driver who took me to my hotel, though he said it was rubbish and I’d be better off somewhere else.

My sister arrived a couple of hours later.  She had come via Canada, Frankfurt and Cyprus.  She has to travel professionally, but there is a New Zealand notion that once you pass over the thousands of miles of ocean that cuts you off from the rest of the world, you should see as many countries as possible, if they are adjacent on a land mass.  So after I had said that yes, it had been an interesting journey but three countries in a week is a bit much, she said:- “I’ve got something on in Georgia next year.  Could you meet me there?  We could then go to the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.”  I checked the maps in my pocket diary.  Those countries certainly did touch each other and weren’t they once all part of the Soviet Union, so there must be trains between them.  So I agreed to it, and we spent our first evening in Amman planning our next year’s journey.

Our hotel was near the King Abdullah Mosque.  At about 4am a recording of the muezzin would play.  Normally that's a lovely sound, but the sound was cranked up too high and so distorted.

The Rail to Damascus

I was at the Aleppo station at 5:15am to buy a first class train ticket to Damascus for £2.40.  No, I haven’t misplaced the decimal point.  That is what four hours in a reasonably modern and comfortable train from Aleppo to Damascus costs, about the same as four miles along the rails in the UK.  At the ticket office foreigners are sent to an official who looks at their passport, taps into a computer and then lets them buy tickets.  This presumably only affects non Arabs, because the criteria seemed to be “those who look foreign”.

So a pleasant journey as the dawn came up, showing flat-roofed towns and mud villages, Bedouin encampments of rectangular tarpaulin-like tents, presumably  shelter for those who are taking animals round to graze, though goodness knows what they could find to eat. The land looked fairly barren - sometimes totally bare, sometimes with sparse low vegetation, sometimes stony fields, and always hot and dry.  In the places that were cultivated the earth was ploughed in strips among low yellowy stone walls with more stones piled in heaps, and the dark soil was sprinkled with white powder which I assumed must be top dressing.  In this ancient land the soil must have been fertilised over and over for 5000 years.  Occasionally I’d see a hose pipe for irrigation.

The air is so clear you see Damascus a long time before you get there, which was mid-morning.  I was glad after all of the early start because it gave me more time in the city.  From the station a taxi took me to a back packers hotel which was once a grand house with wall paintings and a big courtyard with a palm and vines.  It was also a little basic - I’m “budget” not “backpacker” ie I like my own bathroom, enough blankets on the bed and a telly - but the location was great, being a few hundred yards from the Old Town,  with walkways to get over the strenuously busy roads. I went past the bird market and could hear the birds chirping but did not look in as birds in cages upset me. You see them outside shops, like hanging baskets in the UK. The road signs were in the Latin alphabet as well as Arabic. 

The foot traffic that  was going towards the  Citadel, the statue of Saladin and the Umayyad Mosque   were sight-seers and pilgrims, Western and Arab.  There were also groups of young people in T-shirts with Fox written on the back, baseball caps and shorts or leggings.  They were running for a charity.

Damascus- About 3000 contestants took part on Friday in the 19th Terry Fox Run to raise funds for cancer research in Syria, organized by the Syrian Society for Supporting Medical Research.

The runners set off from Damascus Citadel passing through the landmarks of Old City of Damascus including Khan Suleiman Basha, the Roman Arch, al-Bakri Bath, the Umayyad Mosque and Az-Zahiriyah Library.  

There were towering runners from Canada and Germany and smaller local runners.  The Muslim girls wore  hijabs and long sleeved body-huggers under their T-shirts, but the colour of the T-shirts looked  bright and chemical, the cut  skimpy, in the ancient city among the women draped in black and white-robed men.   This was the modern age - less formal, less ceremonial, less concerned with private spiritual welfare and grand public display.  The kind of religious impulse that had in part built the mosque and drew pilgrims these days takes form in charity -  practical, but not totally utilitarian.  An expenditure of energy has to be publicly performed before the material reward is won, for a better future here on earth.  

I wasn’t allowed into the Umayyad Mosque at once - it was being used for what it was built for - but told to come back in half an hour and was handed a brown robe with a hood, like a monk‘s cowl.  Other Western women had donned these and looked inappropriately like Franciscan friars.  I got away with leaving the hood down and hiding my hair with my scarf. 

Western woman in mosque

The mosque is quite stunning, with fantastic wall paintings and brilliant tiles. 

It is the fourth holiest place in Islam, and houses famous shrines including that of Imam Al-Hussein bin Ali, a great martyr in the Shi-ite branch of Islam.  (I’m about as interested in who he was and why he is important as the average Muslim would be in Martin Luther or John Knox.)  Women were touching the shrine and weeping, so not wanting to be intrusive I left them to it and walked about the rest of the mosque awestruck.  A solitary English bloke said to me, “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” In such places the lone tourist is full of utterance that has to be vented to someone. 

In a church I can tune in to the religious feel of the place - the devotion - the awe - and can understand what is going on in the reliefs and rood screens.  The mosque was alien but the size and its simple shape - the dome, the wide marble floored courtyard - and the beauty of the decoration overwhelmed me. 

The Muslim worshippers didn’t seem to mind us tourists and I suppose a mosque that large in an important city would be like a cathedral in containing all sorts of people - the pious, the curious and the hucksters. 

I take photos of people after they give me permission or if I'm sure they won't see me filching a shot.

After that I wandered about the old town and souk.  It was Friday, so many of the shops in the souk were closed and I only bought an ice-cream (excellent - dipped in pistachio nuts) but enjoyed the pretty wooden shutters of the closed shops and the general bustle of the open ones.  There are signs pointing out an Old Town route, highlights of Damascus etc so evidently a reasonable number of Western tourists are expected and I heard a very English voice shouting commands to builders who were refurbishing one of the buildings.  The place had a narrow, labyrinthine, tumbling down medieval feeling, exactly what a tourist wants to see, and though I got lost, it was always to end up somewhere picturesque. 

So after a couple hours of this I got back to Saladin's statue and the citadel again and walked back to the hotel.  It was evidently near the university as there were young people who looked like students at the chairs and tables that were set up in the narrow streets and lanes.  Young men and women were at the same table, some of the women beautiful Somalis, at least they looked like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  In the evening a kitchen sold food to locals and tourists sitting outside- a chicken meal for £1.50 - and hundreds of young people sat drinking tea and coffee, drawing on nagiles and playing back-gammon.  It was lively and animated without drink.  Many of the young men were bearded and looked intellectual.  I would have loved to have asked them what they thought of Syrian nationalism; pan Arabism; socialism; Islamism; American foreign policy, but the opening never came.   

In the morning I had to wake the night porter asleep in the reception area to let me out so I could go out with my camera and take pictures of the buildings and of the city waking up, which one of my favourite  activities in foreign places.

One of the many million pictures of Assad

The lanes that had been so busy were now shut and shuttered, on the main roads men with shovels were being picked up by mini buses and the bakeries were opening.  I had been less than a day in Damascus and was sorry not to stay longer but I was due in Amman that day.

Sneezing in Aleppo

There are times on holiday when you think why the hell did I ever leave home?  That was the Aleppo experience for me.  There’s nothing wrong with the city as such, just that I found it stressful and exhausting, like being at work.  It’s a busy city with lots of tooting traffic which makes it difficult to cross the roads, but I’d learned the trick of this in Cairo - you lurk near a local, and let them stand between you and the traffic as they somehow melt across the five lanes of moving traffic.  A family with small children is especially useful as a traffic shield.  Like Cairo too Aleppo has very high kerbs, and broken pavements, which makes walking hard - and must be harder for the locals who are mostly shorter than I am.  It would be hell pushing a buggy.

Because of the delay at the border crossing I had arrived just as it was getting dark.  I had to go to the cash line, and spent a couple of hours looking for one, constantly getting lost.  I had a map, but very few road signs use the Latin alphabet.  A couple of people directed me, but in the end I got back to the hotel and they pointed the way.

A great plague that attacks XX chromosomes and uterus carriers had struck the city and had caused death to 90 per cent of the female population, at least that’s what the streets looked like.  Although the pavements were very busy and lively and walking at night in the city felt perfectly safe, about one in ten passers by were women, fairly well draped, though not burqa’d.  I could smell delicious coffee but the coffee shops were as much a no-go area for me as a working-class pub in the 1950s.  I remember being in Greece decades ago and there was barely a woman to be seen outside.

In the morning I woke sneezing with a feverish cold.  However, I only had one day in the town and I had to go out and sight-see so dosed myself with aspirin and spent the morning trying to get to the Grand Mosque and the souk, but getting lost and wandering among streets that sold bathroom fittings and bits for cars.  I couldn’t ask directions by showing someone a map as they of course couldn’t read it, just as I couldn’t read their road signs.  I was wearing a headscarf, linen trousers, a long-sleeved shirt and jacket, and but school-children gasped and giggled when they saw me.  A respectable woman wears a floor length dark coat or robe.  Finally, feeling extremely pissed off with the heat, dust and smell of pee, I found a smart Western hotel with air-conditioning and a swish bar and there did get my bearings, made my way to the Grand Mosque, which was very fine, and a souk, where someone sold me a necklace and earrings with great panache, then headed back to the hotel.  I passed the tourist office, a little outbuilding from the grand Ministry of Tourism building and dropped in to ask about trains to Damascus.  There was one bloke (handsome - good looks in Syria are very common and both men and women walk with straight backs), a telephone, and nothing else at all - no brochures, no leaflets, no lists of accommodation.  The information was purely oral.  (Trains to Damascus - 3am, 5:40am or in the afternoon).   Tourism has some way to go in Syria.

So spent the rest of the daylight eating aspirin, drinking coca cola and dozing in front of CNN, in the gloom that being alone and ill in a foreign hotel brings on, with the further thought of yet another hideously early start.