So the bike did arrive in Tbilisi on the Tuesday and we managed to collect it Wednesday evening. Everything working to a sort if plan but Wednesday was all about hanging around and not much else.
We expected something big to be happening on the Thursday. After all it was a Bank Holiday in honour of the Day of Victory over Fascism. But it was like the other days with slightly less traffic. Traffic is a major issue in Tbilisi - almost at the scale of Istanbul. Parking is worse. Too many cars, narrow roads, park on the pavement, pedestrians walk in the road and slows down traffic further. Except where the roads are big and some are very wide indeed and the only way to cross is via underpasses which are not that close together as we found out...
We worked our way out of Tbilisi and it was good that we were not going far and we could take it easy. We were heading for the wine region of Eastern Georgia which would then be an easy stepping zone into Azerbaijan. We had a nice mountain pass and altogether a pretty uneventful ride stopping in a wine Chateau. Wine chateaux are called Chateau in Georgian too it would seem. Ours, Chateau Eniselli produced half a million bottles per annum of white, semi-dry red, European style red and the Georgian wine that was described as cloudy amber and was fermented in clay pots buried in the ground. Friday morning before setting off we had a tour and maybe the cloudy amber was due to the state of cleanliness and rust. Think we will stick to the red. The property's guard dog was a large Alsatian that was blinded in one eye. It took a lot of persuasion from us to get it to stop sniffing our fox tails - we feared the worst as we suspect had happened in Andorra. But succeed we did and it went off to bark at and annoy a horse that had been tethered by one of its hooves. We were a tad aghast at the cruelty of this. Our host then explained why the dog was blind in one eye and who had kicked it...
Border crossing was one of the easiest we have done. Having exited Georgia we were met by two military fatigued Azeri's one of whom asked us the question as to whether we had been to Armenia as we did know that they were their enemies and tat they were at war with them? The other was very keen on the red fox tail and kept saying something in Azeri to Paul who was practicing his 'blank' look. With the help of Google translate this became 'gift' and we refused wondering what would the happen - nothing did and it was all very smooth. The final checkpoint out of the area met us with the 'where from?' question. The response of London was met with Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Mo Salah. A universal language. We then learned that there would also be Arsenal and Chelsea, in Baku and we were cheerily waved on our way.
The leg from the Georgian wine region to Sheki in Azerbaijan was one we did in 2017. That day in 2017 ended with us burning out the clutch though we only realised this the day after. Not this time. We don't know whether we took a different road this time, whether a new road had been built or whether we had simply forgotten but it was a pleasant trip with no real challenges. We stopped for chai but there was no cake.
Our stop Friday night was below the steep, cobbled, 'waterfall' that had done for us in 2017. We are now staying at the Sheki Karavanserai which is an Azeri Heritage site and like travellers of yore we sat down for Chai - motorcycle boots and all. And then all of a sudden there was a line of seven Japanese Samurai brandishing double Digital SLRs with big lenses as well as their mobiles - we had become a tableau vivant in a museum.
Strong possibility that the bike will be OK tomorrow for the ride down to Baku.
Fingers crossed.
No comments:
Post a Comment