Silk Road Ride

Final Wrap-up

2010-08-15T11:26:00.001-07:00

Leysin, January 2, 2011

Sitting here in my apartment in sunny Leysin, Switzerland, it's about time to draw the saga of the Silk Road Ride to a close and tie up a few loose ends. I've enjoyed just about every minute of the entire process (OK, aside from the six months spent recovering from rheumatic fever in 2002!) and I hope that this blog can help convey some of that excitement to you, my readers.

Here are a series of links that should help summarize this three-stage, eight-month, 17,750 km trip. There are maps, photo galleries, daily riding stats and a few news articles about the trip. I figured out that I rode for about 1185 hours at an average rate of 15.0 km/h, was in the saddle for 197 days (six and a half solid months), passed through 11 countries (and one semi-country, Nagorno-Karabakh), climbed an estimated 190 000 vertical metres (that's 22 times the height of Mt. Everest above sea level) and turned the pedals over 3 million times. Not bad!

These bare statistics, though, do not capture any of the essence of the trip. This trip was far more about the landscapes, the cultures, the ruins and the people along the way. Camping beside the Great Wall of China or beneath the tomb of Han Wu Di, traipsing awestruck through Bukhara, Samarkand, Esfahan and Ani, riding past emerald lakes like Sayram, Issyk Kol and Lake Van, crossing the Tien Shan and the Pamirs and the Elborz: these are what this trip was about. Staying with herders in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and townsfolk in Iran, crossing paths with fellow riders, having long conversations with people along the road, and feeling the connections between people and culture and history was what made this journey so worthwhile and helps explain why I stuck with it over the intervening years. The purely physical, while obviously integral to the trip, was really just a means to an end. I was confident that I could make it to the end of the Silk Road; what really mattered were the experiences along the way.

I hope that for some of my readers, this will inspire you to undertake your own dream voyages or projects. Life is short: play hard!!

Stay tuned to graydonstravels.blogspot.com for future trips!

Graydon

Google Maps

2002

2004

2009

Daily riding summary charts
2002

2004
2009

Facebook photo galleries

2002: Xian to Urumqi

2004: Xinjiang and Kazakhstan

2004: Kyrgyzstan

2004: Tajikistan

2004: Uzbekistan

2004: Turkmenistan and Iran

2009: Kuwait and Iran

2009: Azerbaijan

2009: Georgia

2009: Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh

2009: Turkey and Iraq

Articles

An article by me in Verge magazine about the first two legs of the journey.

A brief article in English about my arrival in Venice in January, 2010.

Two more articles in Italian about the same thing.

La Nuova Venezia

Notizario Italiano.

The final, symbolic end of the Silk Road Ride

2010-01-21T05:09:00.000-08:00

Carrouge, Switzerland, January 21

I'm sitting in my sister's apartment here in rural Switzerland, looking out at the freshly fallen snow and coming to terms with the fact that, after all these years, the Silk Road Ride is complete now. Although the ride really ended at the ended of October in Turkey, I had a much more symbolic closure to the trip a couple of days ago when I rode my bicycle, with its rebuilt rear wheel, from San Vito al Tagliamento into Venice, finishing at the site of Marco Polo's house in the Secondo Corte del Milion. It was a cold, cold morning, but a pleasant, flat, uneventful ride across the Veneto plain, skirting the Venetian lagoon, across the causeway and into the city that for so many centuries was Western Europe's trading window to the East. And while Marco Polo returned home from Turkey by ship, it was still nice to feel that I was crossing paths with the Silk Road's most famous Western traveller again.

My friend Manuel had set up a welcoming committee of journalists to take photos and talk to me as I pushed my bike along the streets and up and over the bridges towards my finishing point. So far, there are two stories that have come out in the Italian press:

this one (from Il Gazzetino, the main daily paper of Venice)
and this one (from Nuova Venezia)

They are in Italian but you can make amusing translations of them using online translator programs.

So the trip is over; now, after some time spent riding elsewhere (most likely Ethiopia), it will be back to Canada to start writing a book to turn this trip into an entertaining, informative read for the general public. I hope that you, my faithful readers, have enjoyed the blog, and will look for the book whenever it comes out.

Off to the Balkans

2009-11-20T12:28:00.001-08:00

Berat, Albania, Nov. 20

The Silk Road Ride is over, sad to say. I will continue to add links and maps to this site, but for now my further cycling adventures, riding through the Balkans in November and December of 2009, can be found at

balkanblitz.blogspot.com

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my Silk Road adventures, and that you will continue to follow my cycling explorations in the future!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Silk Road Bike-u Haiku

2009-11-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have actual poetic talent, İ apologize. For the rest of you, İ hope you enjoy this poetic overview of this bicycle journey expressed in the form of a series of haiku. Matsuo Basho is doubtless turning over in his grave.

2002

China

Buying ink brushes
Paying respects to Xuan Zang
Leaving from Xian

Chinese emperors
Lie in vast mausolea
Dead and forgotten

Buddhist cave temples
Honeycomb arid hillsides
Silk Road's eastern end

Cycling through cold mist
Tracing Gansu Corridor
Camped beside Great Wall

Homicidal bees
Pursue me across desert
Anxi oasis

Hot dry hurricanes
Dessicate a roadside corpse
Crossing the Gobi

Travel companions
Across the Taklamakan
Swift-riding Uighurs

Beziklik, Dunhuang
Frescoes adorn rock-hewn caves
Trail of spreading faith

Blazing heat hammers
Tourists in Gaochang, Turfan
Beer under grape vines

Pain spreads slowly through
Swelling joints in Urumqi
Journey suspended

2004

China

Return to deathbed
In rain-lashed grey Urumqi
Two long years later

Otherworldly blue
Propelled by gale-force tailwinds
Leaving Sayram Lake

Kazakhstan

Welcoming shepherds
As I ride across bleak steppe
Cold early springtime

Kyrgyzstan

Farcical frontier
Drawn across boggy valley
Of Scythian tombs

Warm sunshine lights up
Ancient rock-carved hunting scenes
Of Lake Issyk Kol

Mountain passes loom
Aching muscles climb all day
Cycling with Pushkin

Kebabs, beer, bread, borshcht
Filling my empty stomach
Chaikhana in Osh

Fast-moving blizzard
Freezes us on mountainside
Revived in warm yurt

Under Pamir peaks
Detained by bribe-seeking guards
Saved by football match

Tajikistan

Dead yaks mark border
High desert home to slaughtered
Marco Polo sheep

Lenin's statue stands
Above power-line fores
Rain-drenched Murghab town

Source of the Oxus
Defended by flood ramparts
We retreat, muddy

Cold rainy grasslands
Kyrgyz herders shelter us
Crossing the Pamirs

Along Afghan frontier
Hindu Kush towers above
We pedal hungry

Guest of expats
I eat, rest, eat, rest and eat
Break in Dushanbe

Alpine scenery
Crossing the Fan Mountains
Farewell dear Tajiks

Uzbekistan

Stung at border
Cheated times uncountable
Uzbeks rip me off

Floating dream-like blue
Above ancient mud brick domes
Samarkand awes me

Antique minaret
Glowers over timeless town
Gorgeous Bukhara

Ghostly empty streets
Open air museum town
Deserted Khiva

Turkmenistan

Golden statues stand
In soulless dusty towns
Damn Turkmenbashi

Heat like sledge hammers
Mongol-ruined cityscape
Camping inside Merv

Iran

Vodka and cherry
Homemade wine, date palm liqueur
Life in dry Iran

Carpets and pilgrims
Line streets beneath golden dome
Two days in Meshhad

Caravansarai
That once housed Marco Polo
My nighttime shelter

Flawless lines rise up
To a rocket-like apex
Gonbad e Kavus

Two day summit dash
Scotch on peak, hot springs after
Climbing Damavand

Endless traffic jam
Leads into smog-choked Tehran
My time has run out

2009

Iran

Smiles of real welcome
Curious conversations
Welcome to Iran

Sweating through dust haze
Battling traffic lunacy
I dream of water

Cold drinks on roadside
Picnics, dinners, veggies, fruit
Hospitality

Heineken and Scotch
Saadi's graveside poetry
Shiraz in summer

Persian capital
Tombs of long-dead emperors
Persepolis pomp

Tiles shimmer in sun
Mud brick towers, minarets
Esfahan wonder

Assassin castles
Lakeside picnics and swimming
Cycling the Elborz

Dashing cross the steppe
I spot a huge manmade shape
Soltaniyeh's dome

Torrential rainstorms
Kneedeep litter beside road
Caspian seashore

Azerbaijan

Water fountain burns
Gazelles frolic, headwinds howl
Riding to Baku

Oasis of ease
In Art Deco cityscape:
Hostess Natalya

Waves of green hills rise
Higher than the eye can see
Rainy Xinaliq

Returning from the hills
Slope and wind co-operate
Flying Baku-wards

Seki exudes charm
Kish village breathes history
Pedal self-destructs

Like a bad conscience
Huge faces loom by roadside
Cult of Iliev

Georgia

Rolling through vineyards
Past fortresses and castles
Kakheti charms me

Climbing to the sky
A sweat-soaked muddy goat track
The Abano Pass

Wine, khinkali, song
Horse-riding, mountain biking
Tusheti idyll

Good-humoured people
In historic countryside
Georgia's on my mind

Rushing stream waters
Orchards, meadows, village greens
Khevsureti jaunt

Towering ice peak
Backdrop for mountain freedom
Kazbegi sidetrip

Forty-first birthday
In Tbilisi old town
Cyclists' rendezvous

Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh

Deserted churches
Sport intricate stone carving
Armenian soul

Soviet greyness
Blights church-studded valleyscape
Debed Canyon ride

Like desert roses
Beautiful women light up
Ugly Yerevan

Dancing teenagers
Greek temple adorns bleak slopes
Geghard and Garni

Fruit and veg harvest
Ararat looms in background
Fleeing Yerevan

Roller coaster ride
Karahundj stones salute sky
Cycling through cold rain

Forested mountains
Soaked in blood of civil war
Remote Karabakh

Snow line creeps downhill
Industrial wastelands pass
Farewell Hayastan

Georgia (reprise)

Mud road to nowhere
Frozen forgotten highlands
Vardzia appears

Turkey

Fall colours glowing
Highlight volcanic landscape
On the road to Kars

Earthquake-shattered scene
Half-standing churches teeter
By Ani's chasm

Sneering begging brats
Hurl stones and bid dogs attack
True Kurdish welcome

Urartu fortress
Ancient temple hieroglyphs
Dust of history

Magic citadel
Old bridge, graceful minaret
Poor doomed Hasankeyf

Byzantine steeples
Where now few Christians live
Scenic Tur Abdin

Iraq

Comfortingly dull
Smiles of genuine welcome
Iraqi detour

Turkey (reprise)

Desert blooms cotton
Trucks thunder across lowlands
I near journey's end

Temples of the moon
Harran's eternal story
Lost limestone hamlets

Modern city growls
Around baklava cafes
Antep's mosaics

Ancient Antioch
Leaves little to be seen now
But Roman tilework

Armenian ruins
Hgih-perching castles look down
Cilician plain

Lightning and hailstorm
Herald my victory lap
Venetian Ayas

Watching rain pour down
Remembering journey highlights
Melancholic joy

The Victory Lap

2009-11-02T05:32:00.000-08:00

Ayas, November 2

I am sitting in an internet cafe, watching recurrent gusts of rain blow in off the Mediterranean. It has been apocalyptic weather for the past 48 hours, ever since I got to within 10 kilometres of the end of my Silk Road Ride. My victory lap was done in blinding sheets of rain mixed with large hailstones, enormous and disturbingly close bolts of lightning and zero visibility. The hail has gone, but the rest of the weather has remained, foiling my plans for triumphant photos with my bike on the beach. Instead I have been lying in bed drinking copious quantities of tea and reading Shakespeare, letting my poor leg muscles relax.

My four-day final stage from Antakya was somewhat anticlimactic, at least partly because of the grey weather. The first day was actually sunny, and I rode southeast towards the Mediterranean through the coastal hills. On the way, I stopped to see the hilltop ruins of the Church of St. Simeon Stylites the Younger. This involved a steep climb of 400 vertical metres, past families engrossed in the olive harvest. There was nobody at the ruins, and I enjoyed having the place to myself. Ten years ago, Joanne and I had visited another Church of St. Simeon not far away, on the Syrian side of the border, and had been mightily impressed by the beautiful cluster of four churches meeting at the sad stump of the saint's rock pillar, chipped away by generations of larcenous pilgrims. This complex follows exactly the same plan, but the four basilicas lie in complete ruined disarray, covered by modern football fan graffiti. From these location, exposed to the cooling mountain breezes, the ascetic saint could look down on Antioch, the city which he viewed as a sink of iniquity. He spent many years living atop a metre-square platform atop a high stone pillar, performing various painful exercises in faith and having his meals passed up to him on a pole. I climbed up the truncated pillar and contemplated the stillness and simplicity of the world and had my photo snapped by a Turkish mother and daughter who had just arrived. It amazed me that two people would choose exactly the same sort of eccentric austerities near the same city, have the same name and end up with the same design of religious complex built around the site of their pillar-dwelling existences. On the other hand, a recent exercise in pillar-standing in Trafalgar Square in London was wildly popular with the public, so maybe there's a Stylite hidden inside all of us.

I dropped back down to the Orontes valley and rode to the Mediterranean, the first time I had seen the ocean since leaving Bushehr two and a half months earlier. The limestone hills backing onto the sea were dotted with ancient tombs and a feat of Roman engineering, the Tunnel of Titus and Vespasian, which saved the port of Seleucia in Pieria from recurrent floods in heavy rain. The city itself was the original capital of the Seleucid province before it moved to Antioch, but it remained as the deep-water port for the area. A lot of Chinese silk must have moved through this port over the centuries before it silted up. I had a delicious lunch of bread and hummus and then went for a swim; while the locals may have found it cold, it was similar to summertime swimming in Lake Superior and I enjoyed the sensation of having arrived at the end of a continent.

From Seleucia I rode along a tiny dirt road along a wild cliff-lined coast, where the only humans in sight were sport fishermen on the rocky beaches. After 30 kilometres I re-entered an area of dense settlement and, just as I was despairing of finding a place to camp, I found a tiny commercial campground, Orient Camping, in Kovacik. Run by an energetic Turkish-born hang-gliding aficionado and autodidact who had recently returned from 28 years in the Netherlands, the only other guest was Mike, another veteran traveller with a love of organic farming and escaping from the industrialized farming that rules so much of the world. We three spent an enjoyable evening of conversation before I took to my tent.

I woke up at dawn to the first drops of rain, and spent the entire next day cycling in various degrees of downpour. I passed through Iskenderun, ancient Alexandretta (Alexander the Great, like his general and successor Seleucus, established an amazing number of new cities named after himself throughout his domains, of which this was one of the first). It was a thoroughly modern industrial port that didn't detain me at all. To the north, somewhere along the blighted industrial landscape, I passed the site of the decisive Battle of Issos in which Alexander inflicted a heavy defeat on the Achaemenid emperor Darius III, opening up the Syrian coast to the Macedonian conqueror. In the downpour, I can't say I saw much all day until I camped in a pause in the rain in an olive grove outside Osmaniye. My tent and sleeping bag were both pretty moist from the night before and it was not a wonderful night of sleep.

The third day out of Antakya I rode all day under grey skies threatening further rain. I visited the deserted Roman city of Hierapolis Castanaba and had the place to myself. The ruins weren't spectacular but they had a melancholy air that suited the weather. I then put my head down and rode steadily across the fat, flat plain of Cukurova, covered with corn and cotton. This was the site of the medieval Armenian state of Cilicia, allied to the Crusaders. I stopped just short of their old capital of Sis, now renamed Kozan, and slept in the final campsite of the trip, an overgrown pomegranate plantation that was too close to a mosque's loudspeaker.

My final day of cycling dawned without rain for once, and I set off early for Sis. I was quite close to the town before the castle loomed out of the mist high above me. It was a stiff 250-metre grunt up a cobblestone road to get there, but it was well worth the sweat expended. Sis castle is one of those perfect fairy-tale castles that you picture in your mind but rarely see. Atop a steep ridge, it is a jumble of curtain walls, circular bastions and hidden underground vaults, sprawled picturesquely among overgrown shrubs and rocky cliffs. I wandered around taking photos, then sat down and sketched the upper citadel. Until 1921 this castle was also home to the second most important archbishopric in the Armenian church (after Echmiadzin), but that, along with all the Armenians who once lived in the area, is now just a historic memory. I had the entire castle to myself, aside from a plethora of lizards and a friendly cafe owner with whom I sat and drank tea.

The ride here took longer than I had expected; my lame map of Turkey didn't show distances to Ayas and guesstimating by eye I came up with a total that was some 30 km too short. I ground south across the plain, passing under the Roman hilltop fortress of Anavarza (I longed to go inside but the tyrant clock was against it). As I neared Ayas, passing a couple of minor Armenian castles, the sky darkened over the Mediterranean and the last 10 kilometres into town was, as mentioned above, a nightmare of monsoon rain and some very painful hail. My visions of drinking wine on the beach and taking photos of the bike and me vanished into the annoyance of trying to find a pension in the hurricane. Once İ had found a place out of the rain, İ did drink a few toasts of wine (one of the foods that travelled west to east along the Silk Road, from its invention somewhere in the Caucasus) and have a celebratory lamb kebab at a restaurant whose owner was so drunk he could barely stand. And that, suddenly, was that.
Ayas is an interesting city, at least what little İ have seen of it so far through the rain. Lots of old Venetian buildings, including a nice offshore castle. Not only did Marco Polo begin his epic 3-year overland trek to China here; some historians believe that shortly after he returned to Europe in 1295, he may have been captured by the Genoans at a naval battle off Ayas. It is certain that during his captivity, wherever he was captured, he recounted his stories to his prison cell-mate Rustichello, a professional story-teller from Pisa, who subsequently published them and elevated Marco Polo from an obscure but prosperous merchant into the most famous European traveller of all time. So Ayas may have launched his fame not once but twice.

I can't believe that it's over, but after 17,725 kilometres of cycling, some 3 million pedal strokes, two bicycles, 11 countries, eight and a half months and too many adventures to recall, I have finally succeeded in following perhaps the most famous and important trade route in history from one end of Asia to the other. I started the trip as a 33-year-old who thought he was immortal, and I finish as a 41-year-old all too aware of the frailties and limitations of my mortal frame. I am very happy, very tired and ready for the next cycling adventure: blitzing through the Balkans.

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

83	10/28	7440.4	87.3	12	1377	6:36	13.2	57.5	Konacik
84	10/29	7533.1	92.7	63	817	5:33	16.8	32.2	outside Osmaniye
85	10/30	7622.6	89.5	27	233	4:57	18.1	53.4	15 km from Kozan
86	10/31	7725.7	103.1	10	606	6:18	16.4	38.7	Ayas

The Silk Road Ridden!

2009-10-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Antakya, Tuesday, October 27

17,350 km from Xian

I made it!!! I rode into Antakya today at midday, outrunning a massive thunderstorm, arriving in what was once Antioch, the third-largest city in the Roman Empire and (more importantly) the western terminus of the cross-Asia caravan routes known as the Silk Road. The Silk Road has been cycled!

Now, it's true that Antioch declined from its apex after its harbour and river silted up, after a disastrous series of wars with the Sassanid Persians, and especially after a number of catastrophic earthquakes around AD 526. After that point, Antioch lost its pre-eminence and trading importance. While a bale of Chinese silk would have likely made its way overland to Antioch in the first century AD before being loaded onto a ship, by the time of Marco Polo (the 13th century) it would more likely have made its way either to Alexandretta (now called Iskenderun) or to Ayas, both ports with strong Genoese and Venetian trading presences. So, just to cover my historical bases, I am not stopping the bike ride here. Tomorrow I will ride out to the old port of Antioch (the city itself is some distance up the Orontes River from the Med), then continue up the coast to the old Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, where Ayas (modern Yumurtalik) is located. Ayas will be the last port of call for this bike odyssey.

The ride to get here, three days from Gaziantep, was almost anticlimactic. Very little climbing, kind of non-descript scenery, not too much to look at. The first day I rode south to Kilis, eulogized in the Lonely Planet as a must-see repository of historic architecture. Maybe I didn't find the interesting bits, but it was as modern and anodyne a city as you could imagine, and I stayed only as long as it took to order a take-out doner kebab. I camped in a reforested grove of pine trees that night and slept well.

Yesterday I pushed on, through a very Mediterranean landscape of olive groves that could easily have been in Spain, Greece, Tunisia or Italy. The historic interest of the day was the Hittite sculpture workshop at Yesemek, where big blocks of black basalt were shaped and roughly carved before being shipped to their final destination to be finished and polished. Lots of half-finished sphinxes, lions and mountain gods, with one enigmatic bear-man thrown in for good measure. The Hittites (1500-1150 BC) are one of the oldest civilizations whose traces I've run across on this trip. I pushed on, following a river valley downhill towards Antakya before camping in an olive grove. My sleep that evening, however, was badly interrupted by a series of spectacular thunderstorms, my tent fly leaking in the worst of the explosive downpour, and a small river flowing right under my tent and soaking me from beneath.

I awoke groggy this morning, but the prospect of making it to the end of the Silk Road got me going, as did the downhill and tailwind. I flew along into town, found a hotel, decorated its outside with my laundry and my bicycle, and set off to see more Roman mosaics at the museum. Unlike at the Gaziantep museum, these mosaics came from a variety of sites in the Antakya area rather than from one spot. Some of the workmanship and composition was spectacular, but the mosaics as a whole were far more heavily damaged than the Antep ones, making for less of a wow effect. It is still, however, one of the world's best collections of Roman and Byzantine mosaics anywhere, and I walked out pretty happy.

I strolled through the old town of Antakya, although few old buildings remain, mostly from Ottoman times. There is almost nothing of the physical fabric of the Roman or Byzantine city, or even from the Crusaders (who besieged the town for six months in 1097-98 before taking it and occupying it for over a century). The bazaar area, while extensive, is almost exclusively made of modern buildings with an unfortunate modern metal and plastic roof over the street, making it more of a modern shopping mall than an old-fashioned bazaar. Almost no hand-made goods are for sale these days; cheap plastic mass-produced junk (much of it, ironically, from China) is the order of the day. In comparison to Isfahan and Shiraz, or nearby Aleppo, it's nothing to write home about. However, the fact that this was where the bales of silk carried across Asia by countless caravans and merchants from Han Dynasty China ended up was consolation for the unremarkable architecture.

Antioch is also a major city in the history of Christianity. St. Luke is said to have come from Antioch, and Saints Paul and Peter both spent a lot of time here. Antioch had a huge Jewish population, and it was here that the new sect first prospered. I rode out to a cave that was supposedly used as the first Christian church, but was put off by the 8 TL admission charge so I looked at it from the outside, then went back to town to scarf down the scrumptious local dessert specialty, kunefe, a mixture of shredded wheat, white cheese, pistachios and honey.

So tomorrow the last 4 days of this long bike trip begin. I will write more from journey's end in Ayas.

Peace and Tailwinds

80	10/25	7201.0	76.5	471	496	4:29	17.2	50.9	past Kilis
81	10/26	7301.8	100.8	141	974	6:04	16.7	56.4	before Kizilhan
82	10/27	7353.1	51.3	63	189	2:32	20.3	36.6	Antakya

Across the Euphrates

2009-10-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

Click here for a Google map of the 2009 leg of the bike trip

Gaziantep, Saturday October 24
17,125 km from Xian

Today I passed a few important milestones. I crossed the Euphrates River and so entered the Mediterranean core of the ancient Roman and Byzantine empires. I left behind Turkish Kurdistan and its unfriendly inhabitants. And I got to within a week of the end of my Silk Road ride. After more than 8 months of riding, over 17,000 kilometres, innumerable hills and mountain passes, and 11 countries, the end is firmly in sight!

I last posted from Midyat. It has taken me 6 days of sometimes eventful riding, past lots of ancient history, to get here, across the northern part of ancient Mesopotamia, across trade routes even more ancient than the transcontinental Silk Road. The first day (Monday, October 19) took me down to the Mesopotamian plain, through a canyon carved into the limestone plateau by a rushing river, beside which dozens of tea gardens and fish restaurants had been erected in the irrigated oasis at the bottom of the valley. I eventually emerged from the canyon onto the baking Mesopotamian plain, so close to the Syrian border that I could easily have tossed rocks into Syria. The road curved around the base of the limestone plateau to Dara, an old Byzantine town founded on irrigation. Half the modern village is constructed at least partly of re-used limestone blocks from the ancient temples, aqueducts and bridges. The ruins were nothing spectacular, but did have two unusual features: a vast underground water cistern, and a series of Byzantine burial chambers carved into an old limestone quarry.

I sweated my way further around and back uphill onto the plateau, finding a campsite atop a hill just outside Mardin. I was on land being reforested, and the forestry department came to check out my intentions before deciding I was mostly harmless. I had a wonderful quiet, dark, warm night, perfect for stargazing and guitar playing. The next morning, I made my way around the hill to the Syriac Orthodox church and monastery Deir ul Zafaran, formerly the world headquarters of the religion. It was an attractive building, but had been pretty heavily restored, obscuring much of the fine ancient stonework. I also had to take a guided tour with a large group of elderly, talkative Turks from Istanbul which detracted from the historic atmosphere.

I spent a few hours wandering around Mardin. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, full of old stone-built houses, churches and mosques, but it was very difficult to take any decent photographs. It was also full to overflowing with busloads of Turkish tourists, and after visiting a highly disappointing museum, I beat a hasty retreat back downhill and out onto the plain. I had entered a vast area being irrigated under the enormous GAP (Southeast Anatolia Project) plan, and the stony, arid plain suddenly turned into Iowa, or perhaps Mississippi, covered in huge fields of corn and cotton. This made it difficult to find a decent campsite, and I ended up behind the back wall of a gas station, hidden from casual view but not from constant traffic noise.

The third day out of Midyat was a long, hot grind, trundling along the busy truck route across the plain (called by the Turks the Ipek Yolu, or Silk Road). All those trucks I had seen queued up at the Iraqi border follow this route from western Turkey, as do a lot of the trucks headed to Iran and Central Asia. The only good part to this tidal wave of trucks is the dense distribution of truck stops, all providing water coolers and cookies for thirsty, hungry cyclists. The road was torn up for a huge resurfacing and widening project, and I was glad to get off onto a tiny road to the south after lunch. I didn't see this road on my woeful map, so I had to ask a lot of directions to find my way across an unirrigated range of limestone hills to my destination, Sogmatar. The villages I passed were tiny (most fewer than 100 inhabitants) and seemed to come from a bygone century. There was essentially no motorized transport, and little sign of life. Eventually I got to Sogmatar and had my faith in humanity (especially its youthful part) restored by a young boy of 12, Zahid. When I showed up in his hamlet, he very politely asked if I wanted to see the ancient carvings. He showed me around, gravely serious, conversing in Turkish but always quick to use sign language or simpler words if he saw I didn't understand. I checked out the ancient temple to the moon goddess Sin, the underground chamber full of Assyrian relief carvings and the hilltop statues of the moon goddess and sun god. The village was (of course) full of children but they ignored my presence, continuing with their schooling or their games. I was mystified, until I found out that the village was not Kurdish, but Arab. I camped just outside town on another hilltop, quiet and isolated beneath thousands of stars.

The next day was long, hot and painful. I continued along my tiny road to Suayb, another small village built on the site of a former sizeable Byzantine town. The village is full of ruined buildings, and lots of subterranean burial chambers that are now, a bit morbidly, used as houses by the modern villagers. I continued through the stony desert hills to Han al Barur, an old caravansarai. Since it might be the last of many caravansarais that have marked my route, I was keen to have a look around, but was foiled by a Turkish TV crew that had arrogated the site to themselves and wouldn't let me in. I sneaked around the back to have a peek anyway, and returned to find them moving my bike to get it out of their next shot. I smiled as I told them what I thought of them barring my entry (luckily, none of them spoke English) and rode off, past old limestone quarries and more burial chambers, and out onto the Mesopotamian plain and its irrigation again. Suddenly there were people everywhere, all picking the cotton crop, as I rode into the town of Harran.

This town is claimed to be the oldest continuously-inhabited town on earth (I don't buy this; Jericho, Damascus and Aleppo make the same claim and seem more credible). It's also famous as a place where Abraham, patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, spent a few years. Its distinctive beehive-shaped houses are its current claim to fame, as villagers made use of the vast amounts of ancient mud brick lying around the town to build high domed roofs against the heat. It also has the oldest mosque in modern Turkey, a seventh-century Abbasid creation that now lies in ruins except for its distinctive tall, square minaret, completely unlike just about every other minaret in the country. The centre of town is a huge archaeological zone, and the main mound is under active excavation, exposing levels of occupation dating back to the Neolithic Age. Standing atop the mound and looking south, I could see a number of other mounds, many unexcavated, each the location of a prehistoric settlement on the plain that had crumbled and dissolved into a tell-tale hill. Somewhere out there, in 53 BC, a Roman army led by the rich but unsoldierly triumvir Crassus was annihilated by a Parthian army waving silk flags and employing the Parthian volley, a flurry of arrows fired on horseback while apparently retreating. Luce Boulnois starts the excellent book The Silk Road with an account of this battle, said to be the first time Romans had seen the distinctive new fabric making its way west from China. On the other side of town a castle, most recently rebuilt by the Crusaders during the time of Baldwin, count of Edessa, loomed picturesquely.

Surfeited with history, I rolled out of town towards Sanliurfa, ancient Edessa. A few kilometres outside Harran, I was attacked by a dog. Unlike most dogs I've encountered here, this one did not warn me of his approach by barking. The first I knew of his existence was when his open jaws bounced off my rear pannier as he snapped at my calf. I immediately swung at him with my Kurd-beater stick, but missed. This violent swing unbalanced the bike and sent me into the soft shoulder of the road, where I promptly and painfully crashed, twisting my sore back in the process. The dog trotted back to his yard, and I got up off the ground and rode in pursuit, pelting it with rocks. The owners of the dog, a Kurdish family (naturally!) saw nothing wrong with their dog attacking passers-by and were quite put out that I pursued it around their yard, hurling curses and rocks at it. Eventually, to appease me, the mother dropped a rock on the dog's skull to its great surprise. I rode off cursing all things Kurdish: dogs, dog owners, children and parents.

I was in some pain and also quite dehydrated when I got to Urfa, so I didn't really do justice to this ancient city. I checked into a hotel, ate, did internet, and the next morning visited the small museum and the pilgrimage site to Abraham. Islamic tradition holds that Abraham was born here, rather than in Ur as Jews and Christians believe. They also believe that Job spent his seven years of hardship in Urfa (at least they believe that it was Satan, and not a cruel and capricious God, who inflicted his sufferings on him). I fixed a flat tire (only my sixth in 7000 km) and rode off, back up onto the limestone plateau, in the midday heat. I passed through a howling wilderness, and then suddenly found myself on a huge downhill to the mighty Euphrates River, where I gave my back a break by sleeping in a surprisingly good, cheap motel in the riverside town of Birecik.

This morning I woke up refreshed and went off to the outskirts of town, where the extremely rare and endangered eastern bald ibis is being bred back from the brink of extinction. The wild breeding pairs have migrated away for the winter, but a number of juveniles are being raised in captivity, and I spent some time watching them and trying to take pictures through the wire fence (sorry about the quality of the photo!). Then it was a surprisingly easy 60 km into Gaziantep, another big modern city with a sizeable historic core. The more important features of the town, however, are baklava and the truly amazing Roman mosaic collection at the museum, rescued from the important Roman town of Zeugma when the Euphrates was dammed in the 1990s. The mosaics are very skilfully executed and are a great primer on Greek mythology, and their sheer number is astounding; I have only seen one other collection of comparable size, in the Tunis museum.

I rode into town through extensive pistachio plantations, and these go into the town's famous baklava pastry. I was skeptical that Antep baklava would be any different from the stuff I've been munching all the way through Turkey, but it really is substantially superior. I sampled the output of several different pastry shops, and was in tastebud heaven by the end.

So, now that I'm in the old Roman Empire, the end of my journey can't be far off. I should be in Antakya, ancient Antioch, where the early Silk Road trade between Han Dynasty China and the Roman Empire would have had its western terminus. Then I will turn north to its medieval endpoint, the old Cilician Armenian port of Ayas (now known as Yumurtalik) near Adana. A week of cycling and my seven-year obsession with the Silk Road will have its end!

Peace and Baklava

58	9/29	5275.4	102.6	1461	1076	7:01	14.6	35.7	Anipemza
59	9/30	5372.2	96.8	2205	1884	7:00	13.9	56.4	Bavra, Georgia
60	10/1	5450.3	78.1	1220	531	6:24	12.2	34.4	Vardzia
61	10/2	5517.3	67.0	955	744	4:12	15.9	47.1	Akhaltsikhe
62	10/3	5592.6	75.3	2090	2603	7:04	10.6	55.8	Damal, Turkey
63	10/4	5695.7	103.1	1768	1307	6:40	15.5	51.3	Kars
64	10/5	5763.0	67.3	1601	753	4:48	14.0	47.1	Kozluca (near Ani)
65	10/6	5861.7	98.7	923	991	6:20	15.6	53.9	near Igdir
66	10/7	5947.3	85.6	1706	1486	6:05	14.1	48.6	Dogubeyazit
67	10/8	6060.0	112.7	1722	1486	7:14	15.6	49.9	NE corner of Lake Van
68	10/9	6136.1	76.1	1774	770	4:33	16.7	53.4	Van
69	10/11	6237.3	101.2	1787	1072	6:20	16.0	44.7	near Tonsonlu
70	10/12	6334.4	97.1	1065	712	5:58	16.3	50.7	near Narlidere
71	10/13	6435.8	101.4	707	969	6:13	16.3	66.0	Besiri
72	10/14	6487.5	51.7	438	604	3:19	15.6	55.2	Hasankeyf
73	10/15	6567.1	79.6	891	1247	5:50	13.6	51.7	Midyat
74	10/19	6672.9	105.8	794	858	6:13	17.0	51.3	outside Mardin
75	10/20	6749.5	76.6	446	701	5:15	14.7	58.9	35 km west of Kiziltepe
76	10/21	6864.4	114.9	487	855	7:09	16.1	50.3	outside Sogmatar
77	10/22	6969.9	105.5	467	483	6:41	15.9	45.6	Sanliurfa
78	10/23	7057.0	87.1	325	1018	5:02	17.4	62.8	Birecik
79	10/24	7124.5	67.5	821	839	4:10	16.3	43.3	Gaziantep

Into the Mesopotamian Lowlands

2009-10-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Midyat, Turkey, Sunday October 18

Greetings from a mid-size industrial city in SE Turkey where I have just come back from a three-day break from pedalling. More on that later, but first let me bring you up to date on the five days of riding it took to get here from Van.

I left Van early on a sunny day, although there was a definite haziness to the sky. I rode along the lakeshore all the way to the ferry dock for Akdamar Island. I waited around for the required number of tourists (all Turks, except for me) to gather and then we put-putted over to the small rocky island, looking like one of the Cyclades transported magically from the Aegean to eastern Anatolia. The entire region of Van was a major centre of Armenian culture for many centuries until 1915, and the island of Akdamar boasts the most famous single Armenian monument in Turkey, a spectacular church perched atop a ridge, visible from the mainland for many kilometres around. Restored two years ago, the church boasts even more stone carving than I had seen on churches in Armenia itself, with several bands of bas-relief showing a variety of saints and biblical stories. They looked particularly striking in the strong sunlight, and with fresh snow on the high peaks of the Taurus Mountains to the south. I sat and sketched and listened to choral music on the iPod and spent a wonderful hour and a half absorbing the historical and artistic richness of the island.

Leaving the island, I could have taken a long detour out onto a mountainous peninsula to see a second Armenian church at Altintas, but with the afternoon drawing on, I chose instead to have a pleasant lakeside lunch and then cut across the isthmus of the peninsula on the main road. Little did I suspect that there was a 550-metre climb ahead, over a spur of the Taurus Mountains. As I descended from the pass, the stream I was following suddenly turned south and I realized that it was flowing towards the Tigris river and ancient Mesopotamia; the watershed between Lake Van and the Tigris basin is only a few kilometres inland from Lake Van. I camped at dusk in a dusty field, not far from an encampment of horse-breeding nomads.

The next day I rode, largely inland and out of sight of the lake, to the city of Tatvan, the western terminus of the lake ferries from Van. I climbed up onto the volcanic dam that created Lake Van, had a relaxed lunch and then started a steep drop down the Bitlis River canyon. I passed through Bitlis, a historic old city founded by one of Alexander the Great's officers and dominated by an ancient castle. I admired a few pieces of fine Seljuk architecture, and then escaped the crowded chaos of the city centre. I had a wonderful moment as I left town. I had chatted briefly with a mailman before I left the kebab shop where I had bought a takeaway doner kebab for dinner. As I pushed my way through the thronged street, a young man came up to me, grabbed my handlebars and demanded money for the privilege of being allowed to go on my way. I had picked up a handy stick beside the road on the way out of Van, and so I pulled it out to convince the lout of the wisdom of letting me proceed unhindered. The youth turned away and started walking quickly back up the street I had descended. Unknown to him, his path led him right past the mail delivery truck in which my mailman friend was sitting, stuck in traffic. As my would-be extortionist came level with the truck, the mailman hopped out of the cab, grabbed the guy in a headlock and delivered a couple of stinging slaps to the head. A few passersby, who had seen the entire episode, cheered as the young man ran away, his ears, and head, presumably ringing. I flashed my rescuer a grateful smile and a thumbs up.

Leaving Bitlis, the road continued its steep descent of the canyon, but the pleasure of the downhill was cancelled by the enormous road construction project that blighted the valley for the next 50 kilometres. It also made it hard to find a campsite. Eventually I spotted something on the other side of the river, and ended up pitching my tent next to a centuries-old caravansaray that is now used as a horse stable by the family whose house sits atop the roof. It was much warmer at this low altitude, and I sat outside the tent gazing at the stars, refreshing my knowledge of the constellations, before retreating to the tent for some guitar. It had been a good day.

On October 13th, I sped downhill along the river, turned away from the main road to Diyarbakir, and made my way to the small junction city of Kurtalan, from where I hoped to make my way by back roads to the historic town of Hasankeyf. I changed my mind after being advised that the bridge shown on Google Maps didn't really exist and that the Turkish military police, the jandarma, probably wouldn't let me go along this route anyway. The jandarma and the army were particularly thick on the ground in this area, and I have the impression that the area south-east of Bitlis was (and maybe still is) a hotbed of PKK militancy. Certainly the Bitlis River canyon would be a perfect spot to ambush Turkish military convoys. At any rate, I turned east towards the town of Batman (really, that's the name!) and camped about 20 km short of the city, in a landscape utterly transformed since leaving Lake Van. At an elevation of only 700 metres above sea level, I had left the volcanic highlands of eastern Turkey and Armenia definitively behind me and entered Mesopotamia, the once-fertile but now parched lands drained by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The sky was hazy with desert dust, and the temperature rose to levels I hadn't felt since Iran. The terrain was now a brown, rolling plateau, bereft of high mountains and less interesting to look at, although easier for cycling. İ was excited, though, as İ really was entering one of the great cradles of ancient civilization, a place even older than the Silk Road itself.

My last two days into Midyat were easier cycling than usual, and richer in historical and cultural interest than I had become used to. The first day was a short 50-kilometre jaunt into Hasankeyf, a gorgeous old village on the banks of the mighty Tigris River. The ride there was pretty, particularly the last 10 kilometres as I dropped into the Tigris valley, lined on the far bank by steep cliffs pitted with man-made caves; the entire area is rich in troglodyte dwellings.

Hasankeyf itself was spectacular, a somewhat modern village near the waterline, below a huge ruined upper city which constitutes one of southeast Turkey's premier attractions. The citadel and upper city are completely uninhabited now, but must have housed a far larger population centuries ago than currently reside in the new town. There are extensive graveyards and mosques (a couple of which must have been Byzantine churches a millenium ago), and many hundreds of stone-built houses. Most of the houses have excavated underground sections, visible now that the soft limestone has weathered away to expose them. I sat atop the highest part of the citadel, watching the afternoon shadows lengthen across this deserted Escher-esque city, photographing and sketching and feeling much happier about being in eastern Turkey. The combination of huge abandoned cityscape and troglodytic houses was like a happy cross between Monemvasia or Mystras (both of which I was lucky enough to visit in Greece last summer) and Turkey's Cappadocia. If you ever find yourself in Turkey, you should make room in your itinerary for Hasankeyf before a planned irrigation dam completely submerges the new town and much of the old town, a fate already inflicted on many historic sites in the Euphrates valley further west. That evening I chatted with a Kurdish film-maker now based in the Netherlands about the situation of Kurds in Turkey and in his native Syria. He felt that the Kurds in Syria were far worse off than their ethnic brethren in Turkey, Iraq or Iran.

The next morning I was away from my cheap motel by 7:30, an almost unheard-of early departure, and rode back out of the Tigris valley and up onto a picturesque limestone plateau, the Tur Abdin, a historic hotbed of Syriac Orthodox Christianity. I got most of the way to Midyat, and then turned east to explore a few of the historic villages and churches that dot the plateau. I was glad that I did, as I loved the atmosphere of the area. It felt very timeless and Levantine, with old vineyards and olive groves carved painstakingly out of the rocky landscape, the removed chunks of limestone piled into ancient stone walls between fields. There was essentially no motorized transport, with donkeys and horses filling the gap picturesquely. The grape harvest was in full swing, and I was given bunches of grapes to munch on.

Atop the limestone ridges were ancient villages, full of fine stonework, some of which must have been Ottoman and others older, definitely Byzantine and maybe even Roman. I visited three Syrian Orthodox churches: Mor Yakob, Mor Kyriakos and Mor Izozoal. The first was founded in 419, and parts of the stonework in the early basilica-style church seem to date back to that time. I loved the atmosphere of tranquility in the surrounding monastery, and the Aramaic (the language used by Jesus, as well as by the Achaemenid Persian empire as its official language and by Parthian Silk Road traders as a lingua franca during the Roman period) inscriptions. The Aramaic script is interesting, a sort of pointy Arabic strangely similar to Manchu and ancient Mongol. The surrounding village of Baristepe is partly Christian and partly Muslim, with a priest still in residence at the church. Mor Kyriakos, in contrast, is locked up and guarded with a high wall topped with barbed wire. Almost no Christian families still live in the surrounding village of Baglarbasi, most having fled during the Kurdish-Turkish conflict in the 1990s. Mor Izozoal was locked too, but a local Christian family act as caretakers and opened the doors for me. The church has been extensively, and expensively, restored recently, and not as much original architecture is left as at Mor Yakob. I pedalled into Midyat in late afternoon happy with my church-architecture detour, and noted a number of church steeples poking out of the crowded old part of town. The Lonely Planet says that another monastery, Mor Hananyo, south of nearby Mardin, which İ will be visiting in a couple of days, was for many centuries the headquarters of the Syriac Orthodox church, and it seems that the church still puts a fair amount of resources into preserving these historic outposts.

I rather liked Midyat at first; nobody threw stones at me, and for the first time in Turkey, I had the feeling of being in a modernizing country connected to the rest of the world. Lots of locals chatted with me in a variety of European languages (German, French, Dutch) picked up while working abroad. The whole city had a more relaxed, civilized air than I had encountered further east, with less of an edge of tension, volatility and wildness.

I left my bicycle and most of my luggage in the hotel on October 16th and headed off on a little excursion to the south and east of town. Being an incurable country-bagger, I saw the opportunity to add an interesting entry stamp to my passport: Iraq. Now, before you, gentle readers, start hyperventilating or writing me off as a deranged lunatic, I should add that I only visited the relatively stable, calm and safe Kurdish autonomous area in the north. Backpackers have been making their way here for several years now, and Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet, made a much-publicized visit a few years ago.

It was remarkably easy and straightforward to get from Midyat to the town of Dohuk: a couple of minibuses to the town of Cizre in Turkey, then a shared taxi to the border post, where I got stamped out of Turkey and into Iraq within an hour, unlike the trucks (laden with bags of concrete and other construction supplies) stuck in a ten-kilometre-long queue on both sides of the border. I spent a tedious while both at the border and in the nearby town of Zakho waiting for other passengers to share the cost of a taxi to Dohuk, but I was still in Dohuk before two o'clock, six hours after leaving Midyat.

So what is this corner of Iraq, only 65 km northwest of violent, volatile Mosul, like? The answer is....kind of dull, strangely enough. The main street and the bazaar are crowded with (predominantly male) shoppers, and the town itself is an overgrown village that has grown explosively since the end of the first Iraq war in 1991, and so is lacking in historic buildings although it is in the Tigris valley. I spent my time eating (much tastier, cheaper food than in Turkey), wandering the streets watching the older men, clad in traditional Kurdish overalls, cummerbund and kefiyeh headscarf, about their shopping, and relaxing at my hotel, catching up on rest and sleep after a long stretch of cycling since Yerevan with few rest days.

Quite a few people speak English or German from time spent abroad, or from working with American forces, and I have had some interesting discussions. I spent an hour drinking tea on a street famous for the trade in birds (ptarmigans, according to an older gentleman with impeccable English, although I suspect they may be another species) and guns (I saw a lot of pistols changing hands for a hundred dollars or so a pop). I watched lots of tennis on TV, and read lots of Shakespeare. Iraq may seem a strange place to come to unwind, but it did the trick for me. I would love to go back to Iraq someday when it's possible to visit the historic monuments further south, but that day looks pretty far in the future at the moment. İronically, on my way back through Turkey to Midyat, İ passed the site of a PKK bombing earlier in the day. Makes me wonder which side of the border is actually more secure!

My initial liking for Midyat has been dimmed; when İ got back from İraq, İ took a stroll through the old part of town, full of pretty stonework, but had to abandon it as İ was followed by a mob of feral children baying for money and throwing stones (for once, the girls were worse behaved than the boys). One thing that puzzles me about Turkey is that Turks are supposedly crazy about family and children, but then so many parents let their children run wild in Dickensian street mobs without any supervision or discipline. Out here in the east of Turkey, there are an awful lot of kids not going to school from a very young age, hanging around on the street begging for money and cigarettes. It strikes me that by allowing parents not to send 7-year-olds to school, the Turkish government is storing up problems for the future. A large group of uneducated, undisciplined young people with no prospects of employment in a modern economy would be a perfect recruiting ground for the next generation of PKK fighters.

So now the final leg of the bicycle journey begins; after spending a lot of time getting to the southern border of Turkey, I will now head more or less directly west along the border, diverting to see historic sites along the way, to Gaziantep, before diverting south to Antakya (ancient Antioch, the third-largest city in the Roman Empire and an endpoint of the early Silk Road) and north to Cilician Armenia and Marco Polo's starting point at Ayas. Within two weeks or so, my eight-month-long traverse of the Silk Road should be over!

Peace and (Iraqi) tailwinds.

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

69	10/11	6237.3	101.2	1787	1072	6:20	16.0	44.7	near Tonsonlu
70	10/12	6334.4	97.1	1065	712	5:58	16.3	50.7	near Narlidere
71	10/13	6435.8	101.4	707	969	6:13	16.3	66.0	Besiri
72	10/14	6487.5	51.7	438	604	3:19	15.6	55.2	Hasankeyf
73	10/15	6567.1	79.6	891	1247	5:50	13.6	51.7	Midyat

Gravy Train in Dogbiscuit

2009-10-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

Van, Saturday October 10 (16,000 km from Xian)

I am at the end of a delightfully relaxed day off from cycling, the first after 11 days of hard work to get here from Yerevan, and now it's time to put some of the events of that long stretch onto the page. I'm fairly sleepy, so this may be shorter than usual.

I left Yerevan for the last time a week ago Tuesday (September 29th). It had rained heavily the night before in the city, and all that precipitation fell as snow on all the surrounding mountains. It felt distinctly wintry as I rolled out of town, with the twin peaks of Ararat huge and in my face, and an entire line of other lower peaks looking very, very alarmingly white. If this is Armenia in September, I hate to imagine January! I passed early morning protestors outside the parliament building, making their unhappiness known about the rapprochement with Turke y. After an easy ride along the flat agricultural land as far as Metsamor, I turned uphill through grim lava fields dotted with grim post-Soviet apocalyptic towns and villages. I followed the Turkish border all day, and ended up camped less than a kilometre from the nearest Russian-manned Armenian border guard tower. It was irksome to think that a week later I would be only a few kilometres away on the Turkish side, but that I had a 500-kilometre detour because of the closed border.

It was a cold night in the tent, with lots of frost on the fly in the morning. I had an easier day of riding, with sunny weather and flatter country in the morning. A big flock of migrating storks, maybe 150 of them, passed overhead, headed for warmer wintering grounds. I zipped along as far as the regional centre of Gyumri. Founded by the Russians in the early 19th century as Alexandropol, it was the largest city in Armenia until the Soviet period. Lots of Russian belle-epoque architecture, although much of it is still in ruins, 21 years after a disastrous earthquake and even more disastrous botched reconstruction effort. In the afternoon, I headed north towards the Georgian border. My map didn't give me much warning of what was coming; I had anticipated a straightforward up-and-down mountain pass, but instead the road climbed to a high plateau and stayed there until the border. The high-altitude grassland reminded me of Mongolia and Tibet, and looked very pretty under the warm sunshine. I kept climbing as I got closer to the border, and I didn't cross the frontier until after sunset. The Georgian border guards were all busy shovelling vast piles of snow onto sun-warmed asphalt to melt it. I made it 500 metres into Georgia before camping beside a pretty lake.

It was perhaps the coldest night of the trip so far, but I managed to keep warm on my Li-Lo air mattress by piling most of my clothes on top of it as insulation against the cold ground. I awoke to strange bird calls in the morning, and stuck my head out to see a small group of cranes beside the lake: magic! I bumped downhill slowly along an appalling dirt track to the dismally poor town of Ninotsminda, through villages of subsistence Armenian farmers. This part of Georgia is ethnically Armenian, and seems to be neglected by the Tbilisi government. I got onto pavement after that and zipped into Akhalkalaki, where I had lunch to avoid a torrential downpour. From that point, I chose the road less travelled and bumped along a very primitive dirt road across more steppe. In the geographical middle of nowhere, I ran across an unexpected sight: an OSCE tractor-trailer carrying an ecology/sustainable energy roadshow explaining biogas, solar panels, solar water-heaters and reforestation to bemused local peasants. I rolled on into a grassland almost devoid of human habitation, until suddenly I found myself on the edge of the void. Below me was a 500-metre-deep canyon, on the opposite wall of which was a honeycomb of caves, the famous monastery of Vardzia. I took an hour to pick my way down a steep, switchbacked goat-track of a jeep road to a small guesthouse where I was very happy to sleep inside in a warm bed.

The next morning, I rode over to the caves and poked around. They reminded me strongly of the Buddhist cave monasteries at Bezeklik which I had seen seven years ago at the very beginning of this Silk Road odyssey. There was little to see in most of the caves, but the setting, clinging to the lower wall of the canyon, was spectacular. Only one church is still in operation, and a family was having a young child blessed that morning; the singing of the priest echoed perfectly around the cave. I rode away happy to have absorbed a bit of culture after three days of hard riding. The rest of the day was easy, a coast downstream through desert canyons and forested hillsides to the regional capital of Akhaltsikhe. I had a peek at the Rabati, the old citadel above town, which sports a mosque, a synagogue and two flavours of church (Armenian and Georgian). I had my beard trimmed in a barbershop (rather too severely, as I looked unshaven rather than bearded afterwards; in fact I looked remarkably like a blond clone of the barber), and talked to an English-speaking local. He said that Akhaltsikhe was once a majority Armenian town, but that over the past 20 years most of the Armenians have left for greener pastures in Russia or Armenia.

The ride the next day, as I left the Caucasus republics behind for good, was unexpectedly tough, as I climbed the most vertical metres of any day this year so far (2600 metres). I rode uphill from Akhaltsikhe, through bucolic scenes of the fall harvest, to the border; again, the Georgians have a rutted dirt track leading to their international frontier. On the Turkish side, I set my clock back, resigned myself to not understanding anything anyone says to me, and resumed the climb. The road soared high above the river valley, passing through reforested zones that were a riot of fall colours. The Turkish government seems to be doing more to reforest its denuded hillsides than either the Georgians or (especially) the Armenians. No sooner had I climbed 500 metres from the border than I had to give most of the altitude back. I screamed downhill, past the town of Posof, then spent the afternoon sweating my way up to a 2500-metre pass. I made my way downhill across a hilly steppe, past thousands of people harvesting hay, and camped in an already-cut field.

The ride into Kars the next day was relatively easy and unremarkable. The forests of the previous day were a distant memory, and the landscape consisted of endless rounded hills and farmers harvesting hay. The town of Kars was an interesting place to spend the night. Held by the Russians for a few decades from 1886 to 1920, the town has a bit of a Russian feel, but the Ottoman castle above the town, and the beautiful Armenian church below it, give it an atmosphere all its own.

The ride the next morning to Ani, the former capital of Armenia, now located just inside the borders of Turkey, on the western side of the river that forms the frontier. The ride was easy, and I got there by noon. This gave me enough time to really enjoy the city and its impressive, atmospheric ruins. I had a picnic lunch beside the oldest building in the city, the Zoroastrian fire temple, and played some guitar in the warm sunshine. The snow that had blanketed the nearby hills the previous week had all melted, and we were back in summer. Finally, I bestirred myself and trotted around the huge site; Ani was once home to nearly 100,000 people, making it one of the largest Silk Road cities during its 11th-century heyday, and now it consists of huge extents of unexcavated ruins, dotted with immense standing ruins of churches. I particularly liked the huge Cathedral, the circular Church of King Gagik (very similar in architecture to Zvartnots), the Church of the Redeemer (half in perfect condition, half completely collapsed following a lightning strike 50 years ago) and the perfectly-situated Church of Tigran Horents. The stonework was, of course, intricate and endlessly fascinating, and there was an air of great antiquity and history to the city that I loved. On my way out, I met a Dutch couple in their overland vehicle with whom I exchanged some stories from the road; they have been exploring Africa over the past two decades, and are now trying to tear themselves away from Africa towards Central Asia.

That evening, I thought I had picked a perfect, hidden campsite, but what I didn't realize was that I was actually very close to a large Kurdish village that was just out of sight around a hill. I was spotted, and a steady stream of visitors came to check me out. The last group were three young men, somewhere between 18 and 25, who were the most annoying, offensive visitors imaginable. They showed up as I was cooking and stayed for an hour and a half, methodically asking me to give them everything they could see, asking me to have sex with them, and then demanding 5 lira ($3.50) so that they would leave. I eventually did offer them a used tea bag, but they didn't find this as hilarious as I did. I had to chase them away physically, and then, long after dark, I decided to move my tent in case they went home, got drunk and came back looking for trouble. It was a tedious process, but at least I got a secure night's sleep.

That was the start of the Kurdish Problem. I had been warned that the Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey are notoriously unfriendly to cyclists, but I had assumed that the problem was with vicious sheepdogs. This is (so far) not the case; Georgian dogs gave me far more problems. The real issue is the humans, or more particularly the males under the age of 25. For four days I have rarely passed a group of non-adults without them coming running after me demanding money (or pens, or candies, but "Hello! Money!" is the universal greeting for cyclists in these parts. The kids try to block the road (trying to run them over generally gets them out of the way), try to hit me as I pass, and then pelt me with rocks. Having rocks thrown at me is not something I like; it enraged me in Pakistan in 1998 and in Tibet in 2001, and it does the same now. What angers me even more, though, is the indulgent attitude of adult Kurds, who stand around watching the kids beg and throw rocks and do nothing, except to protect them from angry Canadian cyclists. I even had a Kurdish grandfather throw a rock at me after I chased his rock-throwing son into the ditch. One man explained to me that the Almighty would smite the kids for their bad deeds; I lacked the Turkish to reply that clearly fear of supernatural retribution wasn't having the slightest deterrent effect, and that a few well-aimed slaps to the head might be more effective.

I've been pondering this for the past four unpleasant days of cycling, and it seems to me that, as in Tibet and northern Pakistan, this sort of behaviour seems to manifest itself in areas where the adult population feels marginalized in their own land by foreign overlords (Punjabis in Pakistan, Han Chinese in Tibet, Turks here), and where outsiders are consequently viewed with suspicion and hostility. As well, the native culture of the land is often damaged or destroyed by the actions of the foreign occupiers, leaving the young people feeling disaffected and alienated. (Think of native North American reservations in Canada in this context.) Either that, or the Kurds are merely innately evil schmucks! I certainly hope that the rock-throwing, which reached a climax in Dogubeyazit (aka "Dogbiscuit"), dies down as I head towards more prosperous, more Turkish parts of Turkey.

The cycling, aside from the hail of stones and the incessant begging, has been pretty good since Ani. I took a day to reach the outskirts of Igdir, coming down the Turkish-Armenian border only a few kilometres from my tracks a few days earlier. At one point, near Tuzluca, the Armenian and Turkish border towers were only 50 metres or so from each other, close enough to have conversations if the soldiers wanted to. This part of eastern Turkey has the feeling of an occupied country, with the military everywhere, in encampments, manning roadblocks and driving around in armoured personnel carriers. It's ostensibly aimed at protecting the border, but I think it's more to keep the Kurds and the PKK in line.

The ride from Igdir to Dogbiscuit was surprisingly easy, around the shoulder of Mt. Ararat (hidden in clouds, sadly). Dogbiscuit lived up to its name, a sprawl of concrete shanties across a plain, full of evil kids. Its only redeeming features are that it's close to the Iranian border (generations of overland travellers have passed through Dogubeyazit and mangled its name), and that it's overlooked by a pretty 17th-century palace (the Ishak Pasha Saray) and some 2700-year-old Urartu-era fortifications. It's ironic that my childhood nickname, Gravy Train, was a brand of dog food. Appropriate that I ended up in Dogubeyazit!

The last two days of riding saw a huge pass (2644 metres above sea level) and then a beautiful long downhill to salty Lake Van and its Armenian and Urartu-era ruins. I spent yesterday exploring the castle and Urartu-era inscriptions at the Rock of Van, and today looking at more Urartu ruins at Cavustepe. I had never heard of the Urartu civilization before, but it was pretty major and the forerunner of the Armenian state.

So now, after a day off from cycling, the road west starts; I hope to be in Antalya and Ayas, the twin endpoints of this odyssey, within three weeks. How quickly the end is coming!!

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

58	9/29	5275.4	102.6	1461	1076	7:01	14.6	35.7	Anipemza
59	9/30	5372.2	96.8	2205	1884	7:00	13.9	56.4	Bavra, Georgia
60	10/1	5450.3	78.1	1220	531	6:24	12.2	34.4	Vardzia
61	10/2	5517.3	67.0	955	744	4:12	15.9	47.1	Akhaltsikhe
62	10/3	5592.6	75.3	2090	2603	7:04	10.6	55.8	Damal, Turkey
63	10/4	5695.7	103.1	1768	1307	6:40	15.5	51.3	Kars
64	10/5	5763.0	67.3	1601	753	4:48	14.0	47.1	Kozluca (near Ani)
65	10/6	5861.7	98.7	923	991	6:20	15.6	53.9	near Igdir
66	10/7	5947.3	85.6	1706	1486	6:05	14.1	48.6	Dogubeyazit
67	10/8	6060.0	112.7	1722	1486	7:14	15.6	49.9	NE corner of Lake Van
68	10/9	6136.1	76.1	1774	770	4:33	16.7	53.4	Van

The Long and Winding Road to Stepanakert

2009-09-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

Stepanakert, Saturday September 26

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Stepanakert, the capital of the strange semi-country of Nagorno-Karabakh. Quick, how many of you know exactly where Nagorno-Karabakh is? Be honest, now! It doesn't appear on a lot of maps, because only one country (Armenia) considers it an independent country. It's a small area to the east of southern Armenia (11,000 square km and 150,000 people).

It used to be an autonomous oblast (district) within Azerbaijan but populated largely by Armenians. The Armenians and Azeris didn't get along well, and as the USSR broke up, all-out war started between the Karabakh Armenians (with the help of their ethnic kin from Armenia proper) and the Azeris (with the help of first the Soviets, and then the Turks). The Armenians eventually won, conquering adjacent chunks of Azerbaijan in the process, and ethnically cleansing tens of thousands of Azeris from Karabakh and from Armenia. (The Azeris returned the favour to the Armenians in Azerbaijan; among those who had to flee were chess champion Gary Kasparov's family.)

So does Nagorno-Karabakh count as a real country? I had to get a visa to come here and I went through customs controls on the way in, and they issue their own postage stamps, so I'm going to count this one. On the other hand, people here hold Armenian passports, drive cars with Armenian license plates, are defended by Armenian soldiers and have Armenian social insurance cards, and use Armenian currency. By my count, this is the 79th country I've visited in my life (other than home base, Canada). This count includes a few places that aren't members of the UN: the Vatican, Taiwan, the Cook Islands, Northern Cyprus and now Nagorno-Karabakh. I had an interesting discussion with Natalya, my host in Baku, about what constitutes a country. She teaches a unit to her high school students about this, and she feels that the UN list is the only really legitimate list (although to me the fact that Taiwan and the Vatican don't make that list, and that Switzerland only joined a few years ago, to me makes the list incomplete). I could also count Palestine, but at least when I went there, I didn't get any separate visa or passport stamp, and the place lacked the basic ingredients of a state.

Anyway, to resume the bike ride story, I had a nice three days in Yerevan. On the Sunday, the second day I was there, I left my heavy luggage behind and zipped uphill carrying only my camera bag to Geghard Monastery and Garni temple. Both are located in the barren highlands above Yerevan: not many trees, which I think comes from long-ago deforestation followed by overgrazing by sheep. Not a very welcoming-looking landscape, but a good place to hide an important monastery (famous as the former home of the True Spear that was used to stab Jesus on the cross; there are other True Spears in Krakow, Vienna and Rome, rather as there are seven different heads of John the Baptist scattered around the world--readers of Umberto Eco's fantastic novel Baudolino will remember Eco's explanation of this profusion of holy skulls). It's a common weekend outing for Yerevanis, and the place was packed with busloads of teenagers dancing and shouting in the parking lot and hundreds of souvenir and food vendors. Even inside the monastery, people were selling sheep, which took away a little from the monastic atmosphere. Inside the atmospheric church, however, a choir was singing and the sound of Armenian hymns was absolutely beautiful.

Garni was much quieter and quite a different atmosphere. It's a reconstructed Hellenistic temple, probably to the god Mithras, from the glory days of the Armenian kingdom when they held their own in battles against the Romans and Parthians. I met an older Canadian couple, John and Maureen, from Toronto and their Armenian-Canadian friend Paul who runs a Lebanese-influenced restaurant in Yerevan. They invited me to dinner that evening, and who am I to pass up free food? It was some of the best food I've had in Armenia, and I spent a pleasant evening chatting. The British politician Baroness Cox was at the next table; I think she was in town for some sort of charitable cause.

On my way back into town from Garni, I stopped in at the excellent Armenian Genocide Museum. It's very well done, very moving and understated. It's hard to understand the continuing Turkish refusal to recognize what happened in 1915, when 90% of the Armenians in traditionally Armenian areas of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or marched out into the Syrian desert, dying of starvation and maltreatment along the way. A common Turkish response is "Yes, lots of Armenians were killed in 1915, but it wasn't a deliberate government policy to remove Armenians from Turkey, and anyway there are still Armenians left in Turkey so it wasn't a genocide." After visiting the museum, I would say that this argument does not hold water. The Turkish government also continues to allow old Armenian monuments in eastern Turkey to decay or be vandalized (or to be used as stables by local farmers), in what the Armenians see as a continuing cultural genocide, trying to erase all traces of Armenian culture from eastern Turkey. William Dalrymple's brilliant travel book From the Holy Mountain explores this issue in some detail.

I had a slothful and grey Monday that ended with a drenching downpour as the two Basque cyclists Urdin and Izaro and the Aussie couple Adam and Cat and I walked to a distant kebab restaurant, where we ate the better part of an entire lamb and much of a pig too. Cyclists need an occasional protein splurge like that!

Tuesday morning I rode up to the Karabakh Permanent Representative to Armenia (I don't know why they don't call it an embassy), got my visa, and rode out of Yerevan at 1 pm. For once, the road was almost completely flat (even sloping slightly downhill) as I raced with a brisk tailwind at 25 km/h through the agricultural heartland of Armenia, the valley of the Arax river. This broad, fertile plain is where most citizens of Armenia live, as it's relatively warm and low-lying. On the other side of the Arax is Turkey, in the form of the massive twin-peaked volcanic bulk of Mt. Ararat. It was wreathed in heavy cloud that day, so I didn't get to take the classic photo of Khor Virap monastery silhouetted against Ararat; in fact, while I was inside Khor Virap, a massive thunderstorm rolled past off the mountain, just missing me. I looked through my binoculars, but didn't spot any sign of Noah's Ark high on the icy slopes.

I liked Khor Virap, famous as the place where St. Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned in a deep pit for years before he was released to convert King Trdat I to Christianity in 301. Khor Virap was actually the capital of the Armenian state for centuries before that, and was sacked by the Romans in the first century AD and then rebuilt with Roman funding. Sadly the pre-Christian ruins and excavations are not open to the public; they would be far more interesting than St. Gregory's pit.

I rode southeast along the river, past villages with increasingly unpronounceable names (see photos for proof!), getting loaded down with gifts of fruit and vegetables from roadside vendors. Eventually I hit the Nakhchivan border (at this spot, 4 countries come very close to touching at a single point: Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Armenia), then turned steeply uphill to start the climb of the first of four major passes (and lots of smaller climbs) leading to Stepanakert. The landscape turned to barren desert, although when I camped halfway up the pass it poured rain on me all night, turning my campsite to a mud wallow.

The second day I crossed the first pass, with nice views of Ararat, chilly at 2000 metres' elevation, and dropped steeply into a more fertile landscape of fruit orchards and vineyards. I climbed up the valley, and camped just below the top of the 2350-metre Vorotan pass, in a pleasant meadow with a little brook (camping beside running water has been a rare luxury for me this summer). It was cold and very rainy that night, and I awoke to 5 degree temperatures and the sight of snow not that far above me on the mountaintops. Winter comes early to the Armenian mountains!

The third day was long, cold and grey. I finished off the Vorotan Pass, getting yet more views of distant Ararat, descending into bleak moorland that had ridiculous amounts of up and down to it as the road dropped into deep ravines and climbed back out. Eventually I dropped to warmer elevations at 1600 metres in the pleasant little town of Sissian. I had a big kebab lunch there with two Israelis whom I had met in Georgia and Yerevan, who were surprised that I had gotten to Sissian in only two full days of riding. Afterwards I found the evocative, strangely beautiful stone circle (like a smaller version of Stonehenge) of Zorats Karar (or Karahundj) just outside town. Like Stonehenge, it's believed to have been used for astronomical purposes, with lots of carefully-carved sighting holes in the tops of most of the standing rocks. Some of the theories I read seemed a bit far-fetched, but the isolated spot, high on bleak moors with snowy mountains behind, was really quite full of historical ghosts. I rode over another high pass, then plummeted into the large town of Goris in a blinding downpour that had me headed to the nearest hotel for a night under a roof in a warm bed.
Yesterday I climbed out of Goris under clear blue skies and spent the morning undulating across a plateau dissected by a frustrating series of deep canyons. After a few hours, I dropped to a mere 800 metres above sea level and entered Nagorno Karabakh. The scenery changed quite dramatically; instead of the treeless, rather unwelcoming landscape of southern Armenia, the mountains were draped in dense forest (turning very yellow with the rapid approach of winter) and the scenery became much more dramatic, with steeper slopes and glimpses of distant misty canyons. I had one more big pass to climb, and then suddenly I was dropping into Stepanakert, past the cliffs and old Azeri fortress walls of Shushi. I stayed in a little homestay where I met another cyclist, from Spain, with whom I went out for dinner and what turned out to be too many beers.
This morning I was planning to leave for the north of Karabakh, where a jeep track leads over another high pass back into Armenia at Lake Sevan. However, circumstances conspired against me. On the last day into Stepanakert, my cheap Chinese right pedal which I have been using since leaving Azerbaijan suddenly began to give up the ghost, getting loose and then starting to grind up its ball bearings. I barely made it into Stepanakert, and went off this morning to get it tightened enough to get me to Turkey. Pedals are tricky beasts to adjust, and although I know how to fix a pedal in theory, in practice it's harder. With the help of a hardware store I thought I had the pedal tight enough to ride, but a few hundred metres down the road it disintegrated completely, strewing the road with ball bearings and various nuts and washers. I gave up on fixing the pedal and set off to find a replacement. There is exactly one shop in Stepanakert that sells pedals, but they're $4 plastic ones that look as though they might last 15 minutes. (Note: they in fact lasted 10 km before bending into an unuseable shape!)

This has put a severe crimp in my plans, as I will now have to retreat to Yerevan by bus, carrying my bike on the roof, where I will need to find a more substantial pedal, or else get my original good Shimano pedal fixed properly. It's frustrating that I am being held up by something as elementary as a pedal, and that I have to take to public transport. On the other hand, I did manage to ride all the way here, and my legs will benefit from the rest after averaging 1800 vertical metres for four straight days. Once I have the pedal issue resolved, I will ride north from Yerevan to Georgia and the Turkish border crossing at Posof, ready for the final long haul of this Silk Road bicycle adventure.

48	9/14	4431.8	80/6	574	698	4:47	17.0	53.6	Georgia-Armenia border
49	9/15	4476.7	44.9	1123	894	3:22	13.3	42.7	Haghpat
50	9/16	4543.9	67.2	1557	1240	4:53	13.8	49.6	outside Vanadzor
51	9/17	4656.2	112.3	1062	1275	6:56	16.3	58.4	Echmiadzin
52	9/18	4721.9	65.7	1121	559	3:55	16.6	49.2	Yerevan
53	9/20	4811.0	89.1	1121	1710	4:48	18.6	53.4	Yerevan (daytrip)
54	9/22	4899.7	88.7	1422	675	4:35	19.3	32.0	Near Tigranashen
55	9/23	4984.5	84.8	2005	1895	6:14	13.6	57.1	near Saravan
56	9/24	5076.1	91.6	1292	1851	7:00	13.1	49.8	Goris
57	9/25	5172.8	96.7	751	2017	6:42	14.4	51.5	Stepanakert

The Road to Yerevan

2009-09-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

Yerevan, Saturday September 19:

It's a Saturday evening in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and the young and beautiful are strutting their stuff on the streets. The city is full of stunningly attractive women, although the men are much less striking. Physically, Armenians look extremely similar to Iranians, and quite unlike Georgians. I was out and about last night, getting a taste of Yerevan nightlife, so tonight will be a quieter affair entirely. It's a good chance to catch up on the blog after a few weeks with relatively little internet connection.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to have a day of hiking above Kazbegi, in the far north of Georgia near the Russian border. That day was one of the most spectacular days of the entire Silk Road ride so far. I set out late, having slept in and written up the blog, so I set a ridiculously quick pace up the mountain. I went past the spectacular church high above the town, then walked up along a grassy ridge which gave the impression that I was suspended in space between the massive bulk of Mt. Kazbeg above and the deep canyon below. I had lunch at the edge of one of the big glaciers which pour off the peak, then scampered down for dinner at my homestay. The views, the birdlife (lots of eagles and hawks and a couple of massive vultures), the carpets of colourful wildflowers underfoot, the sunshine, the rhododendrons and the silence made for a fantastic feast for the senses, and left me excited to come back another time to the Caucasus for a long hiking and climbing trip.

The ride out of Kazbegi, down the Georgian Military Highway, was easier than the ride up, but headwinds foiled my idea of riding all the way to Tbilisi. I camped in a meadow between Zhinvali and Mtshkheta (yes, that's really how it's spelled), and spent the next day poking around the old capital of Mtshkheta. It has some of the most important churches in the country, and is the spot where the king of Georgia officially adopted Christianity in the 4th century (a few decades before the Romans, but a couple of decades after the Armenians). It also has a dozen or so archaeological sites scattered around, and I spent a few minutes pottering around a huge prehistoric graveyard on the outskirts before looking through the museum, full of wonderful metal artifacts. Georgia is one of the earliest cradles of Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, and there is also a site in the south of the country which seems to be the earliest non-African human remains ever discovered.

The ride into Tbilisi from Mtshkheta was easy, a coast downhill along the river that cuts Tbilisi in two. I rode into town past endless Soviet-era apartment blocks and hundreds of fishermen and drinkers (the two groups are not mutually exclusive) lining the banks of the river. I found a place to stay, a crowded but cheerful hostel called Irina's full of Israelis and Poles and their inevitable cigarettes. A few minutes after I arrived, an Australian couple, Adam and Cat, riding their bikes from England to Australia showed up and we spent much of the next three days together in Tbilisi, sharing tall tales from the road.

I can't really say that I did much concrete exploring of Tbilisi during my three days there. I did eat lots of food, send the world's most expensive postcards ($3 in postage per card!), buy a new air mattress to replace my defunct ThermaRest (it's a swimming-pool Li-Lo! Not nearly as good as the ThermaRest, and tough to roll over on, and it gets pretty cold from the ground underneath, but it's better than nothing), get my rear axle tightened and rear wheel trued, and celebrated my 41st birthday with a meal at one of the many Irish pubs that have sprung up in Tbilisi. Tbilisi struck me as somehow more liveable than Baku, and with good skiing only two hours away, it could even be quite bearable in the winter. My one regret is that I didn't go to soak in the hot springs that made Tbilisi famous in the nineteenth century.

Since we were going in the same direction, Adam and Cat and I all rode out of Tbilisi together on September 14th under blazing sunshine. We made our way down to the Armenian border through some of the poorest parts of the country that I'd seen yet. The fact that all the people living there are ethnic Azeris may explain some of the government neglect of the region. We crossed the border in the gathering darkness and camped a kilometre inside country number 78 for me.

The next two days were spent slowly making our way uphill up the Debed Canyon, a steep-sided gorge that shelters a number of ancient Armenian churches and monasteries with delightful names like Akhtala, Haghpat and Sanahin. The stone carving in these churches is of the highest quality, and as all the churches were deserted, the atmosphere was wonderful. Armenian churches are generally taller and more spacious than their Georgian counterparts, and are covered with a riot of carved crosses. The church interiors reminded me a lot of Turkish mosques and early Byzantine churches, with a central tower in place of the central dome. The churches were surrounded by dozens of khachkars, stones on which elaborately decorative crosses are carved surrounded by intricate geometric symbols, trees of life and other elements that have a distinctly Celtic feel to them. I spent a lot of time wandering around, taking photos and absorbing the beauty of these ancient sanctuaries.

It was a good thing that the monasteries were gorgeous and the scenery was nice, because modern Armenia is not really a very nice place. Akhtala sports a semi-abandoned copper mine, while Alaverdi has a fully functioning mine and smelter that blights the town and the surrounding mountains. Smog wreaths the valley all the time, while no vegetation grows above the smelter, rather like Sudbury. The town is full of derelict buildings and looks like a typical post-Soviet dystopia. The prize for the ugliest town in northern Armenia, however, goes to Vanadzor, where kilometre after kilometre of decaying petro-chemical plants line the railway tracks and depress passing cyclists. Even the non-industrial towns in the highlands have a mean, decaying, desperate air to them, full of men sitting around idly and Soviet-era buildings in the final stages of decay. Talking to locals, they all agreed that life was far better in the days of the USSR and that many, perhaps most, young people were fleeing these dying towns either to Yerevan or to work abroad in Russia, Germany, Greece and wherever else they can get to. The contrast with much of Georgia is pretty stark: the Georgians have a lot of fertile, well-watered land at low altitude, while much of Armenia is mostly stony high-altitude land with a short growing season.

I parted ways with Cat and Adam just before Vanadzor, eager to push on further towards Yerevan. After camping in a field of construction rubble, I flew up and over a 2300-metre pass near Spitak and rolled through a series of poor highland villages where the aroma of dung fires (there are almost no trees left to burn) reminded me of Tibet. These were some of the poorest areas I'd seen since the Pamirs in Tajikistan, and I hurried through, hoping to drop down into warmer climes (it was only 8 degrees at midday). After a series of ups and downs over various ancient lava flows from the surrounding volcanos, I finally came out on the endless downhill towards the Ararat plain and Yerevan. I spent the afternoon poking around a series of tiny old churches (more great names, like Saghmosavank, Hovhannavank and Karmravor, and more fine carving). Ashtarak, a small town in the midst of these churches, was the first pleasant town I'd found in Armenia; perhaps my view was influenced by the fact that after a few days of spitting rain, the sun had come out. As in much of Armenia, most of the houses and apartment buildings are made from blocks of volcanic tufa stone which gives a very distinctive feel to the architecture. In sunshine, the pinks and oranges in the stone bring the buildings to life, but on a rainy day the buildings seem to radiate greyness. I think that if I lived in a typical Armenian town, I would be like most of my neighbours and develop a vodka addiction.

I made it as far as Echmiadzin, the Vatican of the Armenian Apostolic Church, on Thursday evening and took a hotel room since a wall of black cloud was rolling down from the volcanoes, promising a night of heavy rain. The next morning (yesterday), I slept in, visited the churches of Echmiadzin and their attached treasury (pieces of the True Cross, Noah's Ark, the spear that pierced Jesus' side and various anatomical bits of John the Baptist, St. Andrew and St. Stephen, among other stuff. Echmiadzin cathedral, the Mayr Tachar, is surprisingly small for such an important religious centre, distinctly smaller than several of the more obscure churches I'd seen over the previous few days. Crowds of young seminarians in black overcoats added to the atmosphere, and for the first time I saw more than a handful of Western tourists. One Russian tourist showed a fair bit of cheek by handing me a Russian version of the JW tract The Watchtower inside Echmiadzin cathedral.

I then turned away from Yerevan to visit a wonderful archaeological museum at Metsamor that was almost impossible to find, even with local help. The friendly curators showed me around, displaying their fairly amazing collection of Bronze Age jewellery and metal-work. Armenia, perhaps even more so than Georgia, was a major centre of Bronze Age civilization, just to the north of Mesopotamia, and traded extensively with the Hittites and the Babylonians. Now, thanks to the vagaries of international politics, the Armenians can't even cross the nearby Turkish border, and are almost cut off from world trade. Ironically, the Georgian-Armenian border is clogged with Turkish trucks taking the indirect route to Armenia, while Armenian travel agents flog beach holidays in Antalya.

I rode into Yerevan under sunny skies, the enormous bulk of Mt. Ararat looming immense to the south. I managed to get lost and not get to the Nagorno-Karabakh embassy before it shut for the weekend, so I now have to go on Monday to get my visa for that strange semi-state. Today I spent time at the National Museum wishing that there were more English or Russian explanations (it's almost all in Armenian only), and tomorrow I plan to ride into the nearby mountains to see a Greek temple at Garni and return to make the obligatory visit to the Armenian Genocide museum. And then it will be time for a week-long loop through Nagorno-Karabakh, back into Armenia and off towards Georgia and Turkey. If only the Armenian-Turkish border were open, I could save myself ten days of cycling!

Peace and Tailwinds

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

48	9/14	4431.8	80.6	574	698	4:47	17.0	53.6	Georgia-Armenia border
49	9/15	4476.7	44.9	1123	894	3:22	13.3	42.7	Haghpat
50	9/16	4543.9	67.2	1557	1240	4:53	13.8	49.6	outside Vanadzor
51	9/17	4656.2	112.3	1062	1275	6:56	16.3	58.4	Echmiadzin
52	9/18	4721.9	65.7	1121	559	3:55	16.6	49.2	Yerevan
53	9/20	4811.0	89.1	1121	1710	4:48	18.6	53.4	Yerevan (daytrip)

Azerbai-bai; Georgia on my Mind

2009-09-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

Kazbeki, Georgia, September 8th

I don't have much time to type up a reasonably detailed summary of what I've been up to since Baku, so I will have to put up a Reader's Digest telegraphese summary. Suffice it to say, however, that Georgia is perhaps my favourite country so far along the entire length of the Silk Road: friendly people, great food, lovely landscape, lots of culture and history, and stupendously beautiful women. What's not to like about it?

Aug. 24: Left Baku for good; hideously long grind across bleak steppe and through construction.

Aug. 25: Scenery improves, as I enter the Caucasus foothills. Great fruit for sale, but obnoxious stone-throwing kids.

Aug. 26th: I pick up a cycling partner for the day, young Mori-san from Japan. My Japanese has been hopelessly corrupted by speaking Russian for weeks. We stay (in separate rooms) in Seki, in a converted caravansarai that is hopelessly romantic. My right pedal bearings explode into tiny fragments.

Aug. 27th: Mori-san sets off alone while I go out, buy a new pedal, try unsuccessfully to get old pedal fixed, and then ride uphill to the fantastic stone-built village of Kis to see an Albanian (a medieval Christian country that has nothing to do with the current Muslim Balkan country) church. I leave Seki at 4:20 and still manage to knock off 70 km with a brisk tailwind. My ThermaRest develops a fatal aneurism that makes it more or less useless. I take a few pictures of the ubiquitous cult-of-personality posters of the late deified President Heydar Aliyev. I have been seeing these posters for 16 days, and have yet to see two the same.

Aug. 28th: I make it over the border into Georgia and camp a few km down the road. It finally stops raining on me. I am now pedalling with mismatched pedals, one with clips and a cheapie faux-Specialized pedal without clips.

Aug. 29th: Culture and wine in the Kakheti region. I visit Kvareli, see a wonderful museum to Ilya Chavchavadze, father of modern Georgia, tour a winery, visit a monastery perched on a cliff, and camp in a wonderful meadow. Life is good.

Aug. 30th: I ride up towards the Tusheti region, through a Lost World of waterfalls, rock overhangs and no traffic on the worst road since Tajikistan. I run out of steam well before the top of the 2935-metre pass and camp beside the road in a horrible campsite.

Aug. 31st: Up and over the Abano Pass into a wonderland of high peaks, alpine meadows, ancient defensive towers, rushing rivers and pine forests, the prettiest mountains I've seen this summer. I stay in a homestay and eat like a pig. The daughters of the house take me up to their ancestral village on horseback. A week later my butt is still sore from the Marquis-de-Saddle I had to ride on. The daughters laugh at me.

Sept. 1st: A lazy day spent riding into the regional main village of Omalo, climbing up to the beautiful defensive cluster of towers and photographing and sketching them. I feel tired but elated to be in this amazing landscape. We have a massive barbecue in the evening with some visiting cowboys and devour an entire lamb.

Sept. 2nd: Returning over the pass is easier from this side, as the climb is only half as high. I stop on the way down for a soak in some hot springs, have a long conversation with a shopkeeper over beers, and find a great campsite.

Sept. 3rd: I discover that the lovely "highway" marked on my map is a Calvary of rocks and gravel. It is a long, painful and frustrating day, but it ends outside Tianeti in a campsite of bucolic beauty.

Sept. 4th: I hammer over another rockpile road to Zhinvali and then up a great road (marked as a secondary dirt road on my map) to Barisekho and Korsha, where I stay with a friendly family who run an ethnographic museum; the husband is a very accomplished painter.

Sept. 5th: I have another lazy day, hiking up into a lovely alpine meadow and watching the stormclouds gather. I make it back to the homestay minutes before the downpour starts. A voluble fellow Canadian whom I had met in Tusheti shows up looking like a drowned rat after hiking through the rain.

Sept. 6th: I fly back downhill to Zhinvali, then around a reservoir to Ananuri, where I have a lunch of Olympian proportions and explore the exquisite fortress, before riding up the storied Georgian Military Highway that connected Russia to Georgia in the 19th century. My campsite for the evening has the twin disadvantages of being on a slope, and separated from the road by a swamp. I sleep two kilometres from the disputed "border" with South Ossetia.

Sept. 7th: Energized by yesterday's luncheon, I fly up over the Cross Pass, through the interesting-looking ski resort of Gudauri, and then down into Kazbeki. I find a homestay and then hustle up to the church high above Kazbeki, perhaps the most dramatically-situated church I have ever seen. Loads of photographs, then down to more food.

I am off hiking today to the foot of 5000-metre Mt. Kazbek, and then, with the seasons changing fast (the birch trees are already turning yellow on the hillsides) I will head to Tbilisi, south into Armenia, do a loop through Nagorno Karabakh, come back to Georgia briefly, and then head into eastern Turkey before the end of September to complete the Silk Road Ride.

Peace and Tailwinds

Riding Day No.	Date	Distance From Bushehr	Daily Distance	Final Elevation	Vertical Metres	Cycling Time	Average Speed	Maximum Speed	Daily Destination
1	7/16	119.0	119.0	515	1075	7:55	15.1	?	Konar Takhteh
2	7/17	204.8	85.8	1047	1222	6:14	13.8	55.2	85 km from Shiraz
3	7/18	306.3	101.5	1460	1512	7:37	13.3	47.7	Shiraz
4	7/21	380.7	74.4	1630	581	4:41	15.8	66.5	Estakhr (ruins)
5	7/22	474.0	93.3	1955	777	5:58	15.7	?	Past Pasargadae
6	7/23	601.0	127.0	1950	1297	7:44	16.5	60.8	Abadeh
7	7/24	744.3	143.3	1725	456	7:55	18.2	47.1	Past Shahreza
8	7/25	813.1	68.8	1560	353	3:45	18.4	44.5	Esfahan
9	7/28	951.1	138.0	1633	1060	8:48	15.0	60.5	Natanz
10	7/29	1026.0	74.9	1005	533	4:14	17.8	52.1	Kashan
11	7/30	1133.2	107.2	990	463	6:01	17.8	31.9	Qom
12	7/31	1263.9	130.7	1415	874	7:36	17.2	39.1	40 km past Saveh
13	8/1	1383.2	119.4	1280	645	8:03	14.8	31.3	Qazvin
14	8/3	1542.0	158.8	1280	778	7:02	22.6	46.2	Qazvin
15	8/4	1630.7	88.7	1366	2385	7:22	12.0	51.8	Past Moallem Kelayeh
16	8/5	1655.2	24.5	1730	1021	2:10	11.3	55.2	Evan Lake
17	8/6	1735.5	80.3	1305	1923	6:00	13.4	53.4	Qazvin
18	8/7	1891.7	156.2	1764	828	7:55	19.8	33.4	Soltaniyeh
19	8/8	1993.9	102.1	436	1552	6:35	15.6	60.6	Past Gilvan
20	8/9	2090.5	96.2	16	809	6:35	14.6	60.3	Rasht
21	8/10	2214.3	123.8	6	342	7:50	15.8	34.6	Talesh (Hashtpar)
22	8/11	2292.8	78.5	-38	268	4:21	18.1	40.2	Astara, Azerbaijan
23	8/12	2397.2	104.4	-7	304	6:30	16.1	33.7	Celilabad
24	8/13	2504.1	106.9	-25	189	6:41	16.1	23.3	Shirvan National Park
25	8/14	2627.7	123.6	0	664	9:10	13.5	42.2	Baku
26	8/18	2695.1	67.4	0	402	3:27	19.7	52.8	Baku (day trip)
27	8/19	2793.1	98.0	0	441	5:35	17.6	41.9	Beshbarmaq
28	8/20	2886.6	93.5	968	1280	6:46	13.8	28.3	Qacras
29	8/21	2925.2	38.6	1952	1919	5:03	7.6	40.1	Xinaliq
30	8/22	3081.4	156.2	18	866	7:13	21.7	51.5	Sitalcay
31	8/23	3142.2	60.8	0	319	2:42	22.6	47.9	Baku
32	8/24	3241.9	99.7	675	1816	7:12	13.8	46.4	Maraza
33	8/25	3327.7	85.8	709	1448	6:13	13.8	54.6	Ismailiya
34	8/26	3448.4	120.8	687	1399	7:01	17.2	47.5	Seki
35	8/27	3530.7	82.3	298	689	4:34	18.0	42.0	24 km before Zaqatala
36	8/28	3632.0	101.3	438	907	6:16	16.1	44.0	Kabali (Georgia)
37	8/29	3709.6	77.6	595	670	4:41	16.7	31.2	Pshaveli
38	8/30	3748.9	39.3	2367	2018	5:34	7.1	30.9	below Abano Pass
39	8/31	3773.3	24.4	1864	653	2:57	8.4	29.2	Chala
40	9/1	3802.5	29.2	1864	831	2:48	10.4	35.4	Chala (day trip)
41	9/2	3868.9	66.4	638	1344	6:44	9.9	36.6	outside Pshaveli
42	9/3	3930.5	61.6	1293	1117	5:06	12.1	33.1	outisde Tianeti
43	9/4	3998.2	67.7	1463	1139	5:28	12.3	40.8	Korsha
44	9/6	4097.3	99.1	1447	1135	6:24	15.6	47.6	past Pasanauri
45	9/7	4152.6	55.3	1790	1291	4:32	12.3	61.2	Kazbeki
46	9/9	4262.2	109.6	680	1193	7:06	15.4	51.1	past Zhinvali
47	9/10	4311.9	49.7	481	156	2:46	18.1	36.6	Tbilisi

Rider on the Storm

2009-08-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

Baku, Sunday August 23

I'm back in Baku today, contrary to my original plan. I left five days ago, headed north to the Caucasus mountain town of Xinaliq, hoping to trek over the mountains with a horse carrying my baggage and bike for two days until I reached the road to Georgia. Sadly, it didn't work out and I've been forced to retreat and take the long way around the mountains via Baku; I plan to leave tomorrow morning early. However, it was a good trip, despite the rain, with some impressive mountain views, some exhilarating and exhausting riding, and an amazing ride back into Baku blown by a stiff tailwind.

My first three days in Baku were absolutely slothful, lounging around Natalya's apartment, reading, eating and using the Internet. On the fourth day, I bestirred myself and rode out to find the Ateshgah fire temple in Suraxani, on the outskirts of the city. I was foiled in my attempt at first by the orgy of road-construction in Baku, which made all my maps out of date. I ended up on the new airport highway, which loops far out to the east before coming back to the airport. By the time I realized my error, it was too late and I got to the airport and doubled back on the old airport road before getting lost again. I ended up in a photogenically decrepit oilfield and took a photo of rusting "nodding donkey" wells pumping away. Five minutes later two policemen came and took me to the local station to yell at me for compromising national security with my photo, so I had to delete the offending snapshot.

After all this, the temple was a bit of a let-down, but it was interesting that despite the Persian name, it was in fact a Hindu temple for long-travelling sadhus. There may have been a Zoroastrian fire temple here once, but not in recorded history. It's one of quite a number of natural fire sources on the Abseron Peninsula, and indeed throughout the region; Joanne and I saw another one, the Chimera, on the Turkish coast last summer. The ride back into town took only 22 km, rather than the 44 km I covered on the way out, and on the way I found a welding shop to repair the small braze-on eyelet that holds my back rack in place and which had sheared off on the way into Baku. The guys in the shop were hilarious, and seem to know how to do a good job welding too.

Leaving Baku on Wednesday, I left ludicrously late (like 11:30 am!) and rode slowly through the post-Soviet post-industrial apocalyptica of Sumqayit, where dozens of petrochemical plants once poisoned the air and water, and which now rusts away in peace. I made it 100 km up the coast, stopping below the sacred mountain Beshbarmaq to camp. The next day I had a slow slog uphill in the rain to Quba, a small pleasant town with (apparently) a Jewish village across the river, and (definitely) the best doner kebabs in Azerbaijan. I cycled another 15 km up the river and camped in a lovely meadow that would have had great views if it had stopped raining.

After a rainy night, I spent the entire next day riding to Xinaliq, a mere 36 kilometres away. My average speed for the day was a mere 7.4 km/h, which tells you that it was a strictly uphill sort of day. And what uphills they were! The Soviets, when building roads, do not go for any wimpy European or Iranian ideas of what a sensibly steep grade is. The steepest bits are a 20% grade according to my cycling computer, which is like an intermediate ski run. On an unloaded bike, that's doable, but with 40 kg on the bike, I had to abandon all dignity and push the bike up several steep bits, cursing and swearing the whole way. I haven't been on such steep stuff since the jeep tracks of NW Pakistan 11 years ago, and this might have been steeper. At least it was paved! The road led through a spectacularly photogenic gorge straight out of a Chinese scroll painting, and up, up, up through green hillsides distorted into crazy shapes like a Salvador Dali pool table. After the last pass, I rode up a mercifully flattish valley with two road maintenance workers, drank tea with them and then pushed up the cruel final uphill into Xinaliq town, feeling glad that I'd donned my long tights and Gore Tex jacket for the first time this trip: it was cold!!

I quickly discovered that my hike wasn't going to happen. You must, by law, take a guide and the guides, with a monopoly, gouge tourists mercilessly, asking for crazy sums of money. The cheapest offer I got was for $500 for 2 days' walking across the mountains to Laza. I would never pay that, and the incessant rain made it a bit of a moot point anyway. I absorbed what views I could between the rainclouds, put up my tent and cooked up a huge meal.

The next day (yesterday) I awoke to more rain, did some bike maintenance (changing disk brake pads for the first time ever: a fiddly job!) and then, when the rain had stopped, rode back to Quba, making it there in time for another doner kebab lunch. I left at 3 pm, hoping to make a few kilometres back towards Baku. And I did: about 110 of them in the next 4 hours, flying along on a downhill (at first) and a fantastic tailwind (later). It's been a long time since I made so many kilometres so effortlessly. I camped out 60 km from Baku, and was in town today by noon, ready for more loafing and Internet. Tomorrow, the road to Georgia awaits, and I should be at the border in 4 more days. Insh'Allah.

Peace and Gale-Force Tailwinds

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

27	8/19	2793.1	98.0	0	441	5:35	17.6	41.9	Beshbarmaq
28	8/20	2886.6	93.5	968	1280	6:46	13.8	28.3	Qacras
29	8/21	2925.2	38.6	1952	1919	5:03	7.6	40.1	Xinaliq
30	8/22	3081.4	156.2	18	866	7:13	21.7	51.5	Sitalcay
31	8/23	3142.2	60.8	0	319	2:42	22.6	47.9	Baku

Basking in Baku

2009-08-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Sunday, August 16, Baku

I am sitting on the couch here in the spacious downtown apartment of fellow ex-Yangonite Natalya, who's now teaching at the International School of Azerbaijan and who is graciously hosting me. After a month on the road, a few days of urban civilization, nightlife, quiet and books has been a much-needed boost to my morale and body. I will likely be here another day before continuing my Journey to the West by heading north (go figure) out of Baku up towards the Caucasus.

The three days of riding I had here in Azerbaijan were a very mixed bag. The first afternoon, after finishing my last post, I rolled a few kilometres north of Astara to find a cheaper hotel (it looked like rain, so I didn't feel like camping) and lucked into a really nice joint run by Mammad, a genial mountain of a man who looked like an ex-con turned hotelier. As I was settling in, a carload of four Brits showed up headed for Mongolia overland in a battered Skoda. They were great fun to talk to, and were quite self-deprecating about how ill-prepared they were. They had no map of Azerbaijan, just a digital photo of a rough sketch map that they'd seen at the border. When they took a wrong turn, they were halfway back to Georgia before they realized they were heading west instead of south. In a great idea, they painted their car with chalkboard paint so that everyone could write graffiti on it, and it would be washed clean after each rain.

I set off early the next morning, via the amazing Yanar Bulag, or Flaming Fountain. There's an upwelling spring of water that's full of methane, and the methane bubbles burst from the water surface and can be set on fire, resulting in an unusual sight of hot flames dancing atop flowing water. I then rode through a pleasant hilly landscape of forests and orchards and village squares full of men drinking tea and playing dominoes in leafy cafes. In Lengkaran I stopped for some quick internet and had a funny conversation with a gaggle of hairdressers from the salon next door. On the way out of town, I bought a baked chicken stuffed with a delicious walnut paste and lunched alfresco beside the road with a bottle of beer, a loaf of delicious fresh bread and peaches. It was intensely delicious but I ate so much that I could barely move afterwards, making for a lethargic afternoon. I kept stopping in search of inspiration, buying batteries and ice cream, soft drinks and beer, reading my guidebook in a cafe. I finally gave up the struggle and camped behind a farmer's abandoned barn, fighting with my recalcitrant stove to make tea.

The second full day of Azeri cycling the scenery rapidly became very dull, sort of the Netherlands without picturesque villages. Or good cheese. I was uninspired by the flat uniformity of the landscape, as yesterday's hills receded inland and I crossed the pancake flat plains beside the Caspian. Headwinds kicked up strongly during the day, and I again sought excuses to loaf beside the road or in cafes. I passed through a town of post-Soviet apocalyptica, a shattered landscape of abandoned, decaying factories spread along broad rusted railyards, in the town of Salyan where I stopped to buy a SIM card for my phone. I abandoned my hopes of a big 140 km day and camped just outside Shirvan National Park, home to the last remaining wild herd of gazelle in Europe, but unfortunately closed for the day when I arrived. I camped sheltered from the raking wind by the ruins of an electrical substation.

The next morning I awoke early, determined to make good time on the run into Baku. However, the previous day's headwinds had freshened into a mild gale and battered me mercilessly all day, reducing progress to a crawl and sapping my will. Luckily I had lots of things to see to keep my mind off the incessant clawing of the wind. It started with a francolin pheasant racing away from me beside the road. As I stopped to watch it run, I saw more motion behind it in the distance and, pulling out the binoculars, watched a herd of over a hundred gazelle racing away from the road over the savannah. I was still congratulating myself on my luck (I had given up hope of seeing them after not being able to get into the park the previous day) when I saw a herd of two-humped Bactrian camels grazing right beside the motorway, great for photos. I was reminded of some of my other camel encounters along the Silk Road: in western Xinjiang, and along the Oxus in Tajikistan. Always nice to reconnect with the original transport of the ancient caravan routes that I'm retracing.

I was in Elet by 11 am, ready to seek out mud volcanoes. It took over an hour to find the way (nobody really knew its location, least of all the Lonely Planet) and pick my way over an oil-stained landscape onto a tiny hill surrounded by the Caspian where pint-sized mud volcanoes burbled away. They looked like scale models of real volcanoes, but the mud was not at all hot. Like real volcanoes, the "hot spot" (here more like "wet spot") moves over time, leaving inactive cones to erode slowly in the rain and starting new craters nearby. I could have stayed for hours, but Baku beckoned.

I then cursed and sweated my way up the road to Qobustan in search of Paleolithic petroglyphs, which proved to be up a steep hill below some cliffs that were once lakeside thousands of years ago. It took a while to find the first of the petroglyphs, but once I knew what I was looking for (paved walking paths rather than vague trails through the grass) they were much more obvious. They were really interesting carvings: lots of bulls reminiscent of Lascaux (apparently they're really the extinct European aurochs), hunting scenes, a long reed boat that got Thor Heyerdahl theorizing about ethnic connections, lots of deer, and quite a few human figures doing some sort of dance. In places carvings had been inscribed over older carvings many layers thick, resulting in a dense network of incisions almost impossible to decipher. I thought back to the petroglyphs on the shores of Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan that I had seen in 2004, and how almost identical subject matter and style could be found thousands of kilometres apart, evidence of prehistoric contacts along the pre-silken Silk Road. On my way down the hill, I turned off to find the easternmost Roman graffiti ever discovered, an inscription from the time of the mad emperor Domitian (AD 81-96) by the centurion Julius Maximus of the XII legion, presumably sent to scout out the border territories with the mighty Parthian Empire.

Having exhausted my list of things to see, I set myself to the task of grinding into Baku against the dreaded winds. It took four and a half hours to make it 50 flat kilometres into town, fighting for every metre against the malevolent forces of Aeolus. I finally got onto the Boulevard around 8:30 and met up with Natalya who was out celebrating the first staff gathering of the year. I snarfed down food and beer and went out on the town, staying up until almost three, the latest I've been up for months, and then slept until noon, letting my body catch up on much-needed rest.

Yesterday I poked around Baku with Natalya, admiring the wonderful Belle-Epoque architecture from when Baku was the world's petroleum capital a century ago, and the Turkish stone architecture in the 700-year-old stone town. Baku's stone, like that used to build Jerusalem and Rhodes and Oxford, glows a marvellous golden colour in the late afternoon light, and injects an aesthetic warmth into the atmosphere that is almost palpable. The only pity is the enormous amount of state-sponsored renovation going on, turning entire blocks into dust-shrouded construction zones. We wandered about taking pictures, riding the funicular up to the Martyr's Cemetery and the tomb of the Great Leader Heydar Aliyev: it was all very solemn and Soviet and at the same time like Ataturk's Mausoleum, a secular shrine. Luckily the view from the Eternal Flame down over Baku Bay lightened the mood, and we strolled downhill through the stone town ready for some Mexican food and more late-night Guinness and live music.

Today has been a day of unadulterated sloth, spent uploading photos to Facebook, reading and eating. Tomorrow I will do some bike maintenance, and maybe ride out into the industrial hell of the Abseron peninsula in search of an ancient fire temple.

Hope everyone is squeezing the last drops of enjoyment out of the northern summer!

Graydon

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

23	8/12	2397.2	104.4	-7	304	6:30	16.1	33.7	Celilabad
24	8/13	2504.1	106.9	-25	189	6:41	16.1	23.3	Shirvan National Park
25	8/14	2627.7	123.6	0	664	9:10	13.5	42.2	Baku
26	8/18	2695.1	67.4	0	402	3:27	19.7	52.8	Baku (day trip)

In Azerbaijan

2009-08-11T05:51:00.000-07:00

Astara, Azerbaijan, Tuesday August 11th

I am finally out of Iran and into a new country. Azerbaijan so far is much emptier and quieter than Iran, but I have to say I don't like the vibe in this border town. Maybe it was the disconcerting thoroughness that the passport official displayed towards my passport, scrutinizing every page as though he thought it was counterfeit. It took over half an hour, while the lineup behind me grew to ridiculous proportions. But I'm in!

The last two days of cycling have been thoroughly crappy. Yesterday might well have been the wettest day of the entire trip, with torrential tropical downpours all day and huge rollers coming in off the Caspian. It rained for all but 10 of the 120 kilometres to Talesh (aka Hashtpar) and I splurged on indoor accommodation. This morning, I awoke to more rain, but it stopped after a couple of hours and I got to the border in dry weather. I had a long chat with another Swiss cyclist named David (although with a more reasonable amount of luggage than the last one!) The border crossing was the muddiest and most shambolic I've been across in a while, and I got very muddy putting my luggage through the X-ray machine. At least I got in.....I was a bit worried for a while!! I had a beer to celebrate!

I should be in Baku by Friday, ready for a few days off. I hope to be able to upload pictures more easily on the faster internet connections here.

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

21	8/10	2214.3	123.8	6	342	7:50	15.8	34.6	Talesh (Hashtpar)
22	8/11	2292.8	78.5	-38	268	4:21	18.1	40.2	Astara, Azerbaijan

Feeling Rasht

2009-08-09T08:39:00.001-07:00

Rasht, Sunday August 9, 2009

The last three days have been long and fairly tough, a dash to see a fabulous piece of architecture in Soltaniyeh and then a two-day slog over the Alborz Mountains (again--that makes four Alborz crossings in total, including one in 2004) to get here, to the holiday capital of Iran, the Caspian coastal region.

The first day, from Qazvin to Soltaniyeh, was tough, a long day (156 km) with a fair bit of climbing, although so gradual, and with such nice tailwinds, that I hardly noticed the 500 metres I had gained. There is little to say about the riding or about the unremarkable landscape (I was soon longing for the Alamut), other than to say it was my quickest day of riding this year in terms of average speed, except for my no-luggage dash from Tehran a few days ago. Soltaniyeh, when I got there, was fantastic, a small town in the middle of a dusty plain utterly dominated by one of the most remarkable buildings in Iran. Sultan Oljeitu, a serial monotheist who went through Christian, Buddhist and Sunni Muslim phases, ended up choosing Shia Islam when he became the Mongol Ilkhan of Iran. He built a new capital in the middle of nowhere (ie, Soltaniyeh) and decided with the zeal of the newly converted that he was going to build a new home for the body of the first Shia Imam, Ali (the son-in-law of Mohammed and the fourth Caliph of the Islamic Caliphate). When the authorities in Najaf decided they'd rather keep Ali's remains, Oljeitu was left with an amazing 55-metre-high dome (the biggest brick dome ever built) with no purpose, so he had himself buried in it instead. It's an amazing structure, very geometric, and I photographed and sketched to my heart's content.

The last two days have been Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll Day was yesterday: fantastic riding over the Alborz, with little traffic, although the headwinds got bad on the other side. Today was Hyde: incessant headwinds and traffic made for the most miserable day of riding of 2009. On the plus side, I'm only two days away from Azerbaijan!

Getting kicked out of the internet cafe!!

Peace and Tailwinds!!

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

18	8/7	1891.7	156.2	1764	828	7:55	19.8	33.4	Soltaniyeh
19	8/8	1993.9	102.1	436	1552	6:35	15.6	60.6	Past Gilvan
20	8/9	2090.5	96.2	16	809	6:35	14.6	60.3	Rasht

Qiven' er to Qazvin, and Remembering the Alamut

2009-08-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

Qazvin, Thursday August 6th

I'm back in Qazvin, which is becoming familiar on my third stay here. I got back this afternoon from a fantastic three-day sidetrip to the spectacular Alamut Valley, and am going to resume onward progress tomorrow morning.

My first departure from Qazvin was, sadly, on a bus. I took an afternoon clunker to Tehran on the afternoon of the 2nd, loading my bike in the bottom luggage compartment of the bus. It wouldn't fit, so I started digging out my Allen keys to turn the handlebars sideways, but the conductor and driver kept trying to force the handlebars in, much to my annoyance. My annoyance factor was increased when, after this display of incompetence, the driver demanded $4 for loading the bike, when the ticket to Tehran cost $1. I refused, and the passengers around me started speaking up on my behalf, so the driver retreated in a sulk after a long diatribe. After two hours of listening to music on my iPod, I was greeted in Tehran by the reprise of the driver's rant. This time we were outside the bus, and he shouted on and on and on, despite the fact that he hadn't asked for any money for anybody else's luggage. On and on he howled, and I had unpleasant flashbacks to my first trip to India. Eventually I lost my temper and did my best Earl Weaver imitation, standing two inches from his face and shouting back. Another conductor came by to mediate, and we eventually settled on a "luggage loading tip" of $1, which was still excessive but which ended my interaction with this villainous vermin. I remembered yet another reason why I prefer bike travel to bus travel: no moronic shouting matches with venal conductors/drivers/touts/taxi drivers.

After that, my flying visit to Tehran went well. With almost no luggage on my bike, I flew through the crowded streets to the old Tehran traveller's standby, the Mashhad Hotel, where my 2004 trip had ended. I went out for a doner kebab, and on the way back to the Mashhad, I passed a shop in which two men were playing chess. Seeing my interest, they invited me in and soundly trounced me twice while I had an enlightening conversation with them. One of the men said "I'm not religious. I don't go to the mosque. I don't even believe in Islam. But the government makes me pretend to be a good Muslim. Most Iranians are probably like me, but we get ruled by the 20 percent who are religious fanatics." On the image of Iranians abroad, he said "I went to Europe a few years ago, and once when I gave my passport to the clerk at a hotel and he saw that I was Iranian, he drew his finger across his throat and looked at me. I think this man was very stupid; he only receives one channel when it comes to Iran. Just because the US had a president for eight years who was just as stupid as Ahmedinejad, it doesn't mean I need to behave like that to an American. It really made me sad that that hotel clerk was so close-minded."

I set out the next morning before first light, trying to get out of Tehran before its infamous traffic and smog had a chance to build up. I was 40 km from my hotel by 8 am, and cycling with an Iranian rider whom I had passed earlier and who had caught back up to accompany me. We didn't have much language in common, but it was still fun to interact with someone who shares my interest in cycling, and I was sad to see him peel off and head to work at his factory; he does a 32 km commute every morning and night on his mountain bike. After that I was on my own in an insane maelstrom of traffic which lasted until almost 100 km from Tehran, which is how far the smog, traffic and horrible grey dormitory towns spread, like mould along the edge of a bathtub, west of the city, along the foot of the barely-visible Alborz mountains. I kept my head down and enjoyed the sensation of riding fast, unencumbered by luggage; I averaged a good 5 km/h faster than I would have with full panniers. About 110 km from Tehran, I ran into David, a Swiss cyclist who was towing an intriguing locking trailer which held the phenomenal amount of 100 kg of luggage (just when I was lamenting the fact that my luggage weighs around 40 kilos). He's the only cyclist I've ever met carrying a full-sized folding aluminum lawn chair. We exchanged news and tips, before he grunted off towards Tehran and I zipped along the remaining 50 kilometres to Qazvin, finishing my 158 km before 3 pm and rewarding myself with a good nap and then a great meal at the home of a young lawyer who had stopped to talk with me along the road. Good conversation, even if the food was disappointing take-out kebabs. I was happy, too, with having closed the gap between my 2004 and 2009 trips, so that now I really can say truthfully that I've cycled the whole way from Xian to here.

On the morning of the 4th, having pared down my luggage by leaving behind cold-weather and wet-weather gear, extra books and long-term spare parts, I set off for the lair of the Assassins: Alamut castle. I have been fascinated for years by the Assassins, as the Ismaili Muslims were known during the Middle Ages. I first heard of them in William Dalrymple's book In Xanadu, and ten years ago Joanne and I made a memorable visit to a couple of Assassin castles in Syria. Since then I've wanted to visit the global headquarters of this secretive organization, popularly depicted as being 12th-century forerunners of al-Qaeda, striking terror among rulers throughout the Middle East who opposed them by a program of systematic targetted murder by young fidayeen who were not expected to return alive from a mission. More recently, however, a revisionist view has started to take hold that they were in fact Muslim equivalents of the French Cathars: free-thinking humanist scholars who were brutally put down so that their seductive ideas of liberal living would not take hold further afield. Alamut, founded in 1090 by the first Assassin leader Hassan Sabah, "The Old Man of the Mountains" as Marco Polo called him, was their first castle and the sect's headquarters until its destruction by the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan in 1256.

In Iran, as in Syria, the Ismailis chose inacessible, isolated mountain areas to establish themselves. The Alamut valley is cut off from the main caravan routes of central Iran by a high pass over the foothills of the Alborz mountains to the south, and by the main wall of the Alborz to the north. To this day, the valley is hard to get to, making it perfect for a short bike trip: little traffic and spectacular views. I set off early and after 20 relatively flat kilometres, the road gained 800 metres in a mere 12 kilometres, an average grade of about 7 percent. It was a long, hot grunt over the top of the pass at 2280 metres, but the views at the top over the valley made up for the tired legs. I plummeted down 1300 vertical metres in another 20 km to cross the Alamut River, and promptly began climbing again, steeply up the opposite bank. All day I rode this crazy roller-coaster of a road, gaining and losing hundreds of metres at the drop of a hat. The landscape was wonderful, with expansive views over the peaks of the Alborz and the isolated green oases where irrigation brought the hillsides to life. I tried to figure out what mountain range I was most reminded of, but it eluded me. The sense of space was reminiscent of the Annapurna Range in Nepal, while the coloration and oases were straight out of the Pakistani Karakoram. There were hints of the Moroccan Atlas and even Patagonia. I met a group of student protestors from Tehran who were taking their first day off the streets in over a month; I admire their courage, but I wonder if they have any hope of succeeding in changing their government. I rode all day in a haze of pleasant impressions, before finding an isolated campsite and calling it a day after 2400 vertical metres of climbing. Luckily I put the fly on my tent for the first time, since there was a cool wind, as I had my first rain of the trip, a series of thunderstorms that kept waking me up throughout the night.

The next day I dropped precipitously back to the main river, got to the turnoff for Hassan Sabah's castle, and proceeded to climb 800 metres in a mere 7 thigh-burning kilometres. The whole way, the rock of Alamut, "The Eagle's Lair" dominated the view, rising precipitously from the verdant cherry orchards below it. I would not have wanted to be a Mongol soldier plodding up the hill, looking up at the inacessible fortress I was expected to capture. (The castle was captured, in the end, largely by trickery and forged documents.) Once I had bought my entrance ticket and parked my bike, there were still 150 vertical metres to climb on foot, up a rickety staircase that would not have been there 900 years ago. The nearly vertical rock was a formidable defence, and with the extensive system of water cisterns atop the rock, Alamut could have weathered a siege for several years. There's not much left standing up top; the Mongols systematically destroyed all of the hundred or so Assassin castles in northern Iran to root out the Ismailis. However, the views are stunning, and there's enough foundations to visualize what the castle must have looked like. An archaeologist working there told me that Alamut had a famous and extensive library that was put to the torch by the Mongols; he subscribes to the Assassins-as-humanist-freethinkers school of thought.

I tried to absorb as many views and impressions as possible, but I was eventually adopted by an extended clan of Tehranis and whisked off to a barbeque at a nearby lake. I rode my bike back down the hill from Alamut (my brakes were so hot at the bottom that when I sprayed water on them it vaporized instantly), and then tossed it into the back of the family's pickup truck for the ride to the lake. Evan Lake was very pretty, but the best part was swimming in it, and then stuffing myself silly on ridiculous amounts of rice pilaf and BBQ chicken. I set up my tent beside their encampment, and had a wonderful night's sleep, undisturbed by any precipitation.

I wanted to set off early this morning, but I had to fix my first flat tire in Iran, and while I was doing that, the family cooked me up scrambled eggs on toast and loaded me down with pistachios and dates for the road. I had another day of big climbs, over 1900 m, and by the time I got to Qazvin, my legs were done! Time for a big feast of qimeh nasar, the local lamb and pistachio stew, and then to bed to get some sleep for tomorrow's dash towards Soltaniyeh. I'm only 5 riding days away from Azerbaijan, and I'm getting excited about a new country!

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

14	8/3	1542.0	158.8	1280	778	7:02	22.6	46.2	Qazvin
15	8/4	1630.7	88.7	1366	2385	7:22	12.0	51.8	Past Moallem Kelayeh
16	8/5	1655.2	24.5	1730	1021	2:10	11.3	55.2	Evan Lake
17	8/6	1735.5	80.3	1305	1923	6:00	13.4	53.4	Qazvin

Turning Kebabs Into Kilometres

2009-08-02T01:46:00.000-07:00

Qazvin, August 2, 2009

I'm taking another rest day here in the junction town of Qazvin, 150 km west of Tehran, after five surprisingly hard days of riding from Esfahan. When I arrived yesterday, after 120 km of battling incessant strong headwinds, my legs were cooked, and I decided that they had earned a day off.

I left Esfahan on July 28th with genuine regret; I really enjoyed the town, and could easily have spent more time there. However, I also knew I had to keep moving towards the cool heights of the Caucasus mountains, so I zipped out of town at 7 am, after a final farewell to lovely Naqsh-e-Jahan Square. The first fifty kilometres were flat, on a motorway full of trucks barrelling along. I've been pondering why there seem to be so many more trucks on the road here than in Canada. I can't decide whether it's because there are fewer roads, so traffic is more concentrated; whether there are just far fewer private cars, so that there are proportionately more trucks; or whether Iran is just more devoted to heavy industry; or whether Canada makes more use of trains for moving heavy goods. Whatever the case, it's extremely hard to find any roads in Iran that aren't completely full of ancient diesel trucks with deafening engines belching forth clouds of black soot into the air.

As I left the huge industrial suburbs of Esfahan behind, I could clearly see the pall of smog hanging over the city. One way to reduce smog, of course, is to generate electricity in a carbon-free way, which the Iranians are (very controversially) doing. Where I started this year's trip, in Bushehr, the Russians are building a nuclear power plant. Outside Esfahan, you can see eight enormous cooling towers marking another nuclear power plant. And in Natanz...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I turned off the motorway onto a small side road to the town of Natanz, I thought my day was about to improve. There was almost no traffic on this road that led across bleak desert over a small mountain range to the town on the other side. On the other hand, within fifteen minutes of getting onto the road, a hot gale-force headwind had sprung up and I spent the next thirty kilometres fighting and cursing it as it tried to blow me back to Esfahan. When I finally crested the pass, it was mid-afternoon, and I spent the rest of the day pedalling just as hard downhill to try to overcome the wind. I had a pleasant conversation with a red-headed university student in an attractive oasis town where I stopped for much-needed liquids, and then gritted my teeth for the final forty kilometres to Natanz. Grit was the word of the day, as my face, my legs and even my luggage were sand-blasted and absolutely covered with a fine grit that took days to get out. Cruelly, the final five kilometres were steeply uphill, and I had sympathy for Tour de France cyclists who spend 200 km riding as hard as they can only to have an uphill climb into a ski resort to finish the day. I had a slightly strange interview with the police on my way into town; as they drove off, two men who had been watching remarked "Ahmedinejad supporters!" I spent the night in an overpriced hotel run by two grumpy old codgers, and slept well.

The next day was correspondingly easier, as I lost 600 metres in elevation while making my way to the old caravan town of Kashan. After a hard climb out of Natanz, it was downhill most of the way, past the Natanz nuclear research station. If the Israelis, or the Americans, ever bomb Iran, Natanz is going to be the primary target, and the Iranians know this. For ten kilometres in every direction, most of the hilltops bristle with anti-aircraft guns and missiles. I didn't stop for many photos. Kashan, when I got there around lunchtime, was a pleasant town, with most of its historic centre turning to dust as its residents move out to concrete boxes on the outskirts of town. I settled in at the friendly family-run Golestan Inn, and then looked around a few wonderful old 19th-century mansions, absolutely palatial in size and decoration. One of them was built by the local governor; if I had been Shah and one of my governors had built such an opulent house, I would likely have arrested him for corruption.

I rode slightly out of town to the west in the late afternoon, with the heat at this low elevation (1000 metres) hitting me like a hammer. I stopped in at Sialk, where a very, very old settlement is being excavated. This is one of the earliest pre-historic settlements of my entire Silk Road trip, with pottery and building foundations dating back to the 6th and 5th millenia BC, and something that looks a lot like a ziggurat (a Babylonian-style stepped brick proto-pyramid) that dates back to 2500 BC. While I was there, I ran into a French couple who were surprised that I was able to bike in the heat. When I remarked that I rode as many kilometres as possible in the morning, and then survived the afternoons, the wife remarked that "You may be surviving, but are you actually enjoying it?" I pondered this as I rode up to Fin Gardens, pleasant-enough royal gardens full of streams of running water. In a parched country like Iran, you can see how paradise is conceived as being a garden like this, full of fruit trees and roses and running water. I had the single best meal I've had in an Iranian restaurant that evening, scarfing down great bean soup and wonderful dizi (a chick-pea and potato stew) while chatting to the personable restaurant owner, a passionate Moussavi supporter who wore his political allegiances around his neck in the shape of a green scarf.

After Kashan, my next stop was Qom, the conservative religious centre that was where the Islamic Revolution began. I had a long, hot but flat slog across the edge of the Dasht-e-Kavir desert, interrupted by a few encounters with passing cars to give me cold water or fruit. One encounter, though, was strange, with a man asking me where I had come from and then asking (since I said I had ridden through Central Asia) if I had any Turkmen money to sell. I said no, but he was curiously insistent, pulling out a wad of Iranian money and waving it around and repeating "To show my bibi! For the bibi!" I said a few dozen times that I hadn't got any Turkmen money, and then he asked about dollars. I said (untruthfully) that I didn't have any of those, and opened my wallet to show that I had only Iranian money. The insistent shouting and waving around of his money continued until I had had enough and left. It wasn't until I was in Qom and went to pay for something that I realized that, in all the confusion, the old man had skimmed most of the big Iranian bills out of the wallet. I was seriously annoyed, but because all my encounters beside the road have been with benefactors and providers of cold drinks and good food, I let my guard down. I'm not sure how much money the guy got, but I would guess on the order of $100 worth of Iranian rials.

Qom itself, when I got there, was blisteringly hot, very crowded and almost impossible to navigate. It took over an hour to find the hotel that I wanted, where for $11 I got the smallest, noisiest, least-appealing room of the trip. Being a huge pilgrimage town, prices are very high by Iranian standards; in my wanderings, I came across a hotel that would have cost about $20 in a town like Kashan or Abyaneh; in Qom, rooms started at $80, as there's such a huge number of Gulf Arabs and Saudi Shi'ite pilgrims willing to pay more than the locals. I was unimpressed with Qom, particularly when I had to go exchange more money after discovering the roadside sleight-of-hand, so I went to the opulent but hellishly crowded pilgrimage shrine (to the sister of the eight Imam), had some food and made an early night of it.

The next day, I set off early with hopes of finding the Three Wise Men. Ever since William Dalrymple, in his superb Marco Polo travelogue In Xanadu, first told me the story of how Marco Polo had said that the biblical Three Wise Men were buried in Saveh, I've been curious about the place. I rode north from Qom along a busy highway, and then turned, with the help of some helpful policemen who plied me with melons, onto a small side road to Saveh. The ride was along a fertile irrigated plain, and I got to Saveh in time for lunch. It was exceptionally hot, and after a few minutes of looking around among all the new concrete buildings, I gave up on the Magi and settled for air conditioning and pizza. I had a long discussion with the owner and workers at the pizza joint, none of whom had heard of Saveh's claim to fame. I was consoled by the fact that Dalrymple also failed to find any trace of the Wise Men, despite having the local police driving him around. I had no map, and so I regretfully turned my back on the place and rode off towards Qazvin.

The late afternoon was given over to a 500-metre climb back up onto the Iranian plateau, and then a pleasant ride across a plain of quite attractive yellow grass. I found a secluded camping spot out of sight (although not out of hearing) of the highway and had a wonderful, relaxing evening, not interacting with trucks, crowds of curious Iranians or hideous hotels. I played guitar, cooked up some supper, drank litres of tea and watched the stars come out. I realized how important evenings like this have been for me along my route; they allow me to relax and unwind after days that are sometimes a bit on the stressful side.

Yesterday was just such a stressful day. Overnight a cold north wind sprang up. While the cold was a welcome change, the direction was right in my face. I spent all morning battling to make 35 km up to a pass, crawling along at barely above walking pace, the wind tearing at the bicycle and at my hair. Even the downhill from the pass was barely better, and only the fact that it was so cool (28 degrees at noon instead of the customary 40) made it bearable. Fortified by kebabs in the industrial town of Bueien Zahra, I fought on, this time across a plain of Dutch flatness, getting all the way up to 14 km/h as the wind continued to impede progress. I got to Qazvin with my legs absolutely rubber, and was in bed early last night.

So today I'm off by (yikes!) bus to Tehran. I feel that I need to join my 2004 route to this summer's route, and the easiest way to do that is by making a 150 km sprint without my luggage (which will stay in the hotel here) from Tehran back here to Qazvin tomorrow. With luck, if I get up early enough, I will be 40 km out of downtown Tehran before the Tehran traffic madness begins.

After that, I plan to ride over a mountain pass into the secluded valley of Alamut, one-time headquarters of the feared Assassins from the 11th to the 13th century. The scenery promises to be much better than the mundane deserts and plains of the past week!

Until next time, I wish everyone

Peace and Tailwinds!!

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

9	7/28	951.1	138.0	1633	1060	8:48	15.0	60.5	Natanz
10	7/29	1026.0	74.9	1005	533	4:14	17.8	52.1	Kashan
11	7/30	1133.2	107.2	990	463	6:01	17.8	31.9	Qom
12	7/31	1263.9	130.7	1415	874	7:36	17.2	39.1	40 km past Saveh
13	8/1	1383.2	119.4	1280	645	8:03	14.8	31.3	Qazvin

Half the World, Half the World Away....

2009-07-27T03:06:00.000-07:00

Esfahan, Monday July 27th

I am on my third afternoon in enchanting Esfahan, known in Persian as "Half the World", and after two days of seeing the multitudinous sights and soaking up the atmosphere of the wonderful Naqsh-e-Jahan (pattern of the world) square, I'm having a quieter day: fixing my stove, trying to deal telephonically with the dimwits who run the DBS Bank customer service desk in Singapore, re-stringing my travelling guitar, reading and generally chilling out. Now it's time to bring my blog up to date.

It took five days of cycling to get from Shiraz to Esfahan, along a route rich in history, both ancient and medieval. The first day, I got up early (as usual) to beat the heat and was climbing a steep incline to get out of Shiraz before 7 am. The road was crowded with drivers who had the same idea, and it made for an unpleasant two hours of diesel fumes and incessant grinding engines before the road, and I, descended steeply onto the flats of an agricultural valley. I noticed that my new bike's wheels have less rolling resistance than my old bike, as my maximum speed on descents has increased by at least 10 km/h; I was surprised to look down at my cycling computer and see that I was doing 66 km/h! The rest of the day I stayed in this valley, passing through the 10 km traffic jam of Marvdasht (I think that in Iran, a city is only an excuse for a good traffic jam) and making it to Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire, by 11, just in time for the blistering heat of midday.

I loved Persepolis. I had been looking forward to seeing it ever since reading about Alexander the Great in high school. Alexander captured the city in 331 BC, after routing the Persian army for the decisive third time at the battle of Gaugamela in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. He despatched fast horsemen to secure the city and its immense treasury (3000 camel loads of gold, silver, bronze and precious gems), and made his own way there at a more leisurely pace. He and his army spent some time living there, but one night, either as a drunken accident or as a deliberate act of revenge for the Persian destruction of the Acropolis 150 years earlier, the city was burned to the ground and abandoned forever.

The city is impressively situated on a raised platform overlooking the plain, underneath barren stone cliffs. The city was used for annual gatherings of the nobles of all parts of the immense Persian Empire, and tourists today follow the same route as those Medes, Elamites, Phrygians, Ethiopians, Arabs and Cappadocians did 24 centuries ago, climbing the gently-angled ceremonial staircase up into the city and then passing through the immense Gateway of all Nations. This gate, with a very Egyptian flavour to it, has been graffitied by generations of travellers, including the infamous African explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Luckily, plexiglass now protects the stone from similar vandalism today.

Once inside the city, there are tons of massive ruins to see. The Persian emperors were clearly trying to impress their allies and underlings, and they built on an Egyptian scale, with huge courtyards of columns, and immense palaces. The most impressive sights, however, are the carvings on the staircases of the Apadana Palaces, where envoys from all the 30 or so nationalities of the empire are shown bringing gifts to the emperor. I spent a long time looking at and photographing the reliefs; they reminded me a bit of the carvings at Angkor Wat, although not so extensive. The other highlight for me were the imperial tombs of the later emperors Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III, carved into the cliffs above the city, providing wonderful panoramas out over the extensive city.

I was pretty flattened by the heat, but I revived after some lunch, and cycled a few kilometres up the valley to see some smaller sites. Naqsh-e-Rajab has four impressive Sassanid carvings (from five centuries after Persepolis), showing the early Sassanid emperors Shapur and Ardeshir getting crowned by the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. I was intrigued to see the changes in the 500 years separating the Achaemenids from the Sassanids. The depiction of Ahura Mazda is quite different from that shown on the Achaemenid tombs that I had just seen, and the artistic style has changed from quite Assyrian to much more Roman. As well, the writing system used for Persian has changed from ancient Babylonian cuneiform to a curly alphabet that looks like a precursor of the Arabic alphabet, and the other official languages of the empire (other than Persian) are now Parthian and Greek, rather than Elamite and Babylonian as they were in the time of the Achaemenids.

I then zipped across to the cliffs on the other side of the valley to Naqsh-e-Rostam, where the great Achamenid Persian emperor Darius (the founder of Persepolis) and his successors Xerxes, Darius II and Artaxerxes II had their tombs. They're so identical in style that, except for Darius' tomb which is identified by a lengthy cuneiform inscription, archaeologists still don't know whose tomb is whose. As well, there's another enigmatic building, a big cube with slit false windows, whose purpose is unclear but which seems to have been a tomb for somebody important. Underneath each tomb is a later Sassanid carving, as if the Sassanids wanted to emphasize that they were the successors of these world conquerors. Having read the Histories of Herodotus several times (if you love history and haven't read Herodotus, now is the time!), I found being at the tomb of Darius (whose life and accomplishments make up a lot of the pages of Herodotus) quite moving. Of course, the emotionality might have been due to incipient sunstroke too.

While I was sitting there sketching, a young Iranian woman came running up the steps to talk to me in English. She was a young medical researcher from Tehran, and she had some interesting points of view. She lamented the current state of Iranian culture ("Culture? What culture? We used to have a great nation and high culture, and now we are nothing"), the economy ("we have all this oil, but the people have no money at all") and politics ("Of course Ahmedinejad is a madman, but he's still a better leader than the others would have been. My friends and colleagues mostly voted for him, because it was a choice between the bad and the worst, and he's merely bad.")

That night, searching for a place to pitch my tent, I found a perfect historical spot: the ruins of Estakhr, the last capital city of the Sassanids, laid waste by the rampaging Arab armies in AD 637 and not excavated since. I put up my tent in corner of the city wall and fell asleep, pondering the rise and fall of empires, oblivious to the modern traffic 100 metres away.

The next day, I followed the valley uphill, along a quiet side road parallel to the expressway, making for a very pleasant morning. Eventually, where the agricultural land ran out, the two roads merged and I rejoined the chaos of the main road through a tunnel and out into a bleaker, more desert-like world that led to Pasargadae, the first Achaemenid capital. It was again like a giant convection oven as I toured around the slim remains of the city founded by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid empire. His tomb, a huge but simple structure, has stood the test of time better than the rest of his city, which consists of a few fallen columns and the foundations of a few temples, as well as another enigmatic cube. The signboard says that this one is believed to be the tomb of Cyrus' son Cambyses, and Wikipedia says that it was definitively identified as such in 2006. I liked the austere empty feeling of Pasargadae, and rode off satisfied with having seen it. I had planned to ride another 30 or 40 km, but only12 km down the road, I passed an actual river (well, a large irrigation canal) and decided to camp beside it instead, since running water is at such a premium in Iran.

I awoke well-rested, which was just as well because the next day was unexpectedly hard, at least until the afternoon. The road just kept climbing and climbing, interrupted by brief downhills, and the wind was persistently blowing hard in my face. It took forever to climb the 600 m to the crest of the pass, which (as it turned out when I looked at a decent map later) was over the main range of the Zagros Mountains, although it just seemed like a series of rounded desert hills. I was quite discouraged by the snail's pace I was setting, and wondered glumly if my forty-year-old body was too old for this bike touring gig. Luckily, about ten different cars stopped that day to give me cold water, fruit, juice, cake and encouragement. Then the downhill started, and I zipped along without pedalling for thirty kilometres with a tailwind and felt very positive about the whole experience. I made it to Abadeh, the first real settlement I'd seen since Pasargadae, and rewarded myself with a night in a hotel, where I slept like a log.

The last day and a half into Esfahan were a haze of downhills, tailwinds and excessive heat and traffic, with little scenery and lots of noise. I camped out the last night before Esfahan behind an abandoned factory that turned out to be home to a small colony of tramps. They were quite friendly, but I must confess to having slept nervously under the stars.

After several days in fairly desolate surroundings, it was a relief finally to get to Esfahan, and its leafy streets, air of civilization and tremendous architectural gems. Esfahan is one of the crown jewels of the Islamic world. As the capital of the Safavid Empire in the 16th and 17th century, it was adorned by its rulers, particularly Shah Abbas I, with a series of wonderful buildings and gardens. The Naqsh-e-Jahan square ("The Pattern of the World"), renamed Imam Square, is a magnificent public space, and I keep going back to it every day to watch the ebb and flow of the people, along with the play of light on the mosques that line its sides.

The Jameh Mosque is huge, impressive and one of the most beautifully conceived mosques I have ever seen. I spent a good couple of hours prowling around it. The Imam Mosque is also gorgeous, but it's under scaffolding which ruins the beauty. I think the real gem of Esfahan, however, is the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, a small but perfectly conceived structure with the most mesmerizing ceiling (like an Escher drawing of infinity) and a delicate interplay of light through the latticed windows over the blue, green and yellow tiles inside: simply magic!

The atmosphere in the Naqsh-e-Jahan is excellent as well, with thousands of local Esfahanis and Iranian tourists coming out in late afternoon to see the sights, picnic, take horse carriage rides, or shop for souvenirs. I sit out every day at 6 in a second-story teashop to watch the show. They say that this is the second-largest square by area in the world, after the Stalinist space of Tien An Men Square; I'm not sure I believe it, but it really is a magnificent place to see, and I'm off again as soon as I finish posting this!

Esfahan, strictly speaking, isn't really on the Silk Road route that I started to ride in 2002; most classical and medieval traders would have passed further north, at the latitude of Tehran. However, when I was last in Iran in 2004, everyone assured me that Esfahan is the main reason to visit Iran, so I decided to add on this spur, from Bushehr up to Qazvin, to my original route just so that I could see Esfahan and Persepolis. I have to say that I'm glad: Esfahan is the Islamic world's equivalent to Florence, a city full of some of the most important architectural and artistic products of a major civilization.

My search for guitar strings brought me to Jolfa, an ancient Armenian quarter. The Armenians have always been famed as musicians in Turkey and Iran, and so the guitar shops are all in Jolfa. I bought my strings from George, an Armenian guitar teacher, and rode around the tiny but uber-wealthy neighbourhood, full of ritzy cafes and expensive grocery stores. The Armenian cathedral is a strange mix of Islamic architecture (iwans and tiles and arched doorways) and Christian iconography inside (brilliantly coloured frescoes reminiscent of Greece and Cyprus). I toured the cathedral and the museum next door with two Turkish backpackers who kept muttering darkly about what they viewed as incessant propaganda about the 1915 Armenian genocide. They were planning on going to Armenia on the way home; I wonder how they will be received there.

So having basked in a bit of culture for a few days, it's time for me to hit the road again early tomorrow morning, heading for Natanz, Kashan, Qom and Qazvin. I hope to be able to take some slightly less busy roads, but I'm not sure such a thing exists in this automobile-obsessed society. I will post again, probably, from Qazvin. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures, enjoy the summer, and talk to you all again soon!

Ha! Figured out how to do this! I will continue to fill this in as the trip progresses.

Riding Day No.

Date

Distance

From Bushehr

Daily

Distance

Final Elevation

Vertical

Metres

Cycling

Time

Average

Speed

Maximum

Speed

Daily Destination

4	7/21	380.7	74.4	1630	581	4:41	15.8	66.5	Estakhr (ruins)
5	7/22	474.0	93.3	1955	777	5:58	15.7	?	Past Pasargadae
6	7/23	601.0	127.0	1950	1297	7:44	16.5	60.8	Abadeh
7	7/24	744.3	143.3	1725	456	7:55	18.2	47.1	Past Shahreza
8	7/25	813.1	68.8	1560	353	3:45	18.4	44.5	Esfahan

Scorching My Way to Shiraz

2009-07-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 20, Shiraz

I'm sitting in a posh internet cafe here in Shiraz at the end of a much-appreciated second day off from cycling here in the former Iranian capital. It was an unexpectedly harsh reintroduction to life in the saddle over the three days it took to ride here from Bushehr, and my now-forty-year-old body was pretty sore and tired afterwards. Two days of eating well, sleeping in, visiting the sites, getting an unexpectedly generous visa extension and (oddly) a night of beer and Scotch with some of the gilded youth of Shiraz have left me ready to hit the road again tomorrow refreshed.

The first day of cycling, out of Bushehr, was a matter of riding for survival. I had a morning dip in the ocean (I won't see the sea again until Turkey), and rode out of town by 7:3o, hoping to beat the heat. The first twenty kilometres went fine, aided by a tailwind, but after that the road changed direction enough to create a hot, dry tailwind that coated me with fine dust all day long. The heat built up rapidly, and by noon it was 48 degrees in the shade. The traffic was incessant, the scenery (cloaked by the dust haze) was non-existent, and I felt as though I was on an Exercycle from hell. My iPod (I'm cycling with a source of tunes for the first time ever) was a sanity saver and kept me going through the heat and sweat. Luckily, like at the Tour de France, passing motorists would pull up and hand me bottles of cold water on a semi-regular basis, which was A Good Thing as my water bottles were boiling hot within twenty minutes of being filled. A long lunch spent sheltering in an air-conditioned sandwich shop, and then it was back into the heat, this time with the added bonus of a long climb. By the time I put up my tent, I had gained 500 metres in altitude, most of it coming in one long, thigh-burning climb right at the end of what had been a long day. I had a kebab supper at a truck stop in the village of Konar Takhteh, turning down offers of clandestine whiskey from the staff and being flirted with by the owner's female cousin whom he called on the phone to translate for me. Afterwards I put up my tent on some rocky ground out of sight of the thunderous road traffic, falling asleep almost instantly despite the residual 32-degree heat rising from the earth beneath me.

I awoke much less sore than I had feared, after a longish, toughish first day. I remember barely being able to walk on the second morning of my 2004 ride after overdoing it, but my old joints and tendons felt good. This is just as well, as the day began with a long grunt of a climb, 400 vertical metres through desolate rock gorges. At the top, I entered a world transformed, a landscape of tomato fields and orange groves. I stopped into a tiny village to ask for water, and a local architect, who was supervising some construction work, sat me down and fed me an enormous breakfast instead. I turned down offers to stay the night and explore the ancient castles that topped the hills above the hamlet, and headed back onto the road. The landscape seemed more welcoming of humanity than the howling desert of the day before. The heat, however, was still fierce, and by the time I reached the old Sassanid Persian (the dynasty that lasted from 224-638) capital, Bijapur, it was again an incandescent 47 degrees.

I wandered around the deserted ruins (Iranian tourists are more sensible than me and show up in the early morning), admiring the very Roman-looking structures and the dramatic surroundings, at the end of a narrow river gorge and beneath a formidable rock slab. The greatest of the Sassanid kings, Shapur I, had the city built partly by a captured Roman army; he obliterated the Roman legions at the battle of Edessa in 260, and brought back the Roman emperor Valerian in chains to live out his life in comfortable house arrest in a palace in Bijapur. Sensibly, some of the main structures were subterranean, insulating them from the worst of the summer inferno.

I then made a strategic miscalculation, mostly out of ignorance. I rode up the gorge, looking for the cave in which a colossal statue of Shapur I still stands. I thought it was a short scramble above the road, but, as I found out, it is some 400 vertical metres above the valley, a harsh, sun-baked 45 minutes that took a lot out of my already-tired legs. I was accompanied by a helpful Iranian math/physics student named Mehdad, which was a blessing since the path was barely discernible on the rocky hillside. The views from the top, and of the statue itself, rewarded the effort, but by the time I got back down to the bottom and started riding, it was 4:30 and I hadn't had any lunch. I bumped my way down what Mehdad called a shortcut and what I called a dry riverbed, and ended up back on the road by 5:15, tired and hungry. I rolled along until I found another kebab joint, filled my belly, and then rode along until I reached the foot of what looked like a pretty sizeable climb, where I called it a day and camped amidst a sparse oak forest. It was amazing to me that after such heat during the day, 34 degrees inside the tent actually felt cool. In the middle of the night, I woke up chilly as the temperature dropped to 24 degrees, and crawled under my sleeping bag.

Being at 1040 metres, I knew I had to climb another 500 metres or so to get to Shiraz on the third day, but I didn't realize how much extra climbing would be involved. I spent the morning gaining nearly 1000 metres along a pretty road giving great views back over the inclined rock slabs that make up the Zagros Mountains. I bought some plums and figs from roadside vendors and had a wonderful breakfast in the forest. I finally topped out at 2040 metres and was rewarded with a minuscule downhill into a fertile agricultural plain alive with the wheat and tomato harvests, and covered with tent cities of Qashqai nomads who come in to help with the harvesting. After lunch, I anticipated a gentle descent into the city, but instead I undulated all afternoon, climbing a hundred metres only to lose the altitude again. My legs felt like lead by the time I reached the long-anticipated downhill coast into Shiraz. I promptly got lost in the vast maze of insane traffic that is modern Shiraz, and had to be guided to my hotel by a passing Iranian cyclist. I slept well that evening.

Yesterday I accomplished something that had been a worry ever since I got my 15-day Iranian visa. In a matter of an hour, I got a 30-day extension that means I could stay here, if I wanted, until August 29th. I had heard all sorts of worrying stories about people not being able to extend their visas, but the officers I dealt with were extremely helpful and actually offered me even more time if I wanted it.

Relieved, I made my way out to some of the mandatory sights of Shiraz: the tombs of Saadi and Hafez, two of the greatest Persian poets, and to a famous garden. Saadi's tomb was beautiful and peaceful, despite the hordes of tourists, and I was fascinated to watch the groups of Iranian tourists and how they behaved: groups of schoolgirls swathed in black running down to soak their feet in the famous underground fish pond; young couples having clandestine rendezvous in the alcoves of the gardens; middle-class tourists in their finery; a wandering dervish (like a Muslim sadhu). I haven't read much of Saadi's poetry, but he has enjoyed a bit of a popularity boom in the West recently; for those of you interested, check out this link to his verses. I also checked out the tomb of Hafez, without doubt the most beloved literary figure in Iran. (Here's where you can read some of his verse which, I think, doesn't translate really well.) Unfortunately, the tomb complex is undergoing renovation, and the jackhammers destroyed any sense of peace or beauty. The garden was closed by the time I got there, so I retired to my hotel for a siesta, and then went out to another nearby garden to sit under the fruit trees and relax after the adrenaline-inducing, lightning-reaction full-contact sport that is riding in Iranian cities.

I went out on the town last night with an Iranian guy whom I met on the road to Shiraz. It was a funny evening: lots of driving around, picking up friends, picking up a shipment of beer, buying flowers, before finally settling in for a massive feast and too much Heineken and Scotch. The food was spectacular, and the evening ended with his kid sister playing the piano for us, and then me getting pressed into playing as well. Years of lack of practice and hours of Scotch didn't help my performance, but it was fun, and Mehrdod's mother and other sister came down to listen.

Today has been a day of unapologetic sloth, seeing the exquisite Nasir-ul-Molk mosque and another garden, lounging in the same garden as yesterday, and catching up on diaries and this blog. Tomorrow, I'm off to the ancient Achaemenid Persian capital of Persepolis, a place I've wanted to visit ever since I was a kid and read about Alexander the Great conquering the Persians. After that, a brief visit to Cyrus the Great's original capital at Pasargadae, and then the longish (400 km) haul to Esfahan, a ride that I'm assured is far flatter and a bit cooler than what I just rode.

For those of you keen to see what sort of hellaciously hot weather you're missing, check out the Wunderground forecasts for Bushehr, Shiraz, Esfahan, Qazvin and Astara, and think of me sweating my way across the Iranian plateau!!

I hope you're all having a great summer and I'll bid you adieu until Esfahan.

For the cycling statistic geeks out there, I'll keep updating this table as the trip continues.

Riding Day No.	Date	Distance From Bushehr	Daily Distance	Final Elevation	Vertical Metres	Cycling Time	Average Speed	Maximum Speed	Daily Destination
1	7/16	119.0	119.0	515	1075	7:55	15.1	?	Konar Takhteh
2	7/17	204.8	85.8	1047	1222	6:14	13.8	55.2	85 km from Shiraz
3	7/18	306.3	101.5	1460	1512	7:37	13.3	47.7	Shiraz

In Iran!!

2009-07-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 15, Bushehr

After two and a half very frustrating days of delay, I've finally made it to the Islamic Republic of Iran, after a ferry that started after midnight and got in at 5 pm. It's a relief to have made it, and to think that, if all goes well, I will have taken my last public transport for at least four months. I hate not being in control of when I leave, and a two and a half day delay did nothing to cure me of this hatred.

Bushehr is a relief after Kuwait; although the temperature was 33 degrees when I rolled my bike ashore, it was fully 15 degrees cooler than in Kuwait, and instead of a dragon's breath wind roaring in off the desert, pleasant sea breezes cool the town in the late afternoon. I toured the local "sights", such as they are (crumbling houses from eighty years ago that, except for the old British Consulate, were never much to look at), changed some money and am now about to get some sleep in preparation for an early departure tomorrow morning to beat the heat. I hope to be in Shiraz in three days, via some interesting ruins at Bishapur, and in either Esfahan or Yazd five days after that. My route choice will depend on what's going on with visa extensions; I only got 15 days on my visa, so I need at least another two weeks to make it to the Azeri frontier and see the sights along the way.

Anyway, after months of anticipation and weeks of preparation and slow travel to get here, the first pedal strokes of the trip will take place tomorrow morning. Only 6000 meandering kilometres to go until I reach the Mediterranean! I can't wait!