Day 1,504
Going backwards to go forwards
Whenever we spend a few days in a city, the chances are other cycle tourers will be doing the same, and Tbilisi is a very popular spot, especially at the moment when onward travel means lots of time needed for organising. Those heading towards the Pamirs along the Silk Road have to contend with closed land borders, safety issues in Iran, visas etc. For us it was time to reflect on just what we want to do. Us tourers reach out to each other through WhatsApp groups, and I'd agreed to help Deborah from Switzerland and her Australian partner Rowan. Deborah needed an oil change kit for her Rohloff hub and as we carry spares I offered to sell her one. Needless to say we met up over a beer, I mean meeting an Aussie bloke, it seemed rude not too! They brought alone a fellow Brit, Simon, AKA @cheesywattsits. He wasn't averse to drinking a beer or two and we all got along famously. So much so in fact that we met up again a couple of nights later, Deborah cooking us a meal at their Airbnb, Tom created a cocktail in honour of the occasion, a particularly popular decision I believe (The Bananaramaramalangadingdong), but for some reason my memory of the evening is a little hazy.
Tom and I explored a bit more of Tbilisi, we took the funicular railway to the top of the Mtatsminda, which means ‘Holy Mountain’. In the early 1900s plans were made to expand Tbilisi by using land at the top of the Mtatsminda and a Belgium engineer, Alphonse Roby, designed a 500m long railway to connect the lower and upper levels. Unfortunately though, the railway that was built there was never expanded due to the not so small matter of there being no natural water supply up there, oops! Still the railway is great fun, and they did build a massive funfair and TV tower. A local dog guided us round, and much to our relief the funfair was closed, apparently 9am on a Tuesday morning not a popular time to loop the loop and have the bejesus scared out of you on the big wheel. So it was just Tom, Fido and I. We had a lovely wander around, I ate my usual treat, an ice cream, then it was back downhill to hide from the heat in our apartment.
We then spent a ridiculous amount on two empty bike boxes, and packed up our bikes and kit. The bikes shops have cottoned on to the fact that as Azerbaijan has not reopened its land borders since Covid and the only way out of Georgia is to fly, what was once just waste cardboard is now a valuable commodity.
But where should we fly to? Matt P, Uwe and Sabine were busy melting in 50 degree plus weather along the Silk Road in the ‘Stans. We don’t like the idea of faking it to get a Chinese visa. It’s still summer in the northern hemisphere so we don’t want to waste that and head south? But it’s really hot at low altitude, so maybe we need to hit some mountains. What about the Pyrénées and Alps? Our Schengen allowance had almost started again because we had been in Turkey so long. And my family are planning a holiday in Toulouse in August! That sounds like a plan - fly to Barcelona, ride over the Pyrénées for the family holiday, then over the Alps to another airport to take us somewhere else in autumn. This also gives us time to decide where we should go, because we are really undecided. The European restart to the world tour has seriously unsettled us and messed up ‘The Line’. So Spain, here we come, for the second time on this round-the-world trip!
