The Night Bus That Wasn’t (2)

This was written while I was still in Colombia, at the town of Capurgana; about one week into my trip. So, having read the previous post, you’ll understand that I hadn’t had all my Colombian experiences at the time of this writing.

I left Cartagena by bus and spent the weekend in the little town of Covenas; it was an adequate beach town, had some edible street food - something like empanadas filled with potatoes and beans. They had a sauce called suero, which was a soured milk, incredibly salty. By itself I considered it nasty, but they mixed it with some tomato substance - maybe ketchup - and it made a very nice condiment for potato/meat substances.

Saturday night I went to the circus (it was in town!). Rather lame, but for $1.50 it was not unentertaining. This morning they brought me a Guanabana, since I had mentioned I wanted one and couldn’t find one. It tasted much like a sour cherimoya. Good, but not outstanding. Cherimoyas are better. They’re the same family, but Guanabanas are much larger.

So to head to my ultimate destination of Capurgana I need to take two buses and a boat ride, so Sunday morning I got on the bus to Monterias. On the way, I had to change the bus for another one. I met a local girl, we talked for quite a while on the second leg of the bus. They have an obsession with music, nonstop, loud, all the time - even more than most Latin American countries. And apparently, the girl felt the loud music on the bus wasn’t enough for me to properly enjoy, because she insisted I use one ear of her iphone earbuds also, so not only was I trying to understand her babbling, but it was amidst the rattling and two different sets of music. But she also insisted on helping me get on the right bus when we to my stop, which was nice.

Once on that bus - the one from Monteria to Turbo - all was well for awhile. The scenery was nice. Then we started having longer and longer stretches of unpaved roads. Which was jouncy, but not much more so than normal. Then we passed a flooded road, then finally after about 2-3 hours of what should have been a 5 hour trip, we started passing trucks parked along side the road - miles of them. Finally we got to the front, where both lanes were filled with immobile trucks, cars and buses, all with motobikes zipping between them.

Apparently there was a mudslide up ahead, but they were working on it and it was supposed to be fixed in an hour - however, there were also two more problems farther up the road, and no one knew about them. I went up to look, and the road had literally slid away. They were taking some of the rocks that had been shoring it up and putting it in a hastily-cut, muddy section of new road beside it. The ditch was full of thousands of bananas, implying that it was a banana truck that had initially “discovered” the road was unstable.

I killed the time walking around, writing on the computer a bit, but then things started to move so I headed back for the bus. Shortly after I arrived, we were informed that we were changing to a different bus. So we all picked up our luggage and walked about a half-mile back to another bus. This one did not smell better. But it had a higher wheelbase that would be able to get across the newly repaired gap better.

By this time they were letting the first cars across, ten per side at a time. The problem being that there were miles of cars in both lanes all headed the opposite direction, and most of these vehicles were trucks, wide, long, heavy trucks. All went well for about 45 minutes, and we were about to get to our turn in line, when suddenly the impatient drivers all lost their cool at once and started stampeding towards the barely repaired, one-lane muddy gap. From both sides of the road at the same time.

Naturally, no one else moved that night. One of the trucks, whose weight I couldn’t begin to estimate, was an extra-long semi, stacked full, 7′ wide and 5′ tall, of hardwood planks. The weight was enormous. And it sank into that new mud road like butter, jackknifed, and when the backhoe tried to pull it out, broke the cables.

I walked out to survey the damage - having some experience getting stuck things out of ditches - and it was completely hopeless. Short of completely unloading it, waiting for the road to dry, or cutting a new road, no one was moving. So I went back and was getting ready to take a moto taxi to the last town - a long, bumpy, and probably expensive trip in the wrong direction - but one that would have a bed at the end - when they said we were changing buses again. I decided that sounded like it was worth a try, and we started walking. Seems they had made a deal to temporarily trade buses with another company that had a bus full of people on the other side of the gap trying to get our direction. That way we could “just” turn around and go on our merry way. Good plan, really.

And all we had to do was move one truck that was blocking that bus in. Unfortunately, no one could find the driver. So we waited. This bus did not smell as good as the last one. By now it was well after dark, 3 or 4 hours having passed, everyone was starving. I passed around the rest of the Guanabana I hadn’t eaten that morning, which was warmly received. I gather it’s something of a rare, expensive treat to the people here. After that I was something of a hero and they took special care of me.

But we were still stuck with no hope of getting out of there. Not only were we blocked in, pointing the wrong direction, but even if we got out, everyone said the road was blocked ahead and we couldn’t get through anyway. At about 9:30, I was giving up on getting out of there and looking for a flat place to lay down and wait out the night - a truck hood, the roof of the bus, anything dry and flat. When the sound of a diesel engine roared up behind me - they had hotwired the truck and started it moving.

This was the first ray of hope we’d had in quite some time. Then as we were moving it, some trucks came up from the way we were headed, and said, so to speak, that the pass was clear. This met with more rejoicing from the tired, hungry, intrepid 25-or-so of us who had stuck it out through the bus transfers. Several had deserted by now.

Well, turning a bus around on a narrow dirt road crowded with semis was a challenge, but was accomplished. Somewhere in the middle of all this the driver of the truck we had hotwired came up, and was quite steamed, but somehow they worked it out. I wasn’t able to follow the shouting match very closely.

Well, we started bouncing along again, through potholes that were enormous - the size of volkswagons, it felt like - and along and along for hours. The places were the road had flooded were passable, but very badly potholed. Some of them literally bounced you a foot up off of the seat when they were hit. Seriously, no exaggeration - a foot off your seat.

About an hour later - this about 11pm - we passed through a town - barely more than a truckstop of a town, and all the restaurants were closed but 25 hungry travelers weren’t to be denied. So they practically forced the people to reopen the restaurant and whip up some food. Which they did, and fairly quickly too, and although there wasn’t really enough to go around, we all managed. By now the relief had set in and so everyone was acting a bit drunk. Giggling and cackling as tired, relieved women are wont to do. Then they discovered the restaurant served beer. That did not make them less drunk.

So after eating, we kept moving. Now several of them were seriously drunk, one in particular (who naturally was my neighbor) kept yelling at the top of his lungs to the driver to turn up the radio. Fortunately, he got off about halfway there, so only an hour of that to deal with. The rest of us went on to Turbo, where all the people insisted I not go to the bus terminal as it was dangerous at that time of night. So they asked the bus driver to go off the route to drop me off at a certain hotel. Which was very nice. We said goodbyes all around.

Naturally, that hotel was closed. So I took a taxi to another one. I walked past the men cavorting with women of questionable virtue, stepped over the drunk sleeping in the stairwell, banged on the iron bars with the big lock, and was answered this time. She said it was 12$, I said I didn’t care, so she started taking my information and then said “you’re not from here!” (Well duh). I said “no, the USA”. She said “I can’t rent you a room if you’re a foreigner”.

I tried to talk her out of it but it was some sort of law. She pointed me to another hotel across the square, which was 25$ once I managed to rouse the clerk, who was rather rude but gave me a room which was actually fairly clean and nice.

Except that it faced the street, where motorcycle gangs raced back and forth all night. I complained and asked for a room farther back, but she said it didn’t matter because I had to be up at 6am to catch the boat to Capurgana (my paradaisical beach destination), so I wasn’t going to get much sleep anyway. I was tired enough so it didn’t really matter anyway, and slept through most of it. That morning (or later that same night, depending on how you look at it) I got up at 6:00 to get the boat, which it turns out wasn’t scheduled to leave until 8:30, and in fact did not leave until 9:30.

The boat ride was pretty and uneventful, except extremely bumpy - bonejarringly so - I was seriously concerned about being tossed out of the boat a few times. I had been “encouraged” by the locals to sit in the front, the gringo seat, which is because it takes the worst of the beating on the waves.

Well, now I’m at the beach destination, which does seem very nice. We’ll see if it was all worth it over the next few days.

Oh, and I’m flying out.

Posted on December 21st, 2011 by Natnee and filed under Mexico | No Comments »

My Trip To Colombia

I left for Colombia December 14th; I found some really good ticket prices via Spirit Air, and had wanted to go there for a long time. But the strain of blogging has at times worn me out on other trips, so I decided this time to take the trip off; no worries about blogging.

To make a long story short, I spent five weeks there. Colombia is safe for tourists - except for two places, one mentioned in a story to come next week, and the other is Bogota, where armed stickups in broad daylight are common. I personally met two people who had it happen to them during my 5 days in Bogota, a city which I decidedly did not like.

The rest of Colombia is pretty cool. Cartagena was my favorite city, about the only classic colonial city that has ever actually felt classic and colonial and relatively untouristed. I mean, it is a tourist trap, but it’s not as developed as Puerto Vallarta or even Cuenca, Ecuador. Well, I liked it.

I next went to Capurgana, a beach village accessible only by boat on the border with Panama; spent a week there and loved it. I may blog a story or two about that later. Then I flew to Medellin, which was so-so; then I went south to Santa Rosa de Cabal, famous for hot springs, and spent a pleasant week there. Then  I went to Armenia (the town, not the country - now I’ve been to both!) and went to the butterflyery (that’s the literal translation).Got rained out and saw no butterflies.

Then to Bogota, where I had to cool my heels while I waited on a plane for about 5 days, then to my real destination, the Amazon. The Amazon did not disappoint, it was great, by far the highlight of the trip.

Colombia is safe. I saw no narcs, was hassled by no federales, had no close brushes with death due to drive-by-shootings. I didn’t go looking for trouble, but none came looking for me, either, and that’s all I ask.

Overall, I found Colombia itself to be unremarkable. Not unsafe, the people were pleasant, the scenery nice, but nothing in Colombia made me say “ok, I HAVE to go back here” - except the Amazon, and that’s not really Colombia per se. I think if I were to return to the Amazon, I’d fly to Peru and hit their Amazon - they have a lot more of it, and it’s easier to get to.

Plus, the Peruvian food is better. So far, everyone I know who has been to both places agrees. Colombian food is… well, awful. It is bland, tough, and repetitive. Their primary meal, for both lunch and dinner, is called a Bandeja. This means a large plate with rice, fried green plantains, a piece of tough chicken, beef, or pork, and perhaps a small raw, dressingless cabbage salad and/or a soup. The soup was the only part of the meal I liked, so I wound up eating a LOT of soup in Colombia. They have this EVERY DAY, TWICE, in every part of the country where I was. Breakfast is usually scrambled eggs and coffee and a thick, chewy, homemade tortilla.

Now if you go to the large cities like Medellin and want to drop 12-15$ on a meal, you can find food as good as anywhere else; the exception is Bogota, where I never really found good food. Maybe it was there and I missed it, I don’t know, but I had horrible times eating in Bogota.I recall being overjoyed when I found a vegetarian restaurant owned by Hari Krishnas and when my order came it was YELLOW! Sweet, wonderful curry and SPICES! At that, it was only marginal, but compared to what I’d been eating it was wonderful.

There were some highlights foodwise; they eat hot chocolate with most meals, and all breakfasts. I got rather hooked on that. They put cheese in it in some places, which I did not get hooked on.

They had lots of juice stands all over, so I ate a lot of milkshake smoothies. They did this thing called an Arepa in some cities, notably Cartagena, which was essentially grits formed into a patty and fried. Sometimes with cheese in the middle, sometimes with honey and butter on top. Those were good, when I could get them. In other places, an Arepa was a fat chewy corn tortilla.

Hmm. I think those are actually all the highlights of the food after five weeks in Colombia. My best meals of the trip were the two days I spent in the Peruvian Amazon. Colombians are very sensitive to spice. I made some homemade ginger tea once, and nearly gagged my hosts when they tried it. Way too spicy, they said. I was so desperate for spice when I finally got back to the USA, I thought I would die. I still haven’t gotten over it.

But I don’t mean to disparage Colombia. It really was a nice place. I talked to hundreds of other travelers though, and I found a pattern which never failed; everyone who had never been to Latin America before - those to whom Colombia was the first time - thought it was amazing.

Anyone who had been ANYWHERE else in Latin America before this trip said Colombia was so-so. Unremarkable, just like I thought. Nice, pretty, but unmemorable and with lousy food. It lacks the natural wonders of Costa Rica, the great foods of Mexico, Guatemala or El Salvador, the archeological diversity of Peru… it just isn’t amazing. It’s fine. But I was very happy to leave after five weeks.

I do have some very nice pictures I’ll post of my travels in Colombia eventually.

Posted on February 28th, 2011 by Natnee and filed under Colombia | No Comments »

The Last Week In Armenia

We stayed in the Maghay Guesthouse in Vanadzor, which was a very nice, European-style house with high ceilings and china closets and the works. It was a bit more expensive than we’d been paying, but it was quiet, nice beds, and internet. And included breakfast for 20$ p/p. For an extra 10$ p/p she served dinner, which was an expensive but really expansive dinner; soup, several eggplant dishes, the omnipresent tomatoes/cucumbers, a meat dish, fruit, the works. Strangely, we were never offered wine at this place. And we actually ate with the family, which was pleasant. Breakfast was equally large, though based around grits or oatmeal, with eggs and other side dishes.

We went the next morning to Fioletovo and just got dropped off. We walked through town, for several miles, looking at the people, who were clearly a different ethnicity than the rest of the Armenians; strong, big bones, blue eyes, blond hair, and had a serious thing for flowers. All the yards were bursting with them, as you can see in the pictures below.

As near as I can understand it, in the 1850s a group broke off of the Russian Orthodox Church protesting the restrictions against drinking milk during lent. A few other doctrines were also different, but the milk thing got the most publicity, so they were dubbed “the milk-drinkers”, and apparently persecuted quite severely and fled to other countries. There are several pockets of them around the world, in many ways they are like the Amish or Mennonites. They keep to themselves, don’t intermarry with the peoples around them, and so on. The seem to make their living selling their produce and milk in nearby towns.

Well, as we walked through there we definitely could tell this was different. The men all wore long beards, the women had shawls on their hair, the houses all had flowers and many had haystacks taller than the house itself. Then we walked out of that village and a little while farther along into another one, which just as clearly was different. Different people, not as well maintained, not as neat.

We tried striking up conversations with several people, but they are rather closed and suspicious of outsiders. Some waved back, some didn’t, when I waved first. We had wanted to ask them several questions about their lifestyle and the milk, but with the language barrier on top of their aloofness, it just wasn’t possible for us. We thought perhaps we’d bring back the daughter of the owner of the homestay the next day for an interpreter, but naturally she left for Yerevan before we could do that. No one else spoke good enough English to act as interpreter that we had met.

So we just decided to enjoy Vanadzor, which has a huge market, and a pleasant one at that, and then go to Yerevan on Friday. So far this is the least hectic trip we’ve ever taken, with us spending several days in each place. Of course, these are the smallest countries we’ve ever been in too, so nothing was that far away from anything else.

Arriving in Yerevan Friday around noon, we set out for the Armenian Museum of history; it was a large museum, but the parts I really wanted to see - the 7^th century BC to the 4^th century AD - was closed. So we decided to try a different museum on Sunday. Then we discovered it was closed Sunday AND Monday. We found another museum on Monday, but of course, it was closed Monday too. We decided it was conspiracy.

It seemed like everything we wanted to do in Yerevan we couldn’t, because it was closed. The Opera was closed until September 20^th (this being the 12^th). The chess club was closed Monday, and I didn’t find it until Monday. The food market was open Monday, but the shoe market was closed and Crystal wanted some slip-on shoes for the flight. So we gave up and just ate and walked around town. Spent some time socializing with the other backpackers at the hostel. Tried to soak up sleep for the brutal flight back home - even more brutal now because we had changed our plans again. Instead of flying home to Dallas, we decided to fly straight to San Francisco and spend 3 weeks traveling around there, meeting up with my parents and renting a house for a week or two.

Meanwhile, back in Yerevan, it was Sunday and we went to the famous Vernissage market, a place where you go to buy gifts for home or a faucet for your apartment. Enormous and sprawling, it mostly had carvings, jewelry, clothes, and soviet memorabilia - in case your collection back home is missing an army hat or a medal of honor. They had some nice chess sets, but they were priced rather high - about 100$ for the cheapest normal-sized one.

But I found a used soviet-era chess set, about 30 years old, for MUCH cheaper, and in many ways it was even nicer because it had character. I bought it for one of my employees and bought a painting on a log-slice for another employee.  (And I liked it so much, I bought another for myself!)

As we wandered through the market, I spied a chess set (one clearly not for sale) with its owner nearby, and walked up to him and said “shakmat?” (”Chess?”) and pointed to myself, and then at him. He understood and went to get someone else, who apparently was a better player (or maybe more interested?). Regardless, we sat down and played. Soon we had a half-dozen people watching and smoking. It was quite a unique experience. After playing him, I played another player there, which was a very hard fought game - mostly my own fault, since I told Crystal early on in the game, before castling queen-side, “you know how sometimes you see a move that’s a lot of fun, but that you’ll probably regret later… this is one of those… oh well, why not?”

He almost had me at one point, but let me slip away. Anyway, it was great fun and I think he enjoyed it too. So we parted before I bored Crystal too much and grabbed a kebab and soup for lunch. Monday we went to the market again for some dried fruit to take home on the plane. Found a stand, and didn’t even need to ask for samples; we had, literally, handfuls of them shoved at us. And before we could finish those, he gave us samples of something else. And something else. About 10-12 things we sampled, by which time we were really full. We bought some of the best-tasting stuff, and then had to face the challenge of finding a box to put all of our things to take home - which tallied at roughly…

5 kilos (11 pounds) of dried figs

5 kilos of golden raisins

3 kilos of cured meat [note written after we arrived: all the meat was confiscated; apparently no meat, cured, cooked, or otherwise is allowed in, period - everything else made it through customs fine]

1 kilo of dried cherries

¼ kilo of dark raisins

One chess set

Two small paintings-on-logs

One string of walnuts dipped in something that looks like paraffin… but isn’t. I still don’t know what it is. Oh, and he insisted on giving us some fruit lavash - we call it fruit leather back home - for free. So the box had to be fairly large, and so we walked all over the back streets trying to find a box someone had thrown out, since the grocery stores said it was too late to get any from them that day since they’d gotten rid of them already.

We walked about 10 blocks, finally stopped at a pharmacy and after explaining ourselves badly in horrible Russian we managed to convey our need, she gave us a box, and we kept walking. Found a market to buy a roll of tape, then we were walking past a small restaurant and I said “something cooking on a spit”, idly, as we walked by, and then I heard this voice saying “chicken!” - apparently the owner understood English. So I was hungry and I hadn’t eaten this yet, so we got it and went.

Somewhere in all this we had bought a bunch of peaches and grapes, fresh. I knew we probably couldn’t get them back into the USA through customs, but if we could take them on the plane with us until we got there, we could survive the ordinarily horrible airline food. And it worked! Countries seldom care what you take OUT of their country - only what you bring in. So we can bring fresh fruit on the flight, as long as it’s gone by the time we arrive. At least, we did here. So we chopped them up, put them in our handy containers for the trip, and put them in the fridge to chill. And that’s about it, really. We woke up at 4:45 AM to catch the taxi to the plane, and as I write this we are over Sweden.

Many more things happened to us of course, but some of them I’ve forgotten and some, you just had to be there. All in all, Georgia and Armenia are the most hospitable places I’ve ever been in. The capital cities not so much, but if you get away from the pressure of Tbilisi and, to a lesser extent, Yerevan, they are wonderful places. The food really is outstanding and across the board, most produce tested out higher on a refractometer than the equivalent would back home - in some places so high it was off the chart.

As for the longevity we set out to find… we discovered it was actually Abkhazia which had the longevity, primarily, which is technically part of Georgia but is now occupied by Russia… and you can’t get there from Georgia. The other place is in Dagestan, which is also Russia, on the other end of the Caucasus. So we really weren’t able to find anything out about that this trip. Like the guy says in National Treasure… there’s always another clue!

Posted on December 12th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Omalo To Vanadzor

Sorry it’s been several months getting this posted; obviously I made it out of the mountains and back home. In fact, I’m getting ready to leave for Colombia. But last time you read, we were in the mountains of Omalo, Georgia, eating good food and seeing beautiful mountains.

The next day we set out for a place even more remote and farther into the mountains, a village called Dartlo. It was an hour jeep ride and perched on the bank of a river a little village of stone castles, which are very common here. The people who lived here 300 years ago were constantly at war with the people across the mountains in Dagestan, and so they built castles out of the plentiful slate stone for defence; castle isn’t quite the right word, mostly they are a single turret about 20 feet square and perhaps 50 feet tall. Regardless, there was an unbroken network of these stretching across the mountains for many miles. This way they could warn one another if the evil Dagestanis came pillaging. I don’ t know if the Dagestanis had some similar defensive measure against the evil Tushetians or not.

There was a new hostel there which was not too cheap but not too expensive, and it was perched on the edge of the river with a fine view of the narrow valley. We spent first one day there, then decided to just stay there and “be” for a few days. The first day we ate the food, which was good, but not as good as other places we’d been. The room was half the price with no meals, so we arranged to have no meals but get 6 liters of milk a day and do the milk diet for a few days. The milk here tested between 10-12 brix depending on the milking, so it was plenty good enough for the purpose.

We had difficulty conveying this idea to them however, since they spoke little English and we spoke even less Russian. They still made us lunch the next day, after we told them not to. Then they wanted to make us dinner, and we again said that no, we only wanted milk. We did this for several days until they finally realized that we weren’t going to eat anything but milk, which they didn’t mind telling us, they thought was a little odd.

The milk diet was quite popular in the USA a hundred years ago and was widely used to treat and cure many diseases, usually by living on nothing but milk for six weeks or so. Always raw milk, unpasteurized. While we were doing this, we met a backpacker from the UK who told us about a group called the Molokani, a Russian word meaning “milk drinkers”. They apparently live in an enclave in Fioletovo, a village in northern Armenia where we were planning to go anyway, so we decided we’d definitely hit that on the way home.

He helped us by translating some phrases into Russian to talk to them when we got there, and then left for farther up the valley. All in all, it was a peaceful way to spend several days. I have a 12-hour battery and a 5-hour battery for my laptop, both of which were full on arrival. We got about 2 hours of charging each night from the generator, which with my usage during the day meant I gradually lost more and more power each night - but it came out perfectly with us leaving for Omalo on the day I was finally completely drained of power!

We returned to Omalo with the intent to catch the plane the next morning. Unfortunately, the plane wasn’t going to run again for another week, despite being scheduled for the next day. I never figured out exactly why. But we were stuck going back down the mountain again by Jeep.

We spent the day in Omalo with the homestay we’d stayed at on the way up, who were getting ready to leave the mountains for the winter and go back to their home in Alvani, in the valley. So they fed us breakfast, then invited us to their going-away lunch party with their friends, which was an interesting experience. The food was good, as always, and the people were nice. This was the first time we’d actually eaten *with* the locals - up to here, they had always served us in our own table by ourselves. But it was interesting to watch them eat and interact.

They have this thing about cold bread here. The local bread comes in two forms; lavash, which is basically a 2′x1′ flour tortilla, and something like a giant 2′ long croissant. At every meal, they have this croissant cut up into 2″ squares, and it is always served cold. I don’t understand why, but it’s never toasted, never served hot, and seldom even used as a dipping agent - usually just eaten plain, cold, chewy and all. No butter on it, nothing. I tasted a bit to see if it was something special, and it was just like you’d expect day-old bread to taste - nasty. But they consume a great deal of it here, and had trouble understanding why we didn’t.

They made corn Khachapuri here, which means a corn quesadilla. They were fairly good, although being used to Mexican foods, I felt they needed salsa and some guacamole on top, but… oh well

Speaking of which, they don’t use spice at all. I mean spicy foods like peppers and such. I think I only had black pepper in a dish once. Most everything else is prepared very simply. They put a type of sweet basil here in a lot of things - it is a *very* sweet basil, almost like eating stevia. They use a few other spices of that nature, but mostly they let the foods speak for themselves, which they do quite well.

There wasn’t much else to relate about Tusheti as a region, it was pretty, but heavily overgrazed by sheep thanks to Soviet “planning” and so erosion was pretty heavy in some spots and mountains that would otherwise be bright green were thin and sparse. Mostly we just relaxed and enjoyed the milk.

During our ride down the mountain with the taxi driver Gogi and his family, one thing happened which, to me, still doesn’t seem funny but it was apparently very funny to the others. As we were going down a very dusty hill and turning a corner, with the windows rolled down, the wind picked up and blew all the dust we’d just kicked up right through the car, especially the front seat where I was riding shotgun. Coughing and sputtering, I muttered “Karasho”, which means “Good” in Russian. I don’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to say at the time. Well, the rest of the car went into an uproar over that. It still doesn’t sound funny to me. But then about 10 minutes later, our driver playfully drove into another cloud of dust and announced “Karasho!”. That, I concede, was funny.

We arrived at the bottom of the mountain after dark; just after pulling into the town where Gogi lived, the jeep had a flat tire. Better here than some of the places we’d been earlier! So it took a few minutes to change that, by which time the homestay where we were staying, 40 minutes away, had been notified to come pick us up. Gogi and his family insisted on waiting with us in the middle of town, even though it was about 9 PM, and I told them we’d be fine, but they were firm that they didn’t leave until we had a ride. Which was rather touching, I thought.

Anyway, we said goodbye to them and went to the homestay in Telavi, spent a night there, left the next morning by Marshrutka for Tbilisi, where we immediately caught another Marshrutka for Vanadzor. We were planning to find a place to stay in Fioletovo, a beautiful area just west of Vanadzor, where the Molokani lived.

So we went to the market, checked Email for the first time in a week, then caught a taxi to Fioletovo. I knew from the start it wasn’t going to go well because the taxi driver was intense, impatient, and didn’t seem to know the area at all. Plus of course, he spoke no English. But we conveyed we wanted to go to Fioletovo and find a hotel, and we went and then he couldn’t find one; he asked some people, impatiently, with the tone of “these stupid Americans don’t know where a hotel is, DO YOU???” - well, to make a long story short we spent about a half-hour looking for one with him getting more and more impatient - the taxi was on a meter, so it wasn’t like he wasn’t being paid - but finally I realized this wasn’t going to work and conceded defeat for the night. We went back to Vanadzor and stayed in a B&B I found in the guidebook, and the story will properly pick up there next time….

Posted on December 5th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Mexico | No Comments »

Trying To Travel To Tusheti

So we waited all afternoon for the road to open. After an hour or two, Gogi, our driver took us back to his house and fed us watermelon and then about noon said the road was not going to open today. So we went back to the square to pick up a marshrutka back to Telavi when Crystal said “Hey! I see backpackers!”

Naturally I walked over to investigate, and asked if they’d heard the road was closed. They hadn’t, so they asked someone else who said the road should be open by 2 o’clock. By this time, Crystal had our bags in the Marshrutka and was calling me to come on, it was ready to leave, so I made the decision to stick around and give this another shot.

We waited with the other backpackers, who were Israelis, for a few hours. I juggled to amuse myself and them, and we kept asking about the road. Finally, about 3 o’clock we gave up and sought other plans. We decided that four of us would go back to Telavi where I had stayed the night before, and two would go on to Sighnagi, a town I still can’t spell, for the weekend.

We managed to cram 6 backpackers, a driver, and all their  unnecessarily-large bags into a VERY small taxi. I would have taken a picture but there is no way it would have done justice to the image which you can see in your mind. On the upside, it was cheap splitting taxi fare 6 ways!

Halfway back to Telavi the two girls who were traveling together and going on into Sighnagi asked if Crystal and I would like to go on to Sighnagi with them so we could share taxi fare back; this sounded like a good plan, since I wasn’t looking forward to spending the weekend in a place I’d already been.

So we dropped off the two backpackers who were going to try the next day, and four of us went on to Sighnagi, 70km away. Sighnagi was a very pretty town, looks a lot like pictures you see of Tuscany, red-roofed houses with grapevines growing everywhere, cobblestone streets, and so on.

We found a guesthouse which cost 15$ per person per night with 2 meals. The first night was Friday night, and the guesthouse was owned by Georgian Jews (I think) and most of the guests were Israeli, and as we were the only gentiles present we ate at our own table.

We had a huge dinner; 10 plates piled high with food to choose from. Tomato wedges and cucumber slices, fried eggplant (which was really exquisite, and I don’t like eggplant), stewed eggplant, sliced local cheese, a huge pile of the local bread standard (which, being white bread, we didn’t eat), a carafe – probably a half-gallon – of homemade wine.

Then she brought Khachapuri, which is a local staple very much like a quesadilla, after which I said “stop, no more!” and then she brought Khinchala which is a homemade beef dumpling, and their local version of potato salad which is quite different from the American variety,  and… I can’t remember all the plates now. But they just kept coming, and we ate all we could and the hostess kept saying “maybe you want more wine?” and the few dishes we managed to empty, she refilled and brought back to us! You could have fed an army off that table.

I’m not much of a wine drinker, but I think I had about 12 ounces that night. Which for me was a lot. It was pretty good, and even Crystal, who hates wine, likes the wine here. Well, we walked around the next day a bit, took a few pictures, walked down the old city wall built 400 years ago, and then went back to the room to chill. Our guesthouse, which we shared with a family and two other guests, had a balcony looking out over the valley, which probably was 50 miles across and stretched all the way to Dagestan.

Well, I had made the mistake of drinking tap water the night before, and about 2pm my belly started complaining, and by 6pm I was throwing up, and I spent a rather unpleasant night and was very week the next morning, so we didn’t leave Sunday as planned. We wound up staying until Monday, by which time I was sufficiently recovered to try for the mountains again.

We took a Marshrutka back to Telavi, ate beef soup with “fried potatoes” (which turned out to be French fries served with tomato soup as ketchup) for lunch in a restaurant there, which was actually our first restaurant meal in either country, thus far having eaten at the markets or homestays/hotels. Then a Taxi to Alvani, where the Jeeps waited to take people up the mountain to Omalo, in the region of Tusheti, our destination.

The road was open this time, but there was no one to share the 110$ jeep fare (rather steep, I thought), so we waited hoping other travelers would show up. After an hour and a half, with the day waning, I decided to try to bargain it a bit and we agreed on 75$. It was a 4 hour trip up the mountains to Omalo, quite beautiful with waterfalls and flowers and trees, up the only road to Tusheti which wasn’t built until 1979, which gives you an idea how remote this place is.

We arrived an hour before dark at the homestay of, as it turned out, Gogi! Who had come up here the day before bringing the Israeli girls we were traveling with. For some reason which not being able to speak the language I can’t determine, they left the same day we arrived by plane. We were planning to leave the same way in a few days, as plane fare was 35$ p/p all the way back to Tbilisi, while taxi down the mountain alone would be another 75$. Plus taxis, Marshrutkas, and days of travel. You do the math!

Our homestay here was 15$ p/p with dinner and breakfast, and it was the best meal we’d had in Georgia, and again, HUGE. You don’t leave a Georgian dinner table hungry, I can tell you that. This time it was soup, bread, cheese, another homemade soft cheese, and… well, here, I’ll show you…

And this is the same table after we were stuffed to the full…

Kinda hard to see a difference, huh?

After dinner she brought in a plate full of herbs, which I sniffed, she then said they were for tea, which I understood, then asked if I wanted some, which I didn’t understand, but said “yes”, thinking she said they smelled good. Before I knew it Crystal and I had tea to go with our already huge meal. And wine – never forget the wine which flows like water here.

The tea was vaguely minty, but it must be some herb I’ve never had before. She served it with some jam on the side – something rather like a cherry, but definitely not a cherry. I didn’t really like it, and Crystal – when I finally got her to try it – hated it. She had a bad experience with cough syrup as a kid, so her and cherries don’t mix.

The hostess also gave us butter at the same time she gave us the tea, and I thought perhaps it was used in the tea – I’ve heard of that before. So I asked her if the butter was for the tea and she broke out laughing, managed to sputter no, then went out to tell her friends about the silly gringos who thought you put butter in tea! Dorks!

Well, we’ve been the topic of jokes before. Moving on, the beds left something to be desired, but the hospitality was ample. There is no electricity anywhere in this region, so she runs a generator for a few hours at dark for light and we charged our camera and computer then.I n case you thought they only served big meals for dinner…this was breakfast:

We have an outhouse, a pit outhouse at that, and cold water outside. So it isn’t exactly pampering, but the scenery is beautiful and it is peaceful and there aren’t many tourists here, and not many Americans ever make it this far.

In fact, so far we haven’t seen any Americans. We heard about a couple once, but haven’t met any. A few Czechs, a few Poles, a Frenchman, and everyone else has been Israeli. Apparently this is the “in” place to go for Israelis. It’s beautiful, cheap and close for them so I guess it’s a logical place. We must have seen 30-40 Israelis backpacking thus far.

Breakfast the next morning was equally good and huge, consisting of fried potatoes, omelet, cheese, and tea. I asked for milk, and she said there wasn’t any now but we could get some that evening.

After breakfast we made sure we understood when the plane left so we could plan accordingly, and then looked into horses so we could go for a ride someplace. Two horses, a guide, and a 7-hour round-trip trek into the mountains cost 50$. We arranged it, and took this set of photos along the way:

We stopped for lunch, spent an hour resting, then I walked on ahead downhill to catch a few pictures I hadn’t had time for earlier. When the guide and Crystal caught up with me, we discovered that we had to walk the horses downhill most of the way – something we hadn’t counted on, since she has a bum knee and I just got over being sick. But there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

I did tell the guide that we had to ride at least most of the way down (15 km, about 8 miles), and he agreed. But we had at least 2 miles of downhill walking leading the horse, which really was hard on the knees after “posting” while trotting a good portion of the morning. Posting is what you do when the horse is trotting, a sort of half-stand to take the otherwise inhuman jarring out of the ride. Basically using your knees as springs.

Well, we made it. The saddle was homemade out of rough twine and such, and so a lot of it rubbed against my bare legs and the insides of my legs were both pretty sore after the end of the day. But we finally trudged back into town, stiff and sore, but it had been a great ride. The hostess found it greatly amusing how sore we were. Dinner was again superb, and afterwards we went to get the milk.

This involved actually going to the barn and watching the woman milk the cow, strain the milk, and hand it to us. So I am sure exactly where this milk came from. I tested it with my refractometer and it was a fuzzy 12 – the highest I’ve ever tested milk. Milk is difficult to test because the sugar content – measured by the brix – can be inflated by feeding grain or molasses, without increasing the mineral content.

But in this case, I have seen no grain anywhere in town, the cow was not fed grain while milking, and so I’m thinking this is probably completely grass-fed milk. That being the case, milk that brixes at 10 while on grain is poor; milk that brixes at 10 on pure grass is probably very good. Because it means that the grass it’s eating is able to produce a great deal of sugar, something only possible if the grass is very high in minerals. And this was a 12.

So we decided not to continue on to Svaneti, since the numbers don’t work out very good for us to get there. We decided it would be better to relax and enjoy the good food and beautiful scenery of one place, than to rush around and see a little bit of both places and waste almost a week traveling to get there, which could easily happen. So we decided to stay here, without power or internet, with practically no tourists, and good food and great milk, and live the good life for ten days or so until our time runs out.

So that’s where we are now. Of course, by the time you read this we’ve obviously made it back to civilization, so technically it’s where we were then, but… you know what I mean.

Posted on September 13th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | 2 Comments »

Entering Georgia

From Dilijan we caught a taxi to Vanadzor. It was a bit chilly that morning, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt as always. Locals here have no tolerance for cold apparently, because it was only sixty-ish degrees and to see them dress you’d think it was winter already! Well, I’ve mentioned their hospitality. The taxi driver kept looking at my bare legs and arms and finally had to say something; “aren’t you cold??” he asked. I said, using two of my dozen Russian words, “Nyet, karasho!” meaning, “no, I’m good”. Well, he understood but couldn’t accept it. He kept looking at me in wonder, then when we stopped for gas he took off his jacket and insisted I wear it. And really, I wasn’t that cold! But there was no refusing, so I took it gracefully.

Speaking of Gas, most of the cars here run on propane; gasoline is the exception, not the rule. When filling with propane, we all have to exit the car in case it explodes .It takes about 10-15 minutes to fill up the tank. Anyway, we spent the morning in Vanadzor, walked through the gigantic market, got some raw milk, dried fruits, spicy homemade beef sausage, local cheese, and so on. The milk had a very pleasant taste, and cost about 50c a quart.

We caught a taxi for the border of Georgia, crossing into which was uneventful, then a marshrutka (shared minivan-taxi with 15 people in it) for Tbilisi. We noticed immediately that these people were lighter in skin tone - some lighter than I - and less happy, friendly, and apparently less healthy than the Armenians we had just left.

At the Tbilisi bus station we were immediately accosted by taxi drivers, as usual, to whom I replied with a firm no. Never, ever, take the taxi that runs to meet the bus. It speaks of either desperation or greed, neither of which spells good things.

So we got away from the concentration of sharks and were walking through the bus station, when a man - I later learned he was Nigerian, the only black man I saw the whole trip - walked up to us and asked where we were from, and where we were going. I told him and asked him how to get there, and he insisted on walking us all the way across the lot to the bus we needed to get on. Which was very nice.

After finding a hostel we went to the famed old town to look for some food. I found it quite disappointing - reminded me too much of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Overpriced food, cheesy pseudo-European sidewalk cafes, and so on. We ate, but left hungry and disillusioned. We wound up eating at a New York Burger. Rather depressing. Although I must say the ketchup was the most unusual I’ve ever had. It was thin, and had some sort of strange spice in it, like cinnamon or nutmeg. Still not sure whether I like it or not.

Next morning we set out for the Turkish Baths at Abanotubani. They are a sulphur bath where both Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas once bathed. 20$ got us a private room for 2 with a 5′ cube full of 104 degree water that smelled of rotten eggs, a shower, and tile everywhere. Swimsuit time!

Just when the water was really getting me mellow and relaxed, there was a knock at the door. At first I thought our time was up, but apparently it was our masseur. Crystal was too chicken to go first so I said sure, why not. He proceeded to lather me up, rub me down, use a scrub brush all over, use pressure points on the feet, pound on my back, and so on. Then he seemed to delight in surprising me with a bucket of hot water over my head. It took him 20 minutes to do it all. Then, since I apparently survived the experience, Crystal deigned to take a turn. Wound up costing us another 20$ for the both of us for the scrub and massage.

Found a restaurant nearby, obviously invented for tourists, but which was still fairly cheap; we had a chicken liver/heart dish, a bowl of strangely seasoned beans, and a kebab - which here means something like meatloaf rolled into football-shaped but golf-ball sized lumps. Good though.

Then we walked through the botanical gardens, and up to the top of for Narikala - where I juggled as part of my juggle-around-the-world hobby.

Finally we made our way to the train station, where we were planning to catch a train to Zugdidi, thence to Svaneti, our destination in the mountains. I should note that all Tbilisans we met were rude, pushy, aggressive and angry. I haven’t been cut off in line so many times since I was in the Andes mountains where the Indians were REALLY pushy at times.

We were standing in line in the ticket counter, very clearly, and people would just shove past us, stand on the side in the ticket counter and demand their attention next. As if we were invisible. Finally I got pushy too and no one seemed to mind. A far cry from the hospitality of Armenia, and which were to experience in rural Georgia.

Anyway, in spite of all that we found that all trains were full, we were informed rather rudely and impatiently. Until two days later. So we decided to change our plans and go to Tusheti first, then to Svaneti later. Tusheti was also mountainous, and closer. However it was too late to start for Tusheti that night, so we went to another hostel - we hadn’t liked the first one. Here we met several interesting travelers from China, Italy and Israel and stayed up chatting until fairly late.

Tried to catch a minibus to the bus station the next morning, but the first two were full, and the third one had space, but a woman saw me, pushed in front of us, onto the bus, then slammed the door behind her - and I was IN the doorway at the time! I managed to duck out and the bus pulled away. So we gave up on the minibus idea, took the underground metro and started planning our later return to Armenia via some route that did not include Tbilisi!

Next we went to Telavi, our jumping-off point for the mountains. It was too late in the day to go onward to Omalo, our destination in the mountains, so we stayed in a homestay in Telavi. This was our first real homestay, in a beautiful 19^th century European-style home with 10′ ceilings and beautiful antiques. They made us dinner, and breakfast, and doted on us terribly. Their hospitality was incredible, and they only charged us 10$ each for the room and two meals. And another 5$ to drive us to the next town to pick up the taxi for the mountains. I left another 10$ on the bed to thank them for going above and beyond, since I was pretty sure they wouldn’t take it if I offered it.

As I write this, I am waiting in a shared jeep for a trip up into the mountains. It’s a 3.5 hour trip, but we’ve just been informed that the roads are closed until this afternoon due to a lot of rain last night, and maybe closed even then, so we’re not sure what happens next. But hey, that’s part of travel when you’re not with the tour group!

Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Jermuk (They spell it with a “D”).

We walked the distance to the Shuka, the local name for the market where they sell produce of all sorts. Arriving there, things were just starting to get moving and most of the vendors were still closed. I was struck by the fact that all the products were just setting there, under a sheet - not all wrapped up and taken home every night like I’m used to seeing in Latin America. They must be more trusting/trustworthy here.

We wandered through the market and noticed how prettily the food was stacked. We were soon waylaid by a vendor trying to get us to taste her wares - she gave us an apricot and, you’ll think I’m lying, I kid you not when I bit into that apricot I heard singing saying “aaaaaaaah”! It was hands down the best apricot I had ever tasted. It was fresh, but it had all the concentrated flavors of dried apricots, plus some others thrown in. It was amazing.

Then we tried a fig; now mind you, I’ve eaten many fresh figs in my life, I grow my own at home. And I thought I’d had good figs before. I hadn’t. These were spectacular. Using the refractometer, they brixed at 30, while the best figs at home usually brix at 20 - making them 50% sweeter, and more healthy, than the best fig I’d ever eaten.

We tried their blackberries - again, unbelievably good blackberries. Small, and tender, and juicy. The peaches were good, but not outstanding, and so were the tomatoes. The grapes however were excellent, with a brix of 20 which is really good for grapes. I also bought some dried figs which were so tender they were just a little harder than fresh figs, with a dried center that tasted like it had jam inserted into it. Many people have noted the correlation between high-brix foods and healthy people, and here I am eating it and seeing it for myself.

Finally, stuffed and with a backpack loaded with food, we caught a taxi to find the shared minivan going to Jermuk. 2.5 hours later we arrived in Jermuk, the home of some incredible mineral water hot-springs and sanatoriums set up by the Soviets to send workers to for rejuvenation. We wound up staying at a place which was very expensive for me (75$/per person), but it included three buffet meals a day, internet, and treatment at the sanatorium. So at that, it wasn’t too bad.

We ate dinner there that night, tried some of everything, and it was almost all good. Green beans were incredibly sweet. And the potatoes! They were whole, peeled, boiled white potatoes. And yet, if I were blindfolded, I would have sworn I was eating mashed potatoes - these things tasted like they had tons of butter and salt in them, and I was eating them whole and plain! Not only that, but the texture was so smooth, none of the lumps and chunks we have in our potatoes. Since they were cooked, I wasn’t able to get a brix on them (it only works on raw juices), but I’m sure they were the best potatoes I ever had. Crystal said they were better than eating ice cream, and I think she was right!

Time doesn’t permit me to tell of all the dishes we sampled, so I won’t torture you with them, but I must give honorable mention to another stellar food we ate; grits! Crystal grew up in Georgia and hates grits. And so when they brought two bowls of grits to the table to go with our dinner (which admittedly, is a little odd), I figured I’d be eating both of them. But one spoonful changed all that.

The grits were served plain - no sugar, just a little butter melted on top. What’s more, I couldn’t taste the tell-tale sugar/honey tastes in the grits. But they tasted like… well, I don’t know what. They were sweeter than ice cream, but didn’t taste sweetened. They were just plain GOOD. We wound up eating them at almost every meal after that. They also served whole wheat bread, and some fermented milk with cucumber and drill substance.

I got a chance to use my universal picture dictionary, by taking the page with the pictures of animals on it to the buffet and asking the waitress by pointing at a dish, then at the page, and then she’d indicate which animal it was.

So the next day we set out for a hike around the small artificial lake; halfway around I discovered a path leading uphill which I couldn’t resist, and we followed it and saw thousands of wildflowers, and all sorts of bees and butterflies humming everywhere. It was quite beautiful. Here are a few of the pictures:

Alongside the lake is a building made to look like a Greek temple, and inside it are about 8 pipes flowing into these Grecian urns, each with a different type of hot mineral water coming out of the ground between 90 and 130 degrees. Supposedly different ones are good for different things, and there are claims they cure everything from headache to stomach ulcers to cancer. I drank some of each, and they all had a unique taste.

The next day we went down into a steep gorge to see the town’s waterfall. It was a large waterfall, but I felt rather let down by it. I suppose the water did too! (pardon the pun). The gorge was nice, but not gorge-ous. (I’m on a roll!). However, we walked along the bank of the river at the bottom as far as we could, looking for another way out; the road comes in by a rather circuitous route and we didn’t want to have to go up that way. Sure enough, I found a thread of a path heading straight up the side of the hill, and I had a feeling it would take me out of the gorge and into town.

So up we went. As we got half-way up, the path disappeared at a sheer cliff face, so we had to climb up. Crystal had never done any rockclimbing, but it wasn’t a difficult climb and it was quite a bit of fun. We came out at the top in someone’s backyard, followed a path around the side of someone’s house, and came out behind a building in downtown Jermuk, about a block away from where my dead-reckoning said I should be.

Next day we did a hot mineral bath in the hotel, and then I did a gum hydromassage. I think that may be really good for teeth because it stimulates bloodflow in the gums, so I’m going to try and build one when I get home.

Finally we left Jermuk back to Yerevan, then caught a shared minivan - called a Marshrutka here - to Dilijan, called the Switzerland of the Caucasus. Well, as the guidebook says, that’s stretching it a bit. But it is nice. Built on the side of a very steep hill, full of hairpin switchback streets. We were looking for a place to stay, tried one place and weren’t too happy with it, so we looked for somewhere else. We were looking for a place recommended in the guidebook called “Tateh’s” guesthouse.

We made the mistake of asking two guys about 20ish for help. Naturally, we speak almost no Russian much less any Armenian, and they spoke no English. But we managed to convey what we wanted. Next thing we knew, they’d flagged down two people passing on the street and asked them for directions; they concluded that it was down the hill and to the right - when I say down the hill, I mean DOWN the hill. We thanked them and set off, then they decided to walk us there personally. So they led us down the hill, and to the right, asking everyone they saw as we went where Tateh’s guesthouse was. We walked about a mile until they started wondering if it was there, so they stopped at someone’s house, went in and used their phone to call the number in the guidebook. Somehow or other that didn’t work, I wasn’t sure why.

Then as they were doing that, they asked another woman walking by and she said “Oh, Tateh’s!” and indicated that it was way back the other direction the way we came. So we gathered our packs, tiring now, and we all trundled back up the hill. It turns out we went right at bottom of the hill when we should have turned left. Then we skirted a fence, went up a flight of stairs, up a street, and finally I saw the fence that the guidebook said marked the guesthouse. Needless to say, the guidebook was NOT correct about the location. There is no way to find this guesthouse from the guidebook - the directions are simply wrong.

We thanked our guides profusely. I would have given up long before that, and just looked for a different place, but they wouldn’t leave us till we had a place to sleep. They have a very strongly ingrained sense of hospitality here. It’s nice… but sometimes a bit too helpful J

Anyway, it turns out we were almost back up to town, so I went in looking for some dinner. I wanted some milk. So I went into a little grocery store (TINY grocery store) and asked for “Moloku” which was as close as I remembered, the Russian word for milk. That didn’t elicit a response, so I went to a can that had a picture of a cow, pointed at the picture, then made milking gestures with my hands, then mimed drinking out of a glass. That got a response, and she said “Ah! MILK!” and I said… why yes… milk indeed… why didn’t I think of that J

Anyway, I grabbed a couple of other things and that was that. Tomorrow we head for Vanadzor and then to Tbilisi, Georgia. Catch us there!

Posted on August 24th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Flight To Armenia

The flight to Armenia was rather brutal; all told we spent 33 hours in airports and planes. We set next to some interesting people, which helped to pass the time. I got to practice a bit of my German on one leg, which was fun. But the interesting experiences didn’t show up until we landed in Moscow. We arrived with a 12 hour layover ahead of us, speaking little Russian and not quite knowing what to expect. We had to stay in the terminal since we didn’t have visas. The terminal was surprisingly deserted and ragged for Moscow, considering it’s such a hub.

We hadn’t eaten in a long time nor slept in two days, so eating was getting important. We found a restaurant in the terminal, looked at a menu which had an English translation, and decided to get some juice. I pointed at a bottle of juice I saw in the window and asked how much it was, and she dug out the menu and said 90 rubles (3 dollars). Well, that was a bit high but we were hungry and needed to relax and unwind. However, they wouldn’t take dollars. They said there was a place to change them down the terminal a ways, so I went to see if I could figure it out, leaving Crystal with the bags.

Well, I found a machine that looked like it should change dollars; I tried to figure it out, but it didn’t seem to work (I later found it was out of order, but no one bothered to hang a sign). So I wandered around, asked someone else, “Dollars… Rubles?” with a hopeful look seemed to convey the idea. They said I needed to go this way and turn there, and so on. So I went there, and found this machine.

Now I’m pretty sure that this is a machine invented by Stalin to torture capitalists. Granted I was famished and lightheaded, but it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. I looked around all over for a place to insert bills, and nothing seemed to work. I stuck bills in all the orifices around the machine, hoping it would grab them and do something, and nothing happened. Finally I decided to try to decipher the machine using my almost nonexistent Russian, and then discovered that it offered an English translation. I selected that immediately, which took me to a Russian translation anyway!

Well, I navigated more or less by guess through several pages and finally the machine creaked and whined, and this slot (lower picture, center, right side, silver spot) opened up to reveal a box; the idea, judging by the pictures inside the box, was to lay the bills inside, on the bottom, and the machine would take them, count them, and give you rubles instead. That was the idea, anyway.

In practice, I gave it a 5$ bill (I wasn’t about to risk more than that!) and it spit it back out. I tried again. This time it took it, I had to work my way through several menus, starting over once or twice, but I finally got 150 Rubles for my trouble. I went back to the restaurant, relaxed over a bit of juice, and then we decided to move on. I went to settle up the tab and gave the 90 rubles, and they informed me that it was 90 rubles *per glass*, or 450 rubles (14$) a liter!

Mind you, this is a liter (about a quart) of orange juice! I naturally raised a stink, but they pointed to the menu where it was marked that 200ml of juice is 90 rubles. There wasn’t much I could do, but I let them know it was criminal. I also let them know I didn’t have enough rubles, so I had to take another trip back to the Stalin torture machine.

If I thought it was hard to get along with before, it was downright cruel now. It didn’t like any of the bills I submitted. I even tried a twenty. It rejected it time and again, then started saying “The phone number you have entered is invalid”. This was to change money, cash, it had not asked for and I had not entered a phone number!

I tried this for probably 15 minutes, then sat down in despair to think out my options. At this point a dutch traveler, guessing the source of my frustration, approached me and confided that he’d had the same problem with the same machine, and that I needed to tell the restaurant that if they wanted paid, they’d help me change the money. This seemed like good advice, so I did it. They came down to operate the machine, I gave them a twenty to change (sure that it would work for them and make me look foolish) but to my relief, it gave them the same obnoxious message as it gave me!

So he tried a few times, then reluctantly conceded to accept 15$ American and leave it at that. I again let him know I considered him one step removed from a highway robber and we parted.

With that initial hurdle passed, we started wandering around looking for a quiet place to nap. Finally we found a way out of this terminal into another terminal, which was much nicer, much more modern and clean. It had a huge stretch of carpet, which we used to our advantage.

We weren’t the first to have this idea either.

After that we were hungry again. We went through all the restaurants, where hamburgers cost 30$ and bottled water was 5$ a liter. I decided I would drink water from the toilet like a dog before I paid 20$ a gallon for water. I also decided to skip a few meals rather than give the Russian airport Mafia another dime. Well, eventually we got on the plane for Armenia, which arrived in Armenia at 4am local time; by which point we would have been up, not counting about an hour of catnaps, for about 40 hours.

The annoying thing about this flight is that we arrived in Armenia at 4am local time; too late to really use a hotel room, but to early to just start wandering around. I had stewed over this problem for weeks, not wanting to waste 40$ on a few hours in a hotel, but not wanting to just wander a strange city before dawn.

Well, I set next to an Armenian who was returning from a business trip to China; we started talking about his country, where to go, things to see, and so on. One thing led to another and he offered to let us ride in the taxi with him and he’d see to it we got dropped off in a 24 hour restaurant where it was safe and quiet. He also gave me his phone number in case we had any trouble or needed anything translated.

When we arrived, we had to get a Visa, change some money, and then stand in a LONG line to get our passports checked and into the country. When I saw how long it was going to take us, I told our friend, Narek, to go on ahead and not to worry about us, we’d be fine. It took us almost an hour and a half to get all our visas, through the immigration line, and to get our checked bag - we came out the other end of customs and discovered he’d decided to wait for us anyway, just in case we needed help. Him having had no sleep and us complete strangers. I guess this is that Armenian hospitality we’d heard about.

I’m glad he was there, because navigating through the taxi sharks would have been a bit creepy on our own, we had to follow him and the taxi driver through some dank alleys to get to the taxi, then he dropped us off at the restaurant and refused to allow us to pay for the taxi! It seems someone to help is always there when we need them as we travel. Like Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire “I’ve grown accustomed to the kindness of strangers” 

At the restaurant we had spas, which was a thin yogurt soup with cucumber and dill, and a hamburger which wasn’t too good and a khachapuri, which was mostly a big tortilla with cheese in the middle. We left the restaurant while it was still dark and wandered the city streets. I felt safe there and as the dawn came up we watched the city come alive too. Finally we worked our way to the local market, here called a Shuka, and that’s where our next entry will pick up…

Posted on August 23rd, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | No Comments »

Off To Georgia (Not That One, The Other One!)

We are headed off on a new adventure, this time to Georgia (the former USSR republic, not the place they grow peanuts) and Armenia. Yes, Armenia - not Algeria, nor yet Albania, but Armenia. Why? Well, first it’s no secret to readers of this blog that I hardly need an excuse to travel. But why here, now?

Well, several reasons. Primarily, there are persistent stories of the Caucasus having some of the oldest people on earth. Well documented reports run up to 170 years of age. A friend of mine who emigrated from the Ukraine told me that at any given time, the oldest person in the USSR was always in the Caucasus.

There are three places in the world claiming exceptional longevity, Vilcabamba, where I have been (See my article about it, “Shangri-lost”), Hunza in Pakistan where I have not been (yet), and Georgia where I am going now. In Vilcabamba I found that while old people once did exist there, due to the importation of French fries and the western diet in the 1970’s by the Peace Corps, now they are just as unhealthy as anyone else in Ecuador - which is to say, vastly healthier than your average American, but still nothing fantastic.

The USSR frequently closed down entire factories to send workers to weeklong retreats in Georgia and Armenia to increase health and efficiency. The USSR wasn’t known for wasting money and time to make it’s workers happy, so it’s a good bet they believed it really made a difference.

Second, and what prompted the visit now, is that I have researched the connection between better-tasting food and healthier food and have found a distinct correlation; after all, all things being equal if you have two strawberries, one of which tastes sweet and one tastes like the package it came in, the one that tastes sweet tests to have higher mineral content and being more healthy. That’s why we were made to like the sweeter fruits, a sort of built-in quality checker. We override it with massive amounts of sugar, but the sense is still there for a reason.

In my trip to El Salvador I discovered that their food tasted much better than anywhere else in Central America; and I noticed that El Salvadorans in general were happier, had better teeth and wider dental arches (something Weston Price associated with good food and health beyond any question in his research), and in general were stronger than Americans. I saw a woman much smaller than me haul 100 pound sacks of corn a good hundred yards through thick, soft sand - something I’m not sure I could have done. And she hauled about 8 bags in a row - something practically no American woman could do. And this was quite common there. I saw men racing uphill with a dozen 1″ thick clay tiles on their back - which must have weighed 150 pounds. And they did this all day, and seemed to enjoy it.

So the point is, El Salvador had the strongest, happiest, healthiest people in Central America. And they had the best tasting food. If you’ve never tasted food from outside the US - not imported food, but food actually bought and eaten there - you’ve probably never tasted real food. The difference is incredible. And so when I read on Wikitravel that both Georgia and Armenia had food that “made their counterparts everywhere else on Earth pale by comparison”, and whose taste “would make you unable to go back to eating Apricots at home, after eating the delicious apricots from Armenia”, it told me that Armenia might have a higher quality produce, and that might explain the higher quality health and longevity.

I found this sort of off-hand comments in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and in the separate wikitravel pages on Georgia and Armenia, and in several independent sources around the net. I’ve never seen that sort of comments about anywhere else. So that is why I’m going there.

The reason I’m going now, is the harvest season is in September, and I didn’t want to wait another year to find out just how good this food is. Good food can be tested for sugar content with a refractometer, commonly used for checking grapes for harvest, and good food is called “high brix food”, brix being the measure of sugar in the food. So I’ll be checking that against the standard American fruits and seeing if there really is a difference.

Also, on an unrelated note, the Caucasus mountains is why European and Americans are called “Caucasian”, because historians trace back our white-skinned ancestors to the Scyths in the area of the Caucaus circa the 6^th century BC - a tribe very numerous and fully developed, with no apparent history. I hope to go through the museums and discover links to connect them to other peoples who migrated into that area from the south.

But who am I kidding? I’m going because I want to see what’s over that next hill. The rest… just excuses

Posted on August 19th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under Georgia/Armenia | 1 Comment »

Too Bad To Be True - Florida Misadventures

“Come to Florida and build a greenhouse? You’ll pay extra for delivery and cover my expenses? Sure, sounds like fun!”.

And it did. Then. He bought a greenhouse, hydroponic lettuce garden, and barrel gardens from me and paid me to deliver them a thousand miles away in Florida. But fun? Well, I suppose that depends on your definition - and the amount of sarcasm you inflect when you say “fun”.

Assembling the parts was simple enough; a week’s work but nothing worth mentioning. Assembly too was a wrap - piling all the parts on the trailer was a relatively academic, if ungainly, problem. Then we decided to take it for a quick spin before embarking. We made it about ten feet before I noticed this rubbing sound coming from the trailer. Turns out the tires were rubbing on the fenders.

Well, I hadn’t expected it to be quite so heavy - or the trailer to be quite so weak - but we had to do something, and fast, if were going to keep my schedule. So we decided the best way to fix it was to raise the shackles on the back of the springs - replace the 3″ pieces with 8″ ones. This was a rushed, makeshift job assembling it out of the parts we had on hand in the time available but we have a well-equipped shop and had no other choice so we got it done.

Then we went for another loaded test drive. The tires no longer rubbed, but because we’d lifted the shackles, the trailer bed rode higher above the axles - which was the idea, but now it had the shocks stretched out so much that they were not “shocking” and the trailer was wobbling back and forth like it’d just had a pint of tequila.

Newer, longer shocks were the obvious solution, but by now this was Sunday morning - the morning I’d planned to “leave early”. Right. Well, it was a good plan. So as some of us went to town to look for shocks, the others stayed home doing the last-minute packing so we could leave the instant they got home. To make a long story short, half a day was wasted in town partstore-hopping and looking for longer shocks. Of course, you can’t by them by length - you can only buy them by the part number, and since this was for a trailer, and a now-customized trailer at that, no one really could help. So we got spring supports instead.

These little gizmos clamp under leafsprings and help support them, in theory. In practice, they were apparently designed for lighter, thinner springs than we had, because there was no way to clamp them on to ours with the bolts they provided. So we moved on and did what we should have done from the start and just lengthen the shocks. This was pretty simple, removing the shocks, adding a piece of stainless pipe and a new bolt to make the shock longer. Once done, we were finally on the road! It was 3:00pm, but we were on the road!

Thirty miles down the road we were calling home asking “how serious is it when the temperature gauge on the dashboard starts dinging at us??” - apparently it thought we should know that the temperature gauge was maxed out. Mind you, this car had never given us any trouble with overheating, or really that much trouble at all, before this trip.

So my dad, who knows more about cars than I do about computers (and even more than someone who knows something about computers!) drove out to meet us and see just what the problem was. We concluded that it had to be a sensor since it was fluctuating too quickly, and decided to do nothing and hope we were right. But on the test drive my dad took it on, it started vibrating on the front end; it hadn’t done that before, so we figured it must be the road, right?

Just to be safe I felt around and noticed that one of the balancing weights was so loose that it came off in my hand. So we clamped it down tighter and reattached it, and it seemed to fix it. They followed us in their car a few miles down the interstate to make sure things seemed to be ok, and they were.

Well, somewhere in here the air conditioner started dumping about a cup of water on the driver’s feet - it came out and poured right on the accelerator. It did this periodically throughout the trip, but being the passenger I rather enjoyed that part so I didn’t consider it a “problem”, per se.

Anyway, just past Shreveport, less than two hours from home, the vibration my dad had noticed came back with a vengeance. So we stopped and checked the tires for pressure, bumps, missing weights, etc - you know, the things you usually check for when you have vibrating in the front end. We spent all told over an hour checking these things over a fifty mile stretch of road.

Then we discovered that if we pushed past the vibration and got to a higher speed - around sixty - it got a lot better. So, since by now any self-respecting tire shop was closed, it being after dark, we decided to push on and make it to Monroe for the night.

Next morning we went to the nearest tire shop, which happened to be Wal-Mart. After an interminable wait watching the goobers there dawdle, we gave up and asked where another tire shop might be. And I mean goober in the nicest possible sense… I mean, seriously, Gomer Pyle could have changed tires faster.

So we went to another tire shop. On the way, the gauges all went dead. Speedometer, fuel, everything. We decided to focus on one thing at a time and asked the guy at the shop to balance the tire. He did so, but said the rim was bent but he balanced it anyway. While he was balancing, I happened to notice that the brake pads were almost completely gone. So I asked him to fix that, and he said to do that he’d have to grind down the rotor, too. I said fine, so we got ready to wait for a fixed car. A few minutes later he came in and asked me to come look at something only to tell me that the rotor was so badly scratched that we needed new ones. He wouldn’t fix the pads without it. So I told him just to put it back together and I’d deal with it later.

The balancing seemed to have helped the problem, but it definitely didn’t fix it. So after nursing it for an hour we pulled off in Vicksburg. I asked a tire shop to mount my spare, thinking it would cost me five, maybe ten dollars. He quoted me 70$ to swap it out for my spare. Yes, seventy. I repeated it back to him several times. He must have misunderstood me somehow, because I can’t believe anyone would charge that much to swap out tires. Anyway, I never did figure out what he thought I said because I just kept moving.

I nursed it for awhile longer, hoping it would get better, then finally pulled off and asked another tire shop. He quoted me 15$, which I thought was too high but would have paid, then told me there would be a half-hour wait. I was behind on time enough as it was without MORE waiting! So I pulled off and changed it myself. In the process discovering that jacks kept under hoods get REALLY hot while driving and that the tire pump we kept in the car may well be the cheapest piece of equipment ever manufactured by humans anywhere. I also discovered it was very hot in the sun and that gravel doesn’t feel good on your knees. (I already knew those things, but I had to work it into the narrative somehow!)

But the tire was changed and we were moving again. Then the windshield wipers turned themselves on. Yes, without any help on their own they came on. Just once. Then about 5 minutes later, they came on again. Throughout the rest of the day they continued to come on at random intervals. If this were not strange enough, the wipers seemed to wipe faster when the turn signal was on while they randomly chose to run. This seemed strange. After watching cars chasing people all over the world in Transformers just last night, this was disturbing to say the least.

Naturally, it wasn’t raining (why would it rain when your wipers are working??). Considering the skies were clear, we were likely the only people in Mississippi right then with our wipers on. On another day I might have dealt with the autonymous wiper blades promptly, but today we were taking one problem at a time.

Since central Mississippi roads aren’t the best in the world, I couldn’t tell if the tire wobble was still there or if we were just on a really bad stretch of road. After another half hour I was convinced that the problem was worse than ever when, while going over an overpass, the vibration became worse than it ever had and only got better when we coasted. I thought the engine was going to fall out.

When we accelerated, it got horrible - like giant was grabbing the front of the car and shaking it. When we coasted, it was almost normal. So we pulled off to a “complete car care center”. I explained to him my problem and he explained to me that they only did oil changes. I thought about asking why, if it was a “complete car car center” they only did one tiny thing to cars, but I wasn’t in the mood by then. He referred me to another place and we went there, explained the problem, and he promptly said “Oh, you need a new axle”.

This was not good news. I was starting to wonder if this trip was going to cost me more in car repairs than I was going to make! I was thinking “Axle… $1200? $1500?”, so I timidly asked the first question I always ask “how much?”. He said $175 and an hour and a half. That was a relief so I told him to do it and went to wait. Fortunately we brought a laptop and DVDs, so the wait wasn’t too onerous. Although of the three sets of (brand new) DVD seasons we brought with us, only one set seems to actually work properly on this computer.

Still, we managed and after an hour I went out to check on the car and found a coterie of attendants scratching their heads in consternation. It seems the axle they had which was supposed to fit this car just wouldn’t…. quite… fit. They tried for over an hour to make it fit. So they finally admitted defeat and went to the parts store and bought a different one. After they’d been working on it for awhile, I dropped back by to check on how it was going. “Much better,” he said, “it seems to work better when you use the right part”. “Amazing the difference that makes”, I commented.

Somewhere in all this I dropped a hint that the air conditioning water was flooding the front seats and that, while I personally enjoyed it, the driver would love to have that fixed, and since that just involved blowing air back through the drain hole, he volunteered to do that for me. So after about three hours waiting for a ninety minute repair, we were ready to go.

In my paranoia I insisted in taking the car for a good test drive before we left town or hooked back up to our trailer, but since all seemed well we hooked up and drove away. By now we’ve driven about two, maybe three hours out of an eight hour day.

We commented on what was going to break next as we pulled away. The attendant assured us we’d have clear sailing from now on out. A lot he knew! We got two miles. Yes, two miles. Well, I think it was two miles - our gauges still weren’t working. Anyway, twoish miles out of town and suddenly the engine started to miss.

At this point, a less philosophical person might have been frustrated, or even began postulating such ordinarily implausible causes such as aliens, gremlins, or a vengeful deity. But not us, we’re troopers! Although, we had seen over a half-dozen cars abandoned alongside the road at various points along the freeway, (five of them in Louisiana) and were considering adding our own vehicle to the list and flying home.

But we nursed the missing vehicle with an unresponsive accelerator onto the frontage road which happened to be conveniently located, and even managed to make it into the shade in front of someone’s house. Before I left, my dad had cautioned me that he had “rigged” a quick fix on the accelerator cable that might give away at any minute. By “rigged” he meant that the cable had come apart and he had held it together with a chip-clamp and duct tape. Naturally my first thought of a culprit led to this semi-repair. Surely we couldn’t be out of gas, having only filled up 150 miles ago.

So I looked at the cable, which certainly lived up to expectations. I figured it must have been coming apart and caused the car to die. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that despite its obvious shortcomings as a repair, it wasn’t actually the problem. So then I decided to check the gas. Normally, I’d have looked at the gauge but of course, it still wasn’t working.

So I tried to get the gauges going - checked all the fuses - nothing. Then I realized that the obvious way to check and see if there was anything in the gas tank was simply to rap on it. I crawled under the car without delay and a reverberating sound revealed that the tank was indeed hollow. I later deduced that the bad axle was causing so much vibration it must have been murder on my gas mileage, but hindsight is… well, you know.

So now we’re out of gas. A call to AAA told me it would take an hour to get someone here to fix it, no one was at home in the house in front of us, but we had passed a gas station about a mile back that I could just barely see. At least, I thought it was a mile. And I thought it was a gas station. It looked like one, but you couldn’t quite tell from here. I decided a walk back there would be less time than AAA would take, so I grabbed an empty water jug and started hoofing it.

On the way I passed a home that looked occupied so I thought I’d give it a shot. An old lady came to the door and coldly answered my inquiry if she had gas with the answer “station’s that way”. At least, I think that’s what she said. Her dog was yipping so loudly, and she paused every word to yell it’s name at the top of her lungs, it was rather hard to understand anything except that she figured it was my problem, not hers.

So I kept on cruising. As I got within a hundred yards of the station, after 10 minutes of hot hiking, my phone rang; Crystal, the driver, informing me that the people whose driveway we had chosen to grace with our steaming hulk had returned home and offered to come pick me up. I told them it wouldn’t help me much on the way there, but I sure would appreciate a ride back!

I managed to fill the jug with no one accosting me, and managed to even get most of the gas poured into the car. After the appropriate thanks we filled the tank, and I decided to take one more stab at working on the gauges so this didn’t happen again.

Again I swapped out fuses and fiddled with things, rattling it hoping something would fall out - the only repair techniques I know (works on computers, too), and nothing under the dash made any difference. So I went under the hood. None of those fuses admitted to having anything to do with gauges, but I messed with them anyway. Wiggling and taking out this fuse and that, and finally the long awaited exclamation from the person watching the gauges - “Wait a second! That worked!”

I had removed - not replaced, but removed altogether - a fuse. I replaced it, and it killed the dash again. I removed it, and again it worked. Nothing else seemed to be broken when I left it out. It was labeled “Ign. Off Down” which I assumed meant it was the fuse that controlled the solenoid that turned off of the car, it being fuel-injected. Still, after our recent gas episode I figured having gauges was more important than being able to turn the car off. I could always kill it by replacing the fuse in a pinch!

After that, everything worked fine. I can’t figure out exactly why removing, not replacing, a perfectly functional fuse worked, but the wipers no longer move without being told to, the car does in fact shut off without problems, and all the gauges work. Who knows what will happen next. We knew we’d never believe this happened unless we wrote it down the same day, and you may not believe it - but this stuff is so crazy, do you really think I could make it up?

But the sad part is, this trip hasn’t been all that unusual.

Posted on July 4th, 2010 by Natnee and filed under United States | 1 Comment »

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