I camped in stone ruins beneath Mount Ararat and made friends with three shepherds. We discussed stone throwing issues in mime; they found it funny and offered little useful advice. The following morning I confiscated the stick thrown by one of their more parochial colleagues a few miles up the road. The dogs have risen to my 'and I've not had any trouble with the dogs yet' with zeal, as if I'd caught them slacking. I carried that four-foot stick a hundred miles across my handle bars, menacing canine pursuers with cavalry-esque slashing. It seems to work - the dogs blench and give up chase and I remain thankfully unbitten. Yesterday one of these cow-herder (cowherd?) kiddies tried to sick his Kangal on me. That was especially terrifying and I lost the stick in frantic defence. I'm in Kars now, not too far from the Georgian border, hoping this hostility from boys and dogs will ebb. Could it be my rainbow wardrobe?
The rains have come and yesterday was a slog. North of Iğdır I lost almost all of my two thousand meters altitude, joylessly in the knowledge that I'd have to climb back up the plateau before Kars. I slept at the bottom to make the climb in morning strength. Ha. It took a day's weakness. And what a dismal depression! Like Turkey's drain, with all the appropriate detritus scumming around it. Wetland and dingy villages, little more than fetid swamps with a crust of hovels. That's how they seemed to me at least, in the rain and grey with nasty little children screeching for maney! maney! I think my schadenfreude when one of them slipped over in the mud while snatching at my bike was a personal low. Funny how the weather colours everything. I don't recommened the Iğdir - Kars road to cyclists: it is uphill, featureless and wet. As colourless as a landscape can be, barren in October with inevitably foul weather closing. Occasionally a string of pylons, a sinister cairn or a military checkpoint. Not having wanted to tarry stocking up in one of those forsaken villages I ran out of food and water early on. A man flagged me down with eating and drinking gestures. It was grimly amusing to realise that he was a bonafide tramp (rag-bundle on a stick variety) wanting fed rather than making the usual Turkish (and especially Kurdish) lunch invitation. He had the last of my olives and cream cheese - was unfazed by the breadlessness (ekmek yok - problem yok!). I left him too busy fingering cheese into a toothless maw for goodbyes. A nice coincidence for one hungry beggar of food to trick another so. A little further on a great rainbow offered colour and promise so I stopped to check for an internet signal, exactly thinking wouldn't it be nice to hear from Jason or Grace, both of whom had been a while but always write encouragingly. As it happened both of them had written within the last hour and the rainbow doubled up as my camera battery died. It was G K Chesterton said that "coincidences are spiritual puns", something I came across in a novel not long ago and think of all the time now.
Digol is a non-town but I managed to find biscuits and fizzy pop (sports nutrition this isn't) for the second half of the climb to Kars which I reached at the same time as darkness and lightning. Looking down on the city I saw it disappear as the storm delivered a massive power cut. As if all the electric had been sucked into the sky. I skulked around behind someone's stables looking for a barn or something and got the fright of my life from six chained Kangals. Somehow I 'd stumbled into the one bit of yard that their six chains couldn't quite reach. I waited amidst the barking, fairly pleading until the owner came calming with his torch, fed me cheese and olives and slept me in the summer house. This morning breakfast with the kids before school. Clouds clear and hills crest.
The rains have come and yesterday was a slog. North of Iğdır I lost almost all of my two thousand meters altitude, joylessly in the knowledge that I'd have to climb back up the plateau before Kars. I slept at the bottom to make the climb in morning strength. Ha. It took a day's weakness. And what a dismal depression! Like Turkey's drain, with all the appropriate detritus scumming around it. Wetland and dingy villages, little more than fetid swamps with a crust of hovels. That's how they seemed to me at least, in the rain and grey with nasty little children screeching for maney! maney! I think my schadenfreude when one of them slipped over in the mud while snatching at my bike was a personal low. Funny how the weather colours everything. I don't recommened the Iğdir - Kars road to cyclists: it is uphill, featureless and wet. As colourless as a landscape can be, barren in October with inevitably foul weather closing. Occasionally a string of pylons, a sinister cairn or a military checkpoint. Not having wanted to tarry stocking up in one of those forsaken villages I ran out of food and water early on. A man flagged me down with eating and drinking gestures. It was grimly amusing to realise that he was a bonafide tramp (rag-bundle on a stick variety) wanting fed rather than making the usual Turkish (and especially Kurdish) lunch invitation. He had the last of my olives and cream cheese - was unfazed by the breadlessness (ekmek yok - problem yok!). I left him too busy fingering cheese into a toothless maw for goodbyes. A nice coincidence for one hungry beggar of food to trick another so. A little further on a great rainbow offered colour and promise so I stopped to check for an internet signal, exactly thinking wouldn't it be nice to hear from Jason or Grace, both of whom had been a while but always write encouragingly. As it happened both of them had written within the last hour and the rainbow doubled up as my camera battery died. It was G K Chesterton said that "coincidences are spiritual puns", something I came across in a novel not long ago and think of all the time now.
Digol is a non-town but I managed to find biscuits and fizzy pop (sports nutrition this isn't) for the second half of the climb to Kars which I reached at the same time as darkness and lightning. Looking down on the city I saw it disappear as the storm delivered a massive power cut. As if all the electric had been sucked into the sky. I skulked around behind someone's stables looking for a barn or something and got the fright of my life from six chained Kangals. Somehow I 'd stumbled into the one bit of yard that their six chains couldn't quite reach. I waited amidst the barking, fairly pleading until the owner came calming with his torch, fed me cheese and olives and slept me in the summer house. This morning breakfast with the kids before school. Clouds clear and hills crest.
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| not Ararat |
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| Ararat |
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| shepherd mates |
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| Kars road |
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| ... |
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| summer house situation this morning |
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| a Kangal |
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| Kars this morning |
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