Bike to Asia

I thought this day was so tough that it deserves a separate post.
On the second morning in Ushguli there was no clouds on the sky so we decided to leave to the pass. I left with the thought that the way up the road will be very difficult, probably there will be lots of puddles, cows and rocks but it is only a few kilometers and then it will come the fun part because we will just roll down from 2600 to 0 meter and probably the view will be amazing. I wasn’t wrong with the first part of the previous sentence, the road was difficult. It was 7,5 km from Ushguli to Zagar pass (2620 m) but mostly I pushed the bike, Felix only for a few times. We tried to make some photos but they can’t give back the quality of the road.

From Ushguli to Zagar pass - terrible "road"

I could use the following words to describe it: steep, small and big, fixed and rolling rocks, mud, puddle, cows, lots of cowshit, very little snow. What I didn’t expect that breathing is more difficult as well. The view on the other hand was really beautiful.

Almost at Zagar pass

It was interesting that on the north slope there were trees while on the south slope only grass. The higher we went the less trees we saw. As we heard before the road was free from snow but we could see some on the slopes.

Zagar pass (2620 m) between Ushguli and Tsana

After a few hours we finally reached the top, took some photos and started to descend. I thought the difficult part was over but I was wrong. I can’t decide which was more difficult. Climbing up was phisically tiring, descending was mentally tiring. It is hard to compare but the road was probably even worse, steeper, muddier etc. Even down I got off the bike and pushed it many times. We think that it was a mistake to sign it as a road for cars on the map. It is OK that this road looks like that but it should be marked as a mudroad or a path for walking. We met only 1 car on the way up, the dutch family whom we met earlier and sometimes we were wondering how they could manage to drive down. There were some creeks on the way as well, sometime the creek was the road. The second and the last car we saw until the first (living) village was a TRAKTOR which worked on the road where a creek ran through. Next to that it started to rain quite heavily.
Finally we saw some houses, it was good to see that probably we will be able to buy bread and see other people. As we got closer to the village, Tsana, it got more and more suspicious, there was no single sign that anyone lives there.

Tsana - only a ghost village!

There were no animals: no cows (no cowshit), and no dogs (no barking). All the houses were abandoned, some of them were not possible to approach because in front of them grass and other plants grew like jungle. It was a strange, kind of scary feeling to be in that ghost village. We found one garden where the grass was cut so we decided that we will camp there. In that garden there was a marble board about a man who probably died there, it didn’t make the place less scary. We ran out of water so we took our bowl, bottles and the water puryfier and went to the river to clean the water. I know it is funny but I had in my mind that what if we go back and the bikes won’t be there anymore. Of course they were there as besides some birds and bugs there was not a single creature in the village. We cooked some pasta, pitched the tent and moved in in the rain.
In the tent I showed Felix some of the red spots I had on my body. In Usghuli a mosquito basicly ate me, I was full of mosquito bites, they were itching like hell and because I couldn’t resist and scratched them they broke and turned into wounds. I felt like that I have more and more bites every day but that day I found different red spots, they were smaller (3-4 mm) and not bumpy. As we were discussing what it could be I saw that Felix has some on his hands and then we found some more on his arms. Again my imagination worked and thought that that’s why there was nobody in that village because there was something infectious from which we got the red spots. We couldn’t do anything, we just went to sleep. The spots disappeared later.
So just to summarize the day: mainly pushing the bike up to the pass for hours then many times down as well while raining, if riding braking all the times and concentrating not to fall, creeks on the road, shoes are wet, we could only go about 20 km’s, ghost village with the marble table about the guy who died there and spooky red spots…

Zsófi

Tags: Tsana, Ushguli, Zagar pass

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 7:44 AM and is filed under Georgia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.