“I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I have never been before.”
What constitutes the perfect pass? A paved gradual incline without much traffic, and two friendly Georgians waiting at the top to give you a handful of grapes. Needles to say, by the time we completed a short downhill to the lake below, we were in very high spirits.
For a few days we meandered across small country roads, some paved while others were not, in order to climb up yet another pass. This one definitely wasn’t as easy because it seemed to be a completely unused road which in some areas looked a bit more like a river bed. In fact, in our two days of climbing, only one car (Italian tourists on their campervan honeymoon) passed us! We really enjoyed the area though because it was so deserted and we passed through some “traditional” mountain villages amongst others which are now completely abandoned. Many of the villagers in this area live somewhere else in the winter (once the snow falls) only to return in the summer to graze their cattle.
From there, we entered into Sventi, the most popular mountainous tourist destination in Georgia!
During most of this section we had some companions – canine companions – who decided that life on the road was their dream as well. Though we started out with three dogs, we had to chase one off before the end of the first night as him and one of the others were getting a bit feisty with each other. Though we needed to leave them all behind (we didn’t have any extra food with us, nor did we think it was fair that these poor creatures had to run so many kilometers a day) they absolutely would not leave no matter what we did. Tired and hungry, our two puppies proved to be loyal to a fault – and extremely friendly and smart. We tried a few times to lock them behind fences, but within seconds they would jump over or find a way around, and by the end, they just knew to wait by our bikes because they had figured out we wouldn’t leave without them. We ended up scrounging a bit of food for them, and carrying on for five or six days until we got to a tourist town where we enlisted another tourists help to give them a new home.
Here is Jerry. He was the sweet dog, so incredibly determined to be with us just for a bit of love. Baxter (our other companion) was the incredibly smart one who we think use to be a sheep herding dog since he responded to many whistles.
