Lucky Pierre

October/November 2024

Gori Fortress

Brad and Rich were asleep as I snuck out of our high rise apartment, walked through the small city of Gori in central Georgia, and climbed up the hill to the fortress that we'd seen from all over the place, and that I was determined to visit.

It was a beautiful day.

Random church in town

There's evidence that there was a fortress here from way back in the 2nd Century BC, and, like all structures in this place, it's been damaged, rebuilt and expanded many times in its history. Most of the current fortress was constructed in the 1630s, and also in 1774, by a succession of different Georgian kings.

It's an amazing place, and the views were stunning.

Gori waking up

Looking north, to the occupied state of South Ossetia, which is officially Georgian territory, but is controlled by Russian troops. The Russians even occupied where I am now, and in fact the whole city of Gori, as recently as 2008, during the last military conflict between the countries. But after UN-sponsored negotiations it pulled its troops out, for long term strategic reasons no doubt.

It was below zero overnight.

Eventually I went back home and, after another delicious home-cooked brekky, home-cooked by us in fact, we headed off on our bikes, westwards, towards the distant Black Sea, the eastern shore of which is only 240 km from here, as the cyclist pedals.

It was a stunning ride, and we took it steady, riding a little over 60 clicks for the day, with a climb of around 500m.

The beautiful Greater Caucasus mountains were visible for most of the day.

Brad sporting a Stolen Goat and a whistle

No, I'm not holding a snake this time, just one of Rich's strap-offs, which fell from his bike.

A beautiful old monastery

We've been incredibly lucky with the weather.

This amazing bridge swung around 90 degrees

Poor dead cat. I've also seen so many dead dogs in Georgia. I hate seeing roadkill, don't ask me why I take photographs of it, maybe to remind me of the huge impact of traffic on all sorts of wildlife, everywhere I go.

We took the backroads to get to the town of Khashuri.

We fed ourselves, and the dogs

Eventually we pushed our bikes up a hugely steep road that was way too ridiculous to cycle up, and then we cruised through the beautiful forest to a guest house, which had a room with three beds.

We walked into the town of Surami and then cabbed it to a great place for another cheap dinner, which our cab driver recommended. Georgian food is absolutely unbelievably good, we've been feasting like queens for days now.

I was gonna order the country chick as tobacco, but I heard that it's bad for your unborn babies.

Then I thought maybe Chicken Wings Beer would be good, but remembered I'm vegetarian, so just went for normal beer.

Our toilet door.

Hitting The Dirt

The next morning, after some spartan poached eggs and lavash, we rode off, zipping down the steep hill back into the main valley, and then to the beginning of the back road we planned to take, which would take us on a steady climb up and over a bunch of hills, to finally rejoin the main westwards drag maybe 60 or 70 kms later.

We were surprised then, when we discovered the back road was actually dirt, because it hadn't been marked as that on my mapping app. A local guy told us it was gravel all the way to Kharagauli, the next big settlement, and, given that our only other option involved riding on the main highway and then climbing up and over loads of tunnels, we decided to hit the dirt.

The beginning of our road. Piggy's hiding behind the car.

There was a long climb at the beginning.

Looking back at Surami and Kashuri.

Seriously Brad

Bumpy and a bit stony, but I've been on way worse.

Some parts were wet and muddy too, but luckily that wasn't for long stretches.

Actually, once we finally crossed the main ridge, most of the day involved a steady descent, so the pedalling part wasn't too hard, we just had to dodge and weave all the road obstacles, which required lots of concentration.

Giro d'Georgia entrant Ricardo Piedmonte

Yeah, we had live obstacles too, like beautiful horses, cows, sheep, goats, and even the occasional human animal.

There were roadworks going on in parts too. Occasionally we saw vans full of Chinese men, possibly engineers or some type of workers involved in the road construction project.

We stopped at a tiny shop for sweet biscuits and sweet drinks. The biscuits were a bit dry for Brad.

This girl appreciated her slim pickings.

The store was messy and a little loveless.

We were actually lucky that the shop was even open, because after we'd bought our things the owner locked up and drove off.

Ramshackle dwellings.

This shed had a bed and a tiny stove in it, probably for stranded travellers.

Fenced unkempt graves

For part of the ride we skimmed alongside the main railway line between Tbilisi and the Black Sea. A few days later we came through this tunnel on a train, in the opposite direction, on our way back to Tbilisi.

The Brown Arches

Road workers were pouring massive amounts of concrete into huge retaining walls down the hill.

And then, boom, suddenly we were on the Tar MacAdam (as my Irish friend Darina likes to say, since that was the original name of tarmac), and we zipped along quickly, feeling like we'd suddenly boarded speedy hovercrafts.

Brad and Rich zoomed ahead, as they have shiny new real bikes that weigh about 4 grams each, and they were also packed super light, as opposed to me, on my heavy old clunker, carrying my chunky panniers (complete with bottles of wine and brandy), my guitar, and all my other heavy bits.

We'd left our camping gear in Tbilisi though, so that was a bonus, so actually I was still quite a bit lighter than usual.

The crumbling remains of an old monastery.

I was also always last in our little triocycle because of my important photojournalistic duties.

Eventually we arrived in Kharagauli, and it took forever to find a guesthouse and somewhere to eat. We asked around, and were sent in opposite directions a few times, before a lovely old woman phoned a friend of hers, who got her to phone another friend etc etc, and eventually we spoke to Kamahla, a lovely woman who spoke to us in English, and sorted out a room for us.

It's a sobbing shame she didn't win the US election though.

We ate in the (only) local café, and unknowingly ordered enough food for an entire pelaton, but we doggybagged it for breakfast (and lunch) the next day. The food was amazing and cheap, as usual.

Brad snacking before dinner, and pretending he hasn't seen the poor hungry dog in front of him.

Actually that's not true, Brad probably gave him half his packet of Frix's, he's good that way, always incredibly generous in feeding junk food to the local street creatures. They'll take anything they can get around here.

Don't ask me what the replica Eiffel Tower is doing there.

We all shared a room again, there were loads of freight trains, trucks and loud bulldozers getting around all night, but then we realised it was just Rich snoring. Luckily Brad has earplugs, and I don't care.

We had a long climb the next morn, to get over the final set of hills before our destination for the day, the city of Kutaisi.

Up up and away.

And then more up.

Reminds me of my buddy Michael.

Bringing kitsch to new levels. This was some sort of concrete building designed to look like a Flinstones cave house. Wouldn't bloody read-a-berrrt-it.

They love their gates in Central Asia.

More raised pipes

This angry geezer didn't want me to pass, even though I freely offered the information to him that he'd go way faster if he actually sat on his bike and pushed the pedals around with his feet, instead of walking alongside it. He spoke English with a weird accent too.

Negotiating the swarm of traffic on the outskirts of Kutaisi. Note Brad having to avoid someone who's just opened his car door without looking behind. You need to always be on the lookout for that sort of thing when you're a cyclist, it can be seriously dangerous, especially at speed.

Beautiful derelict steelworks

Muscly Soviet ideal workers

Brad doing the Giro d'Italia thing. When I asked him what it meant he said "kiss me in me van or on me bike."

Yes, it's an actual cycle path, and it went for a few clicks. Impressive. It died in the middle for a bit, but then started again.

King David the Builder. Davo took to the throne in 1089, at the ripe old age of 16, and enjoyed some major military victories. Unfortunately he died only 16 years later, leaving behind a much stronger Georgian kingdom than he'd inherited, one of the strongest ever in fact. Apparently.

After climbing lots of hills right at the end, we finally made it to our street, which happens to be undergoing major roadworks at the moment.

The front of our particularly cute guesthouse. Our little apartment was upstairs.

Brad modelling his human cannon ball clobber for Rich and I. Brad's actual job back in England is to be shot out of a cannon every Saturday night at the circus. I think maybe all those walls he's crashed through headfirst have had some sort of effect, because all he seems to do all day is sing whole songs from the 70s 80s and 90s, triggered by single innocuous words that anyone could say, which result in him launching into incredibly well-delivered performances of complete, and very obscure, songs.

Our lovely host recommended a restaurant for dinner, and couldn't stop raving about it. So we gave it a whirl, even though it was quite a long walk up the hill. When we arrived, there were no diners whatsoever, just us, and a baker's dozen staff. They were all young and shy and embarrassed about their English, and orders got confused and foods mixed up and it was all very haha strange.

Bearies and beeries

We didn't buy these boxes of tea because they said they were broken. We found undamaged ones.

Brad's so strong that when he opened the front door it fell right out

Kutaisi

The next day we decided to leave our bikes where they were, and be pedestrians for the day.

Our host told us we could stay for another night, but then forgot to mark our apartment as booked online, and someone else booked it. So we ended up having to move, but found a place literally right across the road. Accomodation around here is well booked in the summer, but summer's long gone now, and there's places available everywhere, and prices are relatively cheap.

First we wandered into town, as I needed to recharge my phone data package.

Our street

Russian wedding limo

The Kutaisi Opera Theatre, and Mickey Mouse

The beautiful David Aghmashenebeli Square, and it's beautiful centrepiece Colchis Fountain, featuring golden horses and other animals. It's all lit up at night and looks cool. Cold actually.

Choose your colour

It's pink for me

I love these elaborate iron poster stands

As Brad and Rich's time here in Georgia is limited, (and diminishing way too quickly for my liking), we decided that the next day we'd put our bikes on a train to the Black Sea, as we didn't quite have time to ride there and then make it all the way back to Tbilisi in time for their return flight.

So we cabbed it to the railway station, about 10 clicks out of town, to get a ticket on the slow train to Batumi, a city right on the sea, in the southwestern corner of the country.

The journey's a distance of about 175km, and the price per ticket was .... guess how much?

It was only 1 single lari per person (including our bikes). That's about US $0.30. Crazy (and puzzlingly) cheap. It's sort of just a token cost.

And we didn't even get tokens.

Then we brunched back in town. I avoided the heartburnapan and the tobacco chickens, as I prefer more gentle food.

Madame Bovary's pretty smooth, Brad and Rich have had a couple of her since I've been in Georgia, she's sort of a cheesy meaty soufflé, don't ask me how she came to be the name of a Georgian food dish.

Actually she's more a Russian food dish. And maybe she got her food name because food was such an integral part of Flaubert's novel. But don't ask me, I'm just making it up as I go along.

Brad pointing to something undeclared, and Rich giving me the two chips.

Adjurian katchapuri, a bit of a go to dish around here. The amazing thing is that if you order it at any good restaurant or café they actually bake it on the spot, and it comes out hot and juicy and extremely bombinable.

Our new rustic guest house, just across the road. It was light and woody, and Maya, our host, is a sweet waddly woman who can fling around broken English at will.

Reading books used to be infectious. These days that disease appears to have been almost eradicated.

Nice big snowcatchers

Rich was feeling a little poorly after his food unfortunately, but it turned out to be nothing too major. Those guys rested, and I went strolling downtown.

The central market

Dried fruit and nut delicacies

Lots of cheap secondhand clothes

Bas unrelief

Downtown Kutaisi

Let sleeping predators lie. Dogs can be nasty in Georgia, but luckily we've been munched-free so far.

Sometimes as we ride along we hear barking ahead, and immediately feel the slight chill in the spine, knowing that soon we'll be accosted by a fang, which is a collective noun for a gang of vicious dogs with sharp teeth.

But actually they've been ok so far, as we pass on the bikes we slow down and try and make them understand that we're not wild boars that they need to kill and shred into pulled pork, but kind humans that love all beings, including vicious bastard dogs.

Local hipsters, and buildings with hats

Yeah, I agree. How can you possibly make sense of this world?

Unfortunately self-loathing is alive and well here, like in many other places. A young woman came out of this salon just before I passed, and walked in front of me for quite awhile. For pretty much the whole time she kept looking at herself, in every single shop window she passed. Sad but true.

Must be really hard for shop owners, because these days people use their shop windows as mirrors, instead of looking inside at their exciting and creative product displays.

The thing is, the woman in front of me was beautiful, in my opinion, without her Bovinetoxins or fake tan or whatever else she may have had adjusted in the salon. Of course we all know that beauty is within, don't we?

But within-beauty doesn't sell fashion or cosmetics.

This guy was great. He was playing a panduri, a traditional three-stringed instrument that sounds a little ukulele-ish, but better, because it's a little deeper, and because the chords and their walking bass notes are way more interesting.

Did not expect zebras here

It was a really beautiful sunset

I'd booked us a table at a place that a local had recommended for live music. When I booked it the guy said it was all Georgian music, so I was expecting a traditional Georgian band - but it ended up being one guy singing really slow Georgian pop love songs over backing tracks. Sad.

The food was good though, and there were lots of young women diners there, many whom appeared to be in love with the singer, and they were constantly singing along and looking lovingly into his unavailable eyes.

Check out those sweets! And the desserts!

The place mats were nice too, and were all very well-placed.

Maccy Dees was full

This isn't just strange because of the shin and the kets, but also the pizz. Whilst on the road, if any of us stopped for a piss, those guys would instinctively call-out pisse!!, which is actually some sort of Danish curse, which can mean basically anything.

Pisse!! became a bit of a theme word for our little trip, you know how that happens sometimes. So did the whole pomegranate juice story, from when we got ripped off by a shonky dude at Uplistikhe.

Maya cooked up an absolute storm for us in the morn, including super delicious eggplant rolls stuffed with walnut paste (which we've had many times now), and local salty cheese.

It was wet. Our train was due to leave in the afternoon, so, after this long breakfast, we went out for coffee. Life is so bloody stressful sometimes.

Umbrella organisation

Cutlery stash

Looks appetising innit

This nougat was tasty, but they didn't spare the sugar

Long term parking

A friendship of many moons

Don't forget to smell the daisies

Rich being stalked by yet another bristling killer.

Make America Meaningful Again (MAMA). Please!

Rain Dead

Eventually we had no option but to get our rain gear on and hop on our bikes, for the 10 km ride to Rioni station.

At first it wasn't raining too much, but the rain got heavier and heavier, and by the time we got to the station our wet weather gear had ensured we were totally wet.

That's the thing about wet weather gear. No matter how much you pay for the best gear, it often either keeps the rain out (and you get wet inside from all your sweating), or it "breathes", and then you get wet from the rain and your sweating.

It was cruisey getting our bikes onto the old train, it was a great old Soviet-era classic, and we almost had a whole passenger carriage to ourselves for the first part of the journey.

Incredible photo of the scenery. I'm thinking of entering this shot in an international photo competition. You know, pretending I meant to do it etc etc, like they always do.

I'm gonna miss these two

I'd had an argument with Black Bewdy, my bike, because she kept riding into puddles on the way, and completely drenched my non-cycle shoes, which happen to be the only shoes I own at the moment. In anger I just left her at the end of the carriage on her own. I needed space.

Me looking particularly worried as I write this blog, because I couldn't find anything punny to say. (At last!!!, I hear you think).

Eventually we got to Batumi, and headed off into the windy storm.

We've actually made it to the Black Sea! Rich reminded us that it was very black. I hadn't even noticed, as I was in storm-fighting mode.

Batumi is the trippiest place! We felt like we'd stumbled upon Lost Vegas.

Me pretending I'm having a good time.

Speaking of tripping, Brad slammed into a hidden pothole and nearly fell off his bike, sharply twisting his wrist in the process, poor guy. He told me about it just after it happened, but I shrugged and ignored him, because he'd spoken when I wasn't ready to listen to him. So impetuous of him.

But luckily his injury wasn't too serious, and he recovered after a couple of days. I felt very guilty that I wasn't there for him in his minute of need.

There'd been yet another earthquake earlier that day, and this building was flipped upside down. But they just turned the sign upside down and changed things around a bit inside, and stayed open. Business is business.

It was pretty late by the time we made it to our apartment, a brand new high rise tackfest of a place. We parked our bikes in the rain, and squished up to the 28th floor.

The place was cheap and nasty. Nothing seemed to work properly. The power wouldn't come on, despite us putting the plastic card in the slot. The kitchen cupboards wouldn't close properly. The toilet flush buttons were so flimsy they threatened to snap every time you pressed them.

The door under the kitchen sink had a fridge hidden behind it (right next to the other, unhidden fridge), and a cutlery drawer hidden in there too.

And, the shonky place's pièce de résistance revealed itself in all its glory in the middle of the night, when a tempestuous storm blew in right off the ocean, and our front glass door kept flying open, and wouldn't stay closed, because the latch was cheap and not working properly. Same for Rich's apartment.

It was actually really dodgy, and could be super dangerous with kids in there, let alone your important stuff possibly getting water damaged.

The whole district we were in was full of apartment skyrises just like our own 53 story fake-Lego one. This part of Batumi was pretty horrible really, the antithesis of our tastes. Luckily the old town was way nicer. But somehow all these highrise buildings appeared to be packed full of people, despite the bad weather and the well-past-summer clime.

Batumi is a magnet for Turks, who come here to gamble at the city's many big casinos (gambling is almost completely banned in Turkey, and there are no casinos).

It's also a huge draw card for Russians, both tourists and migrants. Russian tourists come here on vacation, to escape their freezing winters (Black Sea towns are considerably warmer here than anywhere in central or northern Russia), and the prices here are considerably cheaper too.

Many Russians have also escaped conscription and/or a hugely contracted economy by moving to cities all over Central Asia and the Caucasus, where they find jobs or work online, and can lead a pretty good life, especially by not having to deal with the hugely difficult political and economic conditions in their homeland.

Of course it's also difficult for them, because their families and friends are back in Russia, along with their assets and support networks.

It was late by the time we dried off and went out to eat. We were starving, especially Brad, who needs to eat regularly in order to continue being human. The apartment security guy told us that the only place still open was McDonalds, and we actually decided to go there. But the Goddess was with us, and we went to the wrong McDonalds (not the 24 hr one), and it was closed.

And just when life in the cold hungry rain was threatening to become very bleak, we suddenly found a great café, full of great food and friendly staff, despite the late hour.

We did! Madloba! (Thank you in Georgian).

The rainy view from our balcony.

Nameless heads on frameless walls

Well, there was this framed pic, it even looked like it could be Georgia, which was quite a surprise. I expected generic impossible-to-know-where-this-bland-scene-is-because-there's-millions-of-places-like-it-type prints, or those scream-worthy non-art pastel pictures of fluffy cats or little blonde girls wearing white dresses and wide-rimmed summer hats, sitting on swings, and laughing at their impossibly perfect and playful little white dogs.

The End Is Nearing

Well, it won't be that long before us Three Musketeers will be shooting off in different directions.

Sad but true.

It's been incredible hanging with Brad and Rich. They're both amazingly beautiful men, warm, funny, and soft, but also hard when it really matters.

OMG maybe that's TMI.

Of course, I mean hard in the adventure sporting sense.

Hanging with these two real men has been a total privilege. I feel like Lucky Pierre, the fortunate guy in the middle of the ménage à trois, the one who gets to enjoy it from all directions.

OMG I did it again.

Lucky Pierre is, of course, a moniker which I learnt from a demented ménage à deux called Brad and Rich.

But it's not all bad news yet. We've still got a little bit of time for more action.

Brad, Rich and I now plan to discover the finer parts of this city, Batumi, and will then eventually train it back to Tbilisi.

I'll store my bike here, and Brad and Rich plan to transport theirs back on the train, as they're flying out with them from the capital in a few days.

Yeah, there's more adventures to come.

It ain't over till it's over❤️

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