Tblisi

I'm in Georgia and it is one fine country. Very fine.

Sheki was nice but i left it and Azerbaijan behind and travelled with an Australian diplomat in a couple of minivans to a border town where we hopped into a taxi and drove to the border. The Azerbaijan immigration was sketchy at best as everybody had to hand their passports over to a man with a gun who quickly disappeared but everything sorted itself out and me and Axel, the Aussie, walked over the border to be greeted by Georgian immigration officer who said happily, "Welcome to Georgia!" before i even gave him my passport. Two taxis, one minivan and a few hours later i was in Sighnaghi.

Sighnaghi is a red tiled hillside town complete with pastel coloured houses, balconies and lazy cobbled streets. It's in a region of Georgia famous for grape growing and wine making which was a fame that my guesthouse seemed only too pleased to extend further. The large woman called Manana who owned the place kept asking me to sit down at their big dinner table and then say "David! Eat!". This was usually followed by her small husband, Gori, who seemed to appear from nowhere, his face dominated by large glasses and a bald head and would say "David! Drink!" and pour me some wine or cha cha. Cha cha is a Georgian fire water made by fermenting grape skins and grape seeds to an average alcohol level of at least 50%. Apparently. I don't really remember the finer details.

The next morning i was sat in the front seat of Gori's car with three Israelis on the back seat who were also staying at the guesthouse. Gori was giving us a tour of the area and we saw a winery, a old fort, a monastery and his sisters house where she and her husband brew their own wine and cha cha which, of, course, had to be sampled. It was ten o'clock in the morning. And that's how i found myself being piloted through the landscapes of Georgia dripping with autumn leaves with three Israelis while Gori threw an arm out of a window and said things like, "Church! You go?" and me with a few glasses of cha cha flowing quite freely through my head.

I stayed another day in Sighnaghi (or it may have been two, ask cha cha) and then got another minivan to Tblisi. The Georgian capital is a dishevelled city that oozes charm and bursts with old architecture, happy faces, churches and speeding cars all of which seem to inhabit every tree lined street. I stayed in a family run guesthouse on a Saturday night and met lots of Polish people who seemed to want to drink a large supply of Cognac and then dance (Pole dancers, if you will) which made for a memorable experience.

I left Tblisi in another minivan (it's the only public transport in the Caucasus) and three hours later i was in the mountains near the Russian border and the village of Kazbegi. I stepped off the minivan to be greeted by a nice smiling woman who simply said, "Hello. I am Nazi." Thankfully Nazi has a guesthouse and her name is pronounced Nah-see but for some reason best known to her parents it's spelt with a "z". Unlucky. Nazi and her husband were fantastic hosts always entertaining and cooking huge amounts of food for me and the other guests staying there.

Kazbegi is famous in Georgia for the church that sits on a small mountain above the town. It is perched at a place where no church (or any building) should be but it's there looking out below to the village and the valley, across to the mountains and up to Mt Kazbeg, a snow covered peak towering over everything. Like most things i've seen so far in Georgia, Kazbegi is utterly wonderful. I walked up the dirt tack to Tsmida Sameba, the famous church, and hiked higher up the lower slopes of the dizzying mountain behind it. The next day me and Anya, a German photographer also staying with Nazi, got a taxi to a tiny village called Juta and spent the day hiking in heart-stopping camera-battery-sapping scenery into the brown green Chaukhi valley and up to the base camp of the brilliant white topped Mt Chaukhi. We sat and ate food, looked around and decided that Georgia is less a country and more a work of art. This place is great.

I'm back in Tblisi where i'll be for a few days and then i'm heading south to a different country. Who knows when i'll next be in this part of the world so i thought, "Let's go to Armenia." And it's not everyday that you can have that particular thought. I should be there for a week and then head back north to Georgia as there's no border between Armenia and Turkey. And Georgia deserves more time anyway.

Thanks for reading. Have fun.

Sheki

I've failed. I wanted to get from Japan to England without getting on a plane but on Friday last week i did exactly that and flew from Tashkent to Baku. But now i'm in Azerbaijan which makes me sound exotic and adventurous even though Azerbaijan is neither.

I left Samarkand and the friendly guesthouse and grabbed a train that sped through the familiar mixture of desert and cotton fields back to Tashkent where i stayed in a guesthouse with the three most Bravian looking men i've ever seen and a French guy who seemed to have an affliction to wearing clothes whilst staying in the dorm we were sharing. He also wanted to walk to Mongolia. I met some interesting people in Uzbekistan. It was a fun country though. I wasn't expecting much from deserts and mosques but i was amazed and entertained almost everyday in a country where the average age is 15 and everybody seemed obsessed with either making money or escaping to another country.

I did leave for another country. I managed to get through immigration at Tashkent airport which was bursting full of (guess who?) loads of old French tourists and waited to board my flight to Baku.

Disclaimer: If you are my father then you should probably not read the next two paragraphs. As far as you're concerned nothing out of the ordinary happened on the flight and flying is ace. Just ace.

Thanks to an airport worker and a bus, i and a dozen very Russian looking men found ourselves on the tarmac queuing to get on a plane that looked suspiciously small for an international flight. I've slept in bigger hotel rooms. I noticed a red dotted line around two of the windows and in red letters it said simply "cut here in emergency". The plane was already full of Pakistani men who'd transferred from a flight from Lahore. It seemed that there wasn't enough time or space for all of their luggage to be stowed away properly so the guy next to me spent the whole flight with his suitcase wedged between his legs. Other nondescript boxes that had been shrink-wrapped jutted out into the aisle. Now, i'm an open minded liberal thinking guy but when you get on any aeroplane there are certain things you don't really expect to see and one of those is a lot of Muslim men holding onto boxes whilst on a flight to Europe. It brings out the Fox News in you and that's never a good thing.

But i finally realised on this flight that traveling by plane is crap. You have to be there three hours early, everybody gets treat like a terrorist, the food is shit, you watch movies you don't like or you've already seen and unless you've got a window seat or are lucky enough to suffer from mild narcolepsy you spend most of your time counting the pieces of dandruff on the persons hair in front of you or guessing how many layers of make-up the stewardesses put on their faces that day (Why do they always cake themselves in it? There are certain people who have to wear too much make up to work - clowns and figure skaters. That's it.). The announcements fascinate me as well. "In the event of an emergency...." What kind of an emergency? I'm in a chair in the fucking sky. If the name of this emergency is anything other than We've Run Out Biscuits then we're all mince. Or when you're late leaving and the captain says, "Sorry about the delay. Hopefully we'll be able to make up some time during the flight." How? What the hell are you going to do? Take a short cut? Fly faster? The sooner we invent trains that travel quicker or some kind of Star Trek teleportation device the better it will be for for everybody.

After spending the GDP of Malawi on a visa at Baku airport (robbing bastards) i got a taxi to the centre of the city. My taxi driver was a friendly man and through my miniscule handle of Russian and the taxi drivers broken English here are some things we managed to establish.
I'm rich because England is rich.
My name is similar to a famous motorbike and for the rest of the journey i will be refered to as "Davidson" but it will always be said in a Mr Miagi style "Danielson" kind of way.
I'm 27.
He's 33.
He has two kids.
I have no kids.
I'm weird because i'm not married and i have no kids.
I should hurry up and get married and have kids because my dick will go limp before i'm thirty three.
His dick went limp before he was thirty three.

My expectations for Baku were amazingly low. Everybody i'd met who's been there hated it and as a result i didn't think it was too bad. It's going through another oil boom (in 1905 it produced 50% of the world's oil - economic freedom has led to another) and as a result there's a huge amount of money pouring into the place and the classical European looking buildings are being refurbished or just rebuilt. There's construction and building everywhere, BMWs race Ladas and taxis, hot looking women are crawling all over the place and the old town is smack in the middle keeping all its history and alleyways intact.

I left Baku and came to Sheki by bus which took an age as the road was under construction. Azerbaijan is a nice enough place but it'll be much better when it's finished. Sheki is an old town in the cool hills in the north west of the country. There's not a great deal to see here but it's a really friendly little town and the old men sitting around in the central park playing checkers and sipping tea watched over by the old buildings is a nice contrast to the money and pace of Baku.

Tomorrow i'll cross the border to Georgia which everybody seems to to like as it's full of wine, food, mountains and hospitality. Let's hope everybody is right.

Samarkand

I only have two more days in Uzbekistan and then i'll be on a plane. Here's where i've been, what i've seen and who i've met this week. Aren't you getting bored of all this yet?

Bukhara is an old city chock full of awesome medrasses, mosques and minarets. Most have been restored as they've been crushed and rebuilt plenty of times between the Mongols and Russians. One mosque, Maghoki-Attar Mosque, has been the subject of excavations and digs and summed up the history of the place nicely. First it was the site of a Buddhist temple, then Zoroastrianism (don't ask, i don't know) then a Mosque and finally Jews used it as a synagogue but it's now hawking carpets and hats to tourists. I'm not sure who made the decision to turn all the remarkable Islamic architecture into glorified tourist shops but i wish they hadn't. The best place i visited was Abdullah Khan Medrassa as it wasn't restored to its original form but had been left to decay. I paid an old guy to unlock the place and let me wander around taking pictures of rooms where students used to live and study that were now covered with thick layers of dust, debris or pigeon shit but to me it just added to the charm of the place.

I stayed in a guesthouse in Bukhara owned by fat man and a small child who promised me football on TV and beers in the fridge. I got neither but i did get a strange breakfast every morning. One day it was sausage and mash with grapes on the side.

I got ripped off by a friendly man in Bukhara. He approached me on the street and told me i could have lunch with him and his family and then before the food was served (which was crap) he tried to sell me some blankets and cushion covers embroidered with silk (i must look like the kind of guy interested in soft furnishings). He got so desperate to sell something other than lunch (which cost more than we'd agreed) that he asked me if i liked watches. I shrugged. He disappeared to the kitchen and produced a cheap Soviet wind-up watch that he said would make a good souvenir. I gave him a disdainful look that was only surpassed by his daughter. There are lots of tour buses passing through Bukhara and it seems to have made people there think that a foreign face is some kind of coin-shitting machine that likes to walk the streets buying crap they don't need for no reason at all.

I jumped on a speedy train to Samarkand in the early morning sunshine and we sped past miles of cotton fields sprinkled with people harvesting in the autumn heat who stopped to wave at the train as we then trundled on through dusty deserts and villages. Three hours later i was in Samarkand, one of the most famous cities on the ancient Silk Road and home to the amazing Registan which is a collection of enormous mosques and meddrasses and is a seriously beautiful building. Unfortunately most of Samarkand has ben turned into yet more tourist traps and manicured roads that the Uzbek authorities would love to call "boulevards" which split the dusty old town charm from the soulless buildings and keep the tour buses on the clean streets. It's a shame but it's a big business. Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara is where the money is but i'll probably have my best memories from the other places in Uzbekistan.

And there are amazing numbers of French people on holiday in Uzbekistan. They're everywhere. Most of them on tour buses and most of them old and slightly bewildered but definitely everywhere. I was sat in an internet cafe in Bukhara and an Uzbek man came in to chat with the owner. He then walked over to me, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "France?"
"No," i replied, "England."
"London?" he offered.
"Erm, no, Leeds."
"Manchester?" he attempted, ignoring the answer i'd just given him.
"No...Leeds." He shrugged, looked almost insulted and walked out.

I stayed in a great guesthouse in Samarkand. There were a load of cyclists staying there all on huge trips across Asia and Europe that made me feel as if i should be trying harder to be traveling as well as Japanese people on a mission to take pictures and get drunk as quickly as possible. It was great to sit around and do nothing but swap stories drink beers and share emails before planning the next legs of our respective journeys.

I'll be in Tashkent for one night and then on Friday i'll be in Europe. Or Asia. I'm not sure. Which continent is Azerbaijan on? I'm looking forward to finding out.