When last I ranted, I was in Dilijan, Armenia. I'm now on the other side of the Caspian Sea in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and much has happened.
From Dilijan I moved on to Alaverdi, a town strung along the massive and scenic Debed Canyon. I stayed in a nice little homestay high above the river. It was very hot. Out of desperation, I chartered a taxi to take me around the ruined monasteries in the area. I can't really get excited over ruined Armenian monasteries, but it gave me the opportunity to hang out the car window and bask in the cooling gale.
My dominant memory of Alaverdi however is the huge smokestack by the copper mine, belching out thick fumes that, trapped by the canyon walls, slowly spread a noxious haze up and down the beautiful valley.
From Alaverdi I raced north to Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, for a rest and visa stop. To continue to Azerbaijan, I needed a visa – my first visa of the trip. I had also been on the go for a month and a half now and felt ready to put down roots for week or so somewhere nice.
Tbilisi was quite nice indeed, and my choice of abode – Dodo's Homestay – turned out felicitous.
The visa turned out to be quite a simple thing, though it took several days for them to issue it. It helped that I had not visited the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabagh.
At Dodo's, an abandoned kitten was haunting the rooftop and mewing piteously. One day a drunken Swede climbed a tree and captured it. He imprisoned it in a cardboard box and thereafter ignored it. Terrified and hungry, its lot had not improved. I had been able to ignore the mewing when it was on the roof, but the pathetic sounds coming from the box I could not ignore. So I bought some milk and cat food and set out to socialise the poor thing.
It was a beautiful grey ball of fluff, with huge grey eyes. It inhaled the milk and the small amount of food I thought it could stand in its famished state, then collapsed against my shoulder, totally exhausted.
Over the next couple of days I continued to fed and pet the kitten, several times a day, gradually increasing the size of the meals. She (I sexed her) domesticated quickly, casting off her desperation and becoming quite normal – playful and adventurous.
The only problem was the dog, a dasschund who answered to the name Mordiac. She harassed the kitten constantly, and as she had some training as a hunting dog we were concerned that she might kill her. As it turned out, if she did kill her, it would be from affection. The kitten had roused her maternal instincts.
Time moved on and so did I. I went up the Military Highway to Kazbegi, where a picturesque monastery perched on a peak above the town. Kazbegi was a cool respite after Tbilisi.
When I came down the mountain, it was time to leave Georgia. I did so reluctantly – Georgia is fiirmly on the list of places I want to see agan.
Azerbaijan. What waste of time and money. I wanted to take a ferry across the Caspian Sea. I needed to get a Kazakh visa. I got the visa, eventually, from a consulate that was more interested in playing games of power and dominance than doing its job. The ferry came randomly and infrequently and in the end I decided that hanging around in Baku – not one of the cheaper, prettier or more pleasant places on Earth – was more trouble than it was worth to me. I just wanted out. So I flew instead of floated across the Caspian, my first failure of the trip.
To be continued ...
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