Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Turkish mountains, one last time

Written in a georgian home, Uzugreti
In the morning we wake up early for a good breakfest and we're away towards Ardesen. My tablet has a full batteries again, both of them and that doesn't happen that often. Until now I didn't deplate the battery a single time but in the harshest times it got to 30% of the primary battery and the secondary one completly depleted.
We were running down the hill inside the back of our host's pickup truck. The truck was speeding through the randomly paved and steep roads picking children on the way.
We disembarked in central Ardesen and started a quest for wifi. I forgot to mention that our guests didn't have the internet. We try to get to a wifi spot for obvious reasons and also because we need to know the status of our iranian visa. So far, the consulate didn't send us anything. The deadline is in a few days.
It was incredibly hard to find a wifi spot. People offered us computers, they gave us tea and talked to us about a million things but no way to connect. Besides their good will, the people didn't know they even had a wifi let alone a wifi password. After countless attempts we made our way into a high school. Some of the teachers spoke english (victory!) and they called the english teachers to make the communication flawless. They invited us for food into the school canteen so we got our free lunch but still no wifi.
We ended up getting wifi in front of a store which sold chainsaws. They knew their wifi password and we got our internet. No news about our visa anyway.
So we got out of Ardesen, to some city called Of, between Rize and Trabzon.
Still time to visit some mountains so we wanted to hitchhike further into the mainland. Before we even started a young couple very much in love stopped and we rode with them until Uzungol.
Uzungol at night
The next day we rode with them high into the mountains, we reached the snow in 2500 meters and didn't even exit the car. The turks like their cars and they like to use them. Is walking on foot kind of bad here? I don't know but you would be surprised what you can climb in a usual street car. The french wouldn't even dare to enter that kind of dirt road, these guys didn't even blink.
Our turkish couple, a cow, and me.
Tomorrow we'll leave  for Trabzon again and we'll see if we got our visas for Iran. If we don't? We go to Georgia and try our luck in the iranian embassy in Yerevan. If we get it? Well... Ilona go find your head scarf!

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