Sunday, November 13, 2011

Day 132 Shaki - Goris

I was betrayed this morning - I had paid for breakfast but noone was there at the rundown motel, grmpf! This together with not working showers and generally not particularly hospitable people made me feel like breaking into the kitchen to get it myself. This would have involved some broken windows and given the overall sleazy appearance of the place I better forgot that idea.
I rather tried to unscrew the broken front carrier screw - without success. I temporarily attached the carrier to the screw holding the axis in place - of course this was thought as a very temporary solution until I would find professional help: if that screw would break I could not ride on! Fortunately I only had a short ride today. This time the wind was very much on my side - he blew me up to the small pass before I could roll down to the city of Goris. The city has an extremely beautiful location - surrounded by high mountains on three sides. On one side it even has some cappadocia-style rock pyramids including cave dwellings. Very much to my pleasure it also was considerably warmer down there. I checked in at a bed&breakfast and a short mentioning of my front carrier problems was enough to turn the owner into bicycle repair mode. We first tried it nicely with pliers but this did not work - in the end we had to work with drilling machine, angle grinder and thread cutter plus a big amount ofto fix the problem. After about an hour of work it was done, yeah! I had thought about visiting the Tatev monastery again. When my dad and me were there two years ago we had to take a very bumpy ride 500m down a deep gorge and up on the other side to the monastery. In the meanwhile a long ropeway was built making Tatev an easily reachable touristic sight. Unfortunately it was already too late - I probably would have reached Tatev at sunset. Thus I skipped this idea and rather spent the rest of the day with a cyclists 2 favourite activities: eating and sleeping.

No comments:

Post a Comment