Getting the Eff Out of Georgia

What followed post-Abkhazia was effectively a hasty flight from the Caucasus and a mad dash overland towards the West.  I caught a ride with my Couchsurfing hosts’ father to Batumi where he worked in a bank.  They gave me coffee and put me in a marshrutka heading to the Georgian border.  I hadn’t really stopped to think that there was a lot of Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus I didn’t get to see and might not get to see for a long time, I was just ready for some comfort and rationality in my life.

...so I decided to go to Turkey. 

The Turkish border was atrocious and I highly recommend never crossing at Batumi.  Always Vale.  We were caged up in the hot sun and—one again—my passport did not afford me special privileges while everyone had to line up and have their bags searched.  I suppose in that my bag wasn’t searched I was afforded a special privilege, but I still had to line up and privilege is all relative.

In case there is any ambiguity around how I feel at border crossings towards taxi drivers (or taxi drivers in general) then I will let you know that no, I did not catch a ride with the nearest driver.  Not of a taxi, marshruka, or bus.  I walked.  I walked for a considerable amount of time along the coast and tried hitchhiking.  I also went down to the Black Sea to take a dip and cool off, but it was actually so warm that I just felt like I was bathing in my own sweat.  What this whole exercise did accomplish, however, was me slicing my toe on a piece of coral which burned and affected me for the next week and made walking much more painful.

A cement truck driver stopped to pick me up and drove me to his hub, which was at the junction of the roads to Trabzon along the coast, or to Artvin in the interior.  I hateresolved to make it to Erzurum or Erdican that evening to catch the same train back to Istanbul.  I figured things would be easier if I went from Artvin so I continued along the road after several stops for tea.  So much tea.  It seems to me that the Turkish day can be divided into two phases: drinking tea, and boiling water for more tea. 

I don’t want to give you the impression that the entire Turkish economy revolved around drinking tea, however.  While at least 50% of the population is, at any given time, engaged in consuming tea, the other 50% is occupied by growing and harvesting tea.  Whether the vast tracts of tea cultivation was prompted by the Turkish love of tea, or whether tea consumption was a politically-manufactured cultural trait of the Turks in order to absorb the excess capacity of tea production is anyone’s guess* but the fact of the matter is that tea was there and I had better get used to it. 

On my walk into the interior everywhere I looked there were people harnessed to apparati that ran all the way up the hills and were collecting masses and masses of tea that were dumped onto tarps in village squares.  The entire population appeared to be engaged in tea harvesting, and all the infrastructure built to accommodate its collection and distribution.  Just over the border in Georgia the natural environment was almost identical but there was almost zero tea production, which really went a long way to show how—wait for it—economies transform landscapes.  Looks like that university degree is finally finding an application. 

Anyway, from here I bounced around from car to car until I got to Artvin where a man driving a tow-truck drove me to the bus depot.  He also stopped to get corn from a roadside corn stand where they sell boiled corn.  This corn was so bad.  I’ve had bad corn before--Iing a tow-truck drove me to the bus depot.  He also stopped to get corn from a roadside corn stand where they sell boiled corn.  This corn was so bad.  I’ve had bad corn before—I lived near Chilliwack and the people of Vancouver foolishly believe Chilliwack corn is to die for but I would rather die than eat another cob of mealy, sickly Chilliwack corn.  In any case I ate it, because that’s the type of culturally sensitive martyr I am, but I didn’t enjoy it and to date this has been my only means of externalizing those feelings. 

*Seriously, anyone’s guess.  What are you going to do, look up an agricultural history of Asia Minor?  We both know you’re not.