The Month of June, Part III: Istanbul to Akhaltsikhe

Saturday afternoon, Emilie and I boarded a bus to Kars, a small city in the East of Turkey. We were somewhat apprehensive about the twenty-something hour-long bus ride along the northern half of the country after we realized that outside the touristy area of old downtown Istanbul almost no one speaks any English. But after being served cookies and Cokes and being doused repeatedly with what we came to refer to as “holy oil,” we decided this was probably the best bus ride we’d ever been on. And the scenery was breathtaking.

We arrived in Kars the next day and began our search for a bus to Posof, a town near the Georgian border. Our destination was Armenia, but given the on-going and current strain in the relationship between Turkey and Armenia, the border between the two is closed. So we had to go around. After several frustrating attempts at overcoming the language barrier and then wandering aimlessly around Kars, we somehow managed to secure ourselves seats on a passing bus on its way to Posof. It was the beginning of a string of amazingly lucky events that got us all the way to Yerevan.

Passing into the mountains and into the tiny border town of Posof was one of the most picturesque legs of our journey. Then, after chugging slowly up a steep incline and pulling into the driveway of a small shop, we exited the bus into the pouring rain. A middle-aged man with his young son agreed to drive us to the Georgian border for a few dollars. We raced along the narrow hillside road higher and higher up the mountain, occasionally stopping for a picture moment or a slowly moving herd of cows.

We reached the border checkpoint in the early evening to find the place completely empty and seemingly deserted. We wandered from booth to building searching for an idea of where to get our passports stamped. We might have just walked straight through without talking to anyone if not for our fear of being shot in the back of the head by an invisible sniper. Finally someone spotted us through a window and called for us to approach the building for inspection. The rain continued to pour and our clothes were completely soaked through as we stood outside waiting for the border guards to finish with our passports. At last we were given the go-ahead and made our way to the Georgian side.

The Georgian side of the border was equally deserted and we felt even more lost and confused as to where we were supposed to go. Shivering from the rain, our desperate search for shelter led us to a large barn at the end of a gravel road. As we shook dry and started to think this might be a decent place to hide for the night, we noticed a shed with a window lit at the edge of the inside of the barn. We wandered closer and a gruff border patrol guard emerged. He began muttering something in Georgian, then switched to broken English, and finally I interjected a quick, “Do you speak Russian?” “Of course!” he said. And then we were best friends. We filled out a couple forms, got our passports stamped, and then were quickly ushered into a warm room where we joined three other border patrol guards to watch soccer on soft couches and chat about Georgian politics. They called a taxi for us from the nearest village, but we spent nearly an hour hanging out with the border patrol till our ride arrived. As we loaded our bags into the cab, one of the border guards asked if it was a guitar I was carrying around in my big bag. I said it was, and he said, “Aw, I wish I’d noticed it earlier. We could have played some tunes!”

We bounced along the muddy road to Akhaltsikhe and received a history lesson on the region from our 76-yr old cab driver who spoke in a strange Georgian-Russian gibberish. As we entered the town, it became apparent that none of the shops or buildings had any electricity running. The power had been shut off to the town for the day. Our driver took us to the one guesthouse that had a generator running so that we could have a working light bulb and a warm meal. The host that greeted us at the door led us to our room and told us dinner would be ready downstairs in two hours. The bare walls of our room were eerily marked with droopy pale crosses and the shower water was cold, but other than that, we were just thrilled to have a place to eat and fall asleep.