Day 34 - Fountains and Faff!
The night wasn't as cold as expected, wrapped up as we were, and the views were awesome! I did a double-take while talking to Emma in her full black outfit and white helmet, only for her to teleport 40m ahead. Of course, it wasn't Emma but another female cyclist dressed exactly the same! Took my slow morning brain a minute that though 😅.
The descent was similarly gorgeous to the ascent, through the autumn colours on mostly smooth tracks, accompanied by our "trail dog" who'd appeared outside of the tent that morning. We finished with a distinct feeling "yeh that was good".
At the bottom was the main highlight I wanted to see in Georgia - the Sairme springs. They are a series of fountains dispensing natural mineral water which comes out of the ground sparkling 🤯. One tasted quite neutral, another like drinking a chalk stream, another was quite salty, all fizzy, wild!Then we got distracted and went to a bakery. Very grumpy baker, very tasty stuff.
It was a short run into the city down the rest of the gorge on good roads and we arrived in Kutaisi around 3pm. Plenty of time, we thought!
We'd booked a well reviewed but cheap guest house, which once found via WhatsApp video call, was owned by a gruff but very obliging man who ran his dentist practice from the same place! He showed us into the quiet courtyard and old but charming house, where we immediately set about eating, while blowing his mind with the fact we'd cycled from England/France (he wasn't sporty).
Emma went off to get her bike fixed (again) and scout out some bike boxes for us while I started the packing and drying phaff and washed my bike. I wanted to post my mascot back given he weighs over a kilo, is fragile and takes up over half of one pannier, and the helpful guesthouse owner found a box and packing material and tape - brilliant!
The post office was significantly easier to navigate than the Bulgarian one, with no queues and good English, but I was presented with the option of 50+ euros via air, or 8 euros via train. An easy decision you'd think, except the train only takes it to major hubs. So that parcel is going to a post office in Lausanne with my home address on and a note to the Swiss post I'll pay on delivery. Let's see how that goes...
To fly with a bike it needs to go in a box, usually with some dissembly required. There are a lot more tourists flying bikes in and out of Georgia than bikes sold in Georgia, so the usual system of collecting a bike box from a shop doesn't work. However, a very cool bike shop owner has worked out a great racket. He sent us to a toy shop selling those electric kids cars, where they have plenty of big enough boxes and soft packing materials. With the help of the bright lights and space in the shop and the tape they provided, packing the bikes was a joy. Then he arranges his mate to taxi the people and boxes the half hour drive to the airport! All for the very reasonable price of 48 euros for both of us!!! So once the bikes were packed we left them in the shop to be picked up the next morning and headed out to enjoy dinner, phaff done!
One chap with good English was chatting to us the whole time, and was very interested in bike tech, being a cyclist himself. After a while I asked if he works for the bike shop or the toy store. Neither, it turns out! He was just an interested party who knows the bike shop guy and doesn't work so had plenty of time 😆. Having a translator and extra pair of hands is very helpful, even if you have to multitask dissembling your bike and extremely nerdy discussions on component choices 😅.
We ended up for dinner in a German beer restaurant serving really very good Georgian food. I had a homey potato dish, Ojakhuri, and Emma vegetable soup, along with a pile of mushroom dumplings. All tasted amazing, and was even better once we'd engaged our young waiter to mime the process for the proper way to eat the dumplings (hold the thick end, make a small hole in case, suck out the contents and then finish the casing). Delicious!
And then sleep! Everything ready for the flight tomorrow. ☺️
Food spend today: 58.40 euros