This post is all about my experience and impression about the trip from Armenia to southern Georgia and eastnorthern Turkey. It may be quite useful for those who’re up to make such a low cost hitchhiking trip in this region.
Important data about the trip itself will be highlighted.
This is the second part of my story.
Day 3. (Rize - Erzurum - Sarikamish)
Early in the morning we moved to a bus station and found out that the bus to Erzurum was leaving in an hour (at 8:30am), the price was pretty much 30 TRY. We attempted to get to the place where the microbus was to leave, but realized that it was quite useless, so we bought bus tickets to Erzurum and managed to eat Turkish qufta in fast-food restaurant before the bus came.
The comfort of busses simply impressed me; a guy was serving various drinks and eating stuff during the whole trip. There even was a TV with headphones in front of every seat, though you could only watch Turkish channels. The trip headed to the west through Trabzon, and then we turned to the south all the way up to Erzurum. I was marveling with picturesque views during the whole drive: the majesty of mountains, flexures of canyons and dense forests, but, of course, indeed the trip was very boring and pretty long.
People in the bus were surprisingly different. I suppose that some of them were Kurdish Christians, as they (married women) were not wearing hijabs, and most of them had bright hair, instead characteristic Turkish black hair. But even Turkish people wearing hijab had mostly European kind of behavior or communication; it seemed like they were completely Europeans but with hijabs on.
Near 3pm we arrived in Erzurum bus station and hitchhiked all the way to the city center. Moving several hundred meters out of the center, the streets were nearly empty; however, the city center was full of life. Erzurum had a big mosque-like building right on the central square, which appeared to be ancient seminary.
We quickly found a luxury store to buy a famous Erzurum tasbih for about 20 TRY, which of course could’ve be discounted if we tried to bargain even more. The important tip to remember is that Turkish sellers think that if you’re a tourist, by definition you should have a lot of money, so the price they expose may be several times higher than they would sell to an average Turkish.
After a dinner in a local fast-food we moved through the whole city to the place where a highway to Kars started. During a long walk we were followed several times by kids playing nearby and asking typical questions on broken English like “where are you from?”, “my name Dinar, you?” etc. It seemed that the image of foreign stranger was not a rarity in this ancient city. We soon found a highway to Kars and started our evening hitchhiking (it was about 5pm). The sun was near to go down, it was nearly dark, and the highway lights weren’t yet on. Soon we realized that in order to catch at least someone, we needed to name the nearest city to drive, so firstly we caught a guy who drove us to Pasinler, and then, after several attempts, we were picked up by two older men driving to Horasan.
All the way to Horasan we were talking about various unimportant themes, when one of the men suddenly said, that we’ll have to pay $50 for our trip. Well, even if we had money, we would never pay for a hitchhiking, so we tried to explain that we are travelling free and that indeed, we don’t have any money, we were saying “para yok” (“no money” in Turkish). The driver, who was quiet nearly all the time, started speaking in Turkish, of course, we didn’t understand a word. But luckily, we ultimately got to Horasan and fortunately goodbied to that weird guys
Horasan is a kind of different story to tell. To understand clearly what this small town looked like, one should imagine the Wild Western towns all along the main road in the early XIX century US: small houses, taverns, shops and a long road cutting the whole town through in two separate parts. It appeared, people were celebrating something in a local disco, there were about 50 exclusively men dancing near the road. They didn’t pay any attention to us, so we quietly passed near them. But, however, soon we realized we were followed by several groups of young men walking on the other side of the road with the same speed, staring at us and shouting unclear phrases. The atmosphere was really creepy and aggressive, we decided not to pay any attention to them or respond to their shouts. The ambience became even more fearsome when the muezzin started yelling from the minaret to call the Muslims for a night pray to mosque. After a short break for a pray the music started again, spraying the beats through the whole town along the road, however, we were already near the end of the town, where the highway to Kars was starting. Further indeed was the longest wait that we had during our trip. We waited nearly 2 hours for a car, skipping those offering a ride for money. One of them even spoke Russian and adviced to give us a ride for Russian roubles.
At last, when we were near to lose our hopes, a jeep-car stopped with three young guys inside, who said they were heading to Sarikamish and were happy to give us a ride. Well, we didn’t really care where they were going; the only thing we were concerned about is to move at least in any direction from this goddamned town, so we didn’t really check the map. These guys appeared to be very adequate and talkative; one of them spoke English much better than anyone we’ve met during our trip in Turkey. After the standard questionnaire, they started telling about the places we were driving through: they showed us where the Aras River originated, told about Sarikamish town as “the center of the eastern Turkey winter sporting” (one of these guys, btw, was the skiing trainer). We stopped near one of the all-day highway cafes to have a 15 minutes tea break. While drinking the hot Turkish tea, we exchanged emails and Facebook contacts and after that continued our road. These guys, as about a day ago, advised us to stay in Sarikamish so as to move early in the morning. Admonished by the last time experience, this time we decided to listen to their advice, so they brought us to one of the Sarikamish cheap motels, which was completely empty.
We didn’t have much cash on our hands, so haggling turned out to be rather easy, and we were given a double room for about 40 TRY (the primary price was about 90 TRY). So take that into account when paying more than $10 for a hotel room in Turkey!
The room was just frosty; we were freezing even with our warm clothes on. The good thing was that room had an internet. We slept rather quickly, under the numerous blankets the temperature was a little bit higher.
Day 4. (Sarikamish - Kars - Akhalkalaki)
Early in the morning we realized, that we’re right in the middle of eastern Turkey with completely no cash money, except several TRY. We spent our last 1-2 TRY to buy two bottles of water and a piece of bread from the nearby store.
We walked to the Kars highway about 10 km (it was about 9am), this was a really long and annoying walk, as the sun was shining right towards us, and the mountainous wind was crazily blowing on my ear. Finally we were taken for a ride by a trucker, who drove us up to Kars suburbs, where we lazily managed to hitchhike a car up to the center of the city. It was 11am, the city center seemed to me pretty developed for the first several minutes, however then I realized that none of banks and phone service centers were working. Instead, there were just myriad of second-hand like clothes stores, fast-food restaurants, cafes, food stores etc. When we decided to buy some food and drink to get fed at least a little bit, the credit card terminal didn’t work.
For reference, we were to buy a packet of Turkish tea for 1.5 TYR, a bottle of 1l Coke for 2 TYR, several chocolates for 1-2 TYR each and ayran (tan like drink) for 2 TYR.
Lastly we found an ancient part of the city, where the destructed castle high on the hill and an Armenian church (turned into a mosque) underneath were located, so we didn’t really dislike our visiting of Kars. The inside of the mosque was not changed much from the time it served as a Christian church, as the sanctuary and candle holders were reserved.
We didn’t have much time to review all the sights nearby, as we had a crazy plan to get back to Georgia at least before the sun goes down; it was about 1pm. We left for the highway to the north. The sun was just grilling, and walking was getting more and more difficult. Soon after several unlucky attempts, we realized that there were no cars going to Ardahan or even worse Georgia. So while stopping cars we decided to name the nearby town to increase our chances to get picked up. This really worked, and soon we were on our way to the north. We changed about 4-5 cars, we even got picked up by a tractor, which was moving at 25 kmph, it surely was a lot of fun.
But after all, we did it; at least it seemed to us. We got to the place, where the road from Kars was separating in two directions - one to Ardahan, and another one - straight to the Georgian border. Guess what, there were nearly no cars going to Georgia. Once for a ten minutes period a car passed by without even noticing us. The road was nearly demolished so it was hard even to walk on this road, not to speak of driving. But again, the fortune acted generously and we were picked up for a hitchhike to one petrol station, where we, fortunately for us, were able to use credit cards and bought Coke and a chocolate. After being quickly cheered up, eating and drinking long-awaited sweet stuff, we were picked up by a young woman (!) who drove her grandparents to Damal. She spoke broken English but was able to express her admiration, after we told her about our trip. She was extremely, just amazingly nice, wore western styled clothes and didn’t wear hijab or any other Muslim stuff. The single fact that she was about 25 yo with a driving license in the eastern Turkey was impressive.
In Damal we walked down the hill on which the village was located, passing along a large quarry with trucks driving out every several minutes. A trucker from Iran stopped and picked us, saying that he will drive us all the way to Georgia. At first, he appeared a rather kind guy, and after an hour we understood he was even more gracious and generous. We were offered Iranian fruits and sweeties, as well as Iranian coins. During the whole trip he was dancing, yes, he was literally dancing while driving on that goddamned 3 meters wide road, with one side going down the mountain for at least several hundred meters, on his 18m x 4m truck! Demonstrating us about differences between Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian traditional music and dances and asking us to take photos of him. Well, this guy was just awesome, probably the most awesome guy we’ve met during our trip.
The road itself lied through the most mountainous part of eastern Turkey, we first raised all the way to 2500 m above the sea level and then drastically came down to 1000 m near the Georgian border. The mountains up there were simply astonishing, they seemed something unreachably vast. Near 1500 m the area of dense forests started, painted in autumn colors. We reached the border near 6pm.
At least we thought it was the border. However it turned out that the truck just stopped at the end of a queue for the border. And the queue was about 2 km in length just numerous trucks standing one by another, with drivers resting nearby, drinking tea or fixing something in their large trucks. There were about 180 trucks that we passed by until we finally got to the border itself.
Quickly passing the formal part of the border itself, we again walked about half an hour, until we finally were picked up by a Georgian taxi driver, who hitchhiked us to Akhaltsikhe. It was about 8pm, we were very hungry, the temptation to spend a night in Akhaltshike was seemingly strong, however we got to the southern highway, where after several unlucky tries we stopped a young guy driving to Akhalkalaki, who was nearly a complete zero in Russian. I was sleeping all the way, and the outside was very dark, so the road seemed rather long, but we lastly we got to Akhalkalaki, where, of course, I started noticing signs like “shop”, “motel” in Armenian. We entered a store to buy some food and were lucky to meet the following guys. It was an Armenian family, who, after I explored my nationality, said they saw me on a TV several years ago as I won an Olympiad in Astronomy. This fact really astonished me, how did they manage to remember it, that episode was so short on the TV.
They gave us a room for night for 20 GEL (which was quite OK, for two), we also bought some bread, chocolates, matsun, tan and cheese (about 5 GEL).
After that my friend got even treated by a glass of Georgian wine (I don’t drink). They told us, that a bus to Yerevan leaved daily several times per day. We got fed, talked a little bit and slept.
Day 5. (Akhalkalaki - Yerevan)
In the morning, again, we were amazingly fortunate! A guy heading to Yerevan told us, he can drive us for 6000 AMD for a person, which is even less than a microbus ticket cost. First we thought, the trip is going to be complicated, or we will have to be going with packages of vegetables or something else. But it appeared that the guy was not a taxi driver, it was just that he needed to get to Yerevan quickly and he decided to earn some easy money by giving us a ride. Well, we got to Yerevan in just 3 hours!
