March 27, 2014
Another day in the mountains: Now where did I put my powerlinks?
I had hoped that someone might come over to me before I set up my tent and offer to let me stay in their house, but that famed Georgian hospitality was sorely lacking as no one except a bunch of kids even came to say hello, and they were chased away by an over zealous police officer. On the plus side I slept much better than I thought I would, and there was no rain when I woke early in the morning. The sky was a worrying grey, but at least I could make a dry start.
As soon as I left the town I was onto a dirt road with a lot of potholes, puddles, sand, gravel and big rocks. George was right, it was a very, very difficult road for cars and for quite a long time there was no traffic at all. Of course that made me very happy and even though the going was tough on the steep uphill track it was bliss to be on such a peaceful route through the mountains.
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George was wrong about it being all woods though, as there were villages almost the whole way up. After a while a few vehicles started driving past me, maybe one every 20 minutes or so and almost all of them 4x4s. They had to drive very slowly on the mess of a road though. In some of the villages I saw a couple of Ladas. Lord knows how they got them up so far. I figured that maybe they were driven up in the 1970s when the road had just been built and was in much better shape, and they've been stuck ever since. Not very practical but a nice conversation piece.
As I was going up a very steep section on a more remote section of road I was standing up putting a lot of pressure on the pedals and I felt the chain not quite sitting right. Since the end of Turkey my drive train had started giving me serious problems, with the chain skipping and not sitting right and at this moment I thought 'Dammit, better be careful, the chain might snap' and just exactly as I thought it I heard a loud ping and looked down to see my premonition had come true.
Although this was a bad thing it was a long way from being a disaster because since the start of the trip I had been using a system of three chains on rotation, so I had two spare chains that I could fit. And most likely I would only need to fit one of them. But then I looked at the broken chain and saw that it was the magic powerlink that had snapped. 'Uh-oh!' I thought. For a long time I had been using the same powerlink, the secret weapon for easily removing and fitting chains, on each chain, simply reusing the same one every time. This one, the one which was now broken in half. Without a powerlink I could not fit another chain.
I didn't panic. In theory I still had two other powerlinks somewhere in my panniers, I just didn't know where. I started to go through everything in my front left pannier, which is where I keep all of my spare parts and tools and things and the only place they would be. I vaguely remembered throwing the powerlinks in there but they were so small they could easily have fallen out. I went through everything without much luck, but I did find some pretty random crap in there. For example I discovered that I've been carrying a stapler for the last eight months. Who needs a stapler on a bike tour? Finally I saw one of them in a small bag of screws and things. Success! No, wait, not success, it was only one half of a powerlink. I needed two matching halfs. I looked through the bag and found nothing else. It started to rain.
I was in a bit of a pickle now, stuck on this terrible mountain road with a broken bike. But still I didn't panic. When the chain snapped only one half of the broken powerlink was there, the other half must have flown off somewhere. If I could find it, I could use it with this new half and make a working whole, so I went and searched the road for it. Annoyingly I found the piece of the broken one, which was of no use to me, but not the bit I needed. I searched and searched in the mud. I really needed to find this thing. Then, finally, success! There it was shining up at me. I picked it up with glee. Then I saw it was broken too. Damn and blast.
What now, what now? Stuck on a mountain. Okay, still I didn't panic. An idea came to me that I could fix the chain using this broken piece and a cable tie. Of course it didn't work. If I had a chain-breaking tool I could have fixed this problem, but I didn't carry one because the powerlink rendered it unnecessary. Or so I thought until now. If I ever got down from this mountain I resolved to throw away my stapler and replace it with a chain-breaking tool. Or a bag of powerlinks. But definitely to throw away the stapler. What else? I remembered reading once that you could fix a broken chain like this with a paper clip but I decided not to try this because a) I thought the strain I was putting on the chain with the steep climbs would be too much for a paper clip to hold and b) I didn't have a paper clip.
I'd basically given up and decided that I was going to have to walk the remaining 18 kilometres of the road. It wouldn't really be that much slower than cycling anyway. But then as I was packing everything back into the pannier suddenly, out of nowhere, success! There was another half of a powerlink staring back at me from inside another little bag. What great good fortune had suddenly befallen me. I fitted the new chain with it and was back on my way.
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The total ride up the pass took a lot longer than expected but I finally did make it to the summit. I was extremely disappointed after 35 kilometres of toil on such a terrible road to find that there was no summit sign to pose with, so I made my own and posed with that instead.
A few switchbacks downhill and all of a sudden I was back on the main road again, trucks roaring past and general chaos returning. At least there was a shoulder. It was of poor quality so it was kind of like I was still riding on the bad mountain road, except with a lot of company now zooming past my left shoulder at a hundred miles an hour.
Beyond Khashuri another opportunity to take a smaller road presented itself and if you ever cycle through Georgia may I strongly advise you to take this road from Khtsisi to Kareli because it was surely the best road I'd found in all of Georgia. It had recently been paved and so was very smooth and flat, yet had almost no cars on it at all, and passed through little villages. It was magnificent. Such a wonderful ride was only spoiled by a man sitting on a motionless horse-drawn cart who beckoned for me to stop. This I did but the only thing that I could understand from him was that he was called George, which to be honest I could have guessed anyway. He then went on talking to me in Georgian, in a not very friendly way. I guessed he was drunk. He grabbed a hold of my handlebars and I think asked me for a cigarette. When I said no he continued to jabber away at me and I think he was probably asking me for money.
This was not the first time this had happened in Georgia, and it was very unpleasant. As soon as he let go of my bike I cycled off as fast as I could. A similar thing had happened earlier in the mountains when a very drunk man had slapped me in the face. He did it with affection, but still, he slapped me in the face. This latest unpleasant experience very sadly made me resolve not to stop and talk with anyone else during my time in Georgia. If I wanted to be abused by drunk men I could have just stayed in Edinburgh. I thought back to Turkey, where in seven weeks I couldn't remember a single bad experience with meeting people at the side of the road. In Georgia it was happening a couple of times a day. Sure, a lot of people were very friendly, but these drunk men were really ruining it for me. I had heard it said that Georgians are some of the friendliest people in the world, but personally my experience was that they are some of the drunkest people in the world. Frankly speaking, I found myself longing to get back to the Islamic world and just get invited for a nice friendly glass of chai again.
Today's ride: 81 km (50 miles)
Total: 15,408 km (9,568 miles)
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