Georgia on our minds

İ have no pictures to offer you today, just a note on our whereabouts. We spent a week running across the Black Sea coast from İstanbul to the Georgian border. The land is mountainous and lush. There's a stretch even covered in tea leaves. Who knew? We met a Spanish couple on the bus and travelled together into the Kackar mountains to do some camping. Talk about back woods. These towns are in the middle of nowhere on poor mountain dirt roads to begin with, but there is a lot of road and dam building (really, the kind that floods small Turkish villages to create lakes) going on so everything takes a day. Somewhere on my laptop there is a picture of us waiting for a backhoe to finish excavating the road that we are driving on. Really.

We're now in a relatively large (20k) person town called Artvin ın the mountains near the Georgian border again mulling over whether or not we are sufficiently interested in Georgia and Armenia to sit through a few more long bus rides to really get into the countries.