The Muddiest Place on Earth?
“I… can’t… I… I can’t… move….’ I stutter, struggling to control my laughter whilst at the same time clenching every muscle in my body in an attempt to stay upright. I pause to gather myself, dropping my head in a mixture of exasperation and resignation.
Stepping forward with one foot, gripping both hands for support, the flat sole of my shoe slips and squirms as I release my weight onto it. Adjusting my balance to steady myself, I lean in with my upper body, arms bent at the elbows. Tensing once again, I push through my feet, trying to transmit some kind of force from the ground through my body to the bike, straighten my arms and drive my handlebars forward.
Nothing. My bike won’t move. The wheels just will not turn.
I look over to Tom, and laugh again. He has adopted the same pose, leaning into his bike, straining to move it forwards but succeeding only to look like a cartoon character running frantically on the spot, his feet failing to find any grip, slipping and sliding underneath him. A dog barks continuously from a farmyard nearby, out of sight but aware of our presence and making it clear that we are on his territory, adding a layer of tension over the hilarity of the scene.
I rotate my wrists through 180 degrees, palms gripping the bars from below. Straining again, searching for the limit of friction between my feet and the mixture of mud and cow shit beneath them, I curl my arms to lift the front of my bike off the ground and heave it forward. Success! I make perhaps half a meter of forward progress, and slump my head again, exhausted. Tom takes a different approach, one hand on his bars, one on the saddle, dragging his bike sideways as he takes small steps backwards. He gains a couple of metres before stopping again, leaning on his bike as his body heaves with laughter. Looking ahead, I can see Rich and Colin adopting the same resting stance a hundred metres or so further along this ‘track’, just before it bends out of view. Ed and Pete are out of sight, and I wonder what the secret of their quicker progress is.
Three local men approach, chatting with each other. They greet us as they pass although surprisingly given our experiences over the past few days, don’t stop to ask us what we’re doing pushing overloaded mountain bikes past their small farm in the middle of nowhere. They do share a joke with each other though, presumably amused by this precise question.
Our bikes have all taken on the same shade of beige-brown, as have our feet, legs and hands. This mud has a particularly challenging combination of properties: slippery enough to make grip underfoot difficult, but sticky enough to coat my three-inch tyres as I try to roll them forwards. The mixture builds up and soon fills the gap between tyre and frame, the grippy rubber hidden beneath a dense, slick mass. Chunks of mud are sheared off by the frame and stubby mudguards, rather like a potter sculpting a creation on his wheel, but this only serves to smooth out any undulations that might have provided some illusive grip. Friction diminishes between the tyre and ground, increases between the tyre and frame, and the wheels cease to turn. I might as well be trying to roll my heavy bike with the brakes locked on.
Scraping the mud off the tyres with sticks is somewhat ineffectual - once transferred to the wheels, it seems to solidify and the lengths of dry wood that I attempt to use are no match for it. I resort to clawing chunks off with my gloved hands, which is messy and only partly successful, as I can’t clear the space between the tyres and mudguards.
One strategy that provides some temporary respite is finding patches of grass at the side of the track to push along. Initially the vegetation helps recover some grip, digging into the mud on the tyres. But as the wheels move forward, the fibrous strands are picked up from the ground and bound together with more mud into a matted sticky blockage that jams the gap between the wheel and frame completely. At one point I resort to removing the wheels as the only way of clearing things. A few minutes later, they are stuck again.
And so here we are, our motley group of six, attempting to push, lift, carry and drag laden mountain bikes with wheels that won’t turn, along a river of sticky mud that provides little grip underfoot. We make barely detectable progress. This is day five of our three-week journey across Armenia from the Georgian to Iranian borders, and so far this country feel like one of the muddiest places on Earth! We weren’t expecting these conditions.
We eventually drag our way to the end of this particularly muddy stretch, and onto what could be a slightly dryer path climbing gently up the side of the valley, when a shout from behind us gets our attention. Two of the three men who passed by earlier are back, and after a short discussion, Tom tells us that they are inviting us into their home for a drink. At the start of this trip we discussed that offers of hospitality like this would likely be frequent but that if we wanted to complete this journey in the limited time that we all had, we might need to be selective with how many we accepted. Such an invitation would invariably involve vodka, for which three toasts was the minimum acceptable, and once we started down this route, it would be difficult to politely make our excuses and leave.
It’s been a challenging first five days. We’re two riders down after a close call with hypothermia on the second day left Marco and Nick weak with sickness and diarrhoea, and the endless mud over the last three days has left us making slower progress than we anticipated. But after this particularly frustrating morning, none of us hesitated: with some relief at being able to pause in our slog, we drop our bikes and head towards the small house situated at one end of the farm buildings.
Removing our shoes, and washing our hands, we file inside. The simple stone room contains a rectangular table with two benches, a wood-burning stove and two single beds, illuminated by shafts of light from a small window. A flue extends from the stove up through the ceiling lined with a patchwork of cardboard and plastic sheeting. We cram ourselves around the table which, over the next hour, is laden with plates of lavash (a soft, thin unleavened flatbread traditionally baked in a tandoor), pungent cheese, juicy tomato, and refreshing cucumber. A large bowl is filled with honey complete with the sticky honeycomb - a couple of the hexagonal cells still containing the bees that made it - and two large spoons with which we dribble the sweet, golden viscous fluid onto our lavash and cheese. Accompanying this are two shots of quince vodka and one of pear vodka, followed, once we’d convinced our hosts that we really couldn’t drink any more and still make progress this afternoon, by cups of thick Armenian coffee. Through Tom, our hosts tell us that as they are the only people living in this valley, they always offer what they have to anyone passing by. They’ve never seen anyone trying to ride through here on bikes.
A couple of hours later, we have thankfully moved away from the mud and cow shit slurry and are following a trail through dense, overgrown forest. In some sections, we actually ride - an unfamiliar feeling after the past couple of days - along beautiful, meandering, singletrack, blanketed by a carpet of yellow and brown leaves. But for the greater part of our afternoon, we are bushwhacking along overgrown trail, negotiating our way over, under and through fallen trees, and pushing up steep sections of rock with a similar technique to tackling the mud.
Brace - extend arms to drive the bike forwards - clamp on the brakes - take a step - repeat. A series of endless press-ups and step-ups. Progress at times is once again, glacially slow.
We can see from the track that we are attempting to follow on our GPS, that we are nearing the town of Ijevan but our surroundings don’t give this away until the trees eventually start to thin out, revealing the sky. Through the leaves and branches, glimpses of blue lift our spirits. The oppressive grey blanket that has been hanging above us as we have slipped and slidden our way over these past few days appears to be breaking. The ground is becoming less muddy underfoot. Perhaps what felt like an endless slog might just be easing.
There is one last challenge for the day - a small, angled cliff face that requires us to haul up our heavy bikes. The first goes up precariously balanced on Ed’s shoulder before we establish a chain gang with one person at the bottom pushing up on the seat post from below, two more halfway up reaching down to grab either side of the handlebars and heave them up to a fourth person at the top guiding the bike to safety.
Soon after, and with a mixture of relief and disbelief, we are out of the woods and onto tarmac, gliding down a road from a newly built holiday development, through a village and into the town, covering around a third of the day’s progress in just 25 minutes. We’ve managed a pitiful 18 km since breaking camp that morning. We stop at a church to refill our water bottles but are soon on a busy main road in the centre of Ijevan, buying coffee from a vending machine and snacks from a small shop. The road is lined with parked cars, lorries belching past. We had planned to be in Dilijan tonight, a larger town some 30 km away along this road, to meet up with Nick and Marco, who had travelled by the ubiquitous Lada taxi. With our slow progress these last two days, it doesn’t take long to agree that we’d be happy to avoid riding with this traffic and we load ourselves and our bikes into a taxi and a van.
Just an hour later we unload them into the quiet, shaded garden of our hostel, and once we’ve showered and attempted to clean muddy clothes in a bathtub, we are sitting in an upmarket restaurant run by a friend of Tom, gorging ourselves on platters of lamb, steak, pork, potato, rice, mushroom and stuffed squash whilst recounting stories from the trail. I find this a strange transition at times, moving from such a physical, simple existence, if only for a few days, to being served by a polite waiter in a fashionable space in our barely-clean spare clothes, feeling a little out of place. But bikepacking is all about experiencing the contrasts. Seeking out the silence of the mountains as well as savouring local hospitality. Wolfing down expedition food primarily as fuel and then delighting in the unusual tastes of local dishes. Enduring, perhaps even enjoying, the slog, and then relishing the smooth free miles and days where there’s no riding at all. So far, Armenia is shaping up to deliver it all, although I’m hoping that the needle is nudged a little way around the dial from ‘slog’ to ‘smooth’ in the days to come…!
In September 2019, Tom Allen welcomed a group of bikepackers from around the world to ride the route of the Transcaucasian Trail (TCT) across Armenia. The TCT is an ambitious project to build a world-class trail network stretching 3,000km along the Greater and Lesser Caucasus Mountains through Georgia and Armenia, allowing the dramatic landscapes of the region to be explored by all. Tom led the Transcaucasian Expedition in 2016, supported by the Royal Geographical Society and Land Rover, to explore the potential southern route of the TCT. He co-founded the TCT Armenia NGO in 2016, led the country’s first trail-building project in 2017, and now coordinates the exploration of the future route. Our journey was partly to test rideable route options close to the main path of the hiking trail, and partly to raise funds needed to complete the blazing and marking of the trail in Armenia by the end of 2020. You can continue to make a donation of any size to help the TCT, by following this link.