In this part, we finally made it to the much-coveted cave city. It is a fortified settlement in the mountains where people lived 500 or more years ago. They lived in ordinary houses simply built on the rocks. But they kept their supplies in caves carved out of the relatively soft rock. Since visiting such cities was declared to be practically the main goal of the trip, we had been looking forward to it with anticipation, and even a pleasant trembling in our knees.
But since the pig is an undisputed hit, first here's a bit more of the photogenic piggy.
Piggy is leading Valera and Cat into a bright future
Admission is paid!
Tells us a clunky, hand-drawn scribble added by a local landowner.
Slowly making our way up
Someone has been gnawing at the rocks
The sun was blazing down pretty hard, plus we were lugging our bags with us since we left the bikes down below
Andrey and Pasha — friends forever
Pasha loves scrambling around, just like the “Prince of Persia”
The first landmark is a grotto! It’s so significant that it’s even marked on the GPS
But as for me, the stairs to the sky are much more picturesque
The holey rocks are gorgeous
We finally made it to the city itself, and we are thoroughly exploring its innards
The heart
Greenery
Storage rooms
The hikers are lugging bike helmets along. As it turned out, not for nothing. But more on that in the next episode
The cunning photo trick with leaves in the foreground never fails!
It’s also nice to snap what’s on the outside from what’s on the inside. That totally passes for artistic photography too
Trying to peddle dreary grottos again
Pasha calmly jumped across the gap, the rest of us spared our limbs. It's not wide, but it’s a good twenty-meter drop down
After an hour or two in the heat, we could use a rest
Apparently these are grain storage pits
Our little rascal is everywhere at once
But sometimes you just gotta stretch it out
A debate about whether these lines were carved out with a single blow each, or with a chisel in many iterations. I’m for the latter option.
Windows
The rocks resemble eggshells with hatch holes
Broadway
Here we practically made it to the downtown of the cave metropolis, so the rest is in the next part.