Caucasian Mountain-Tour, "Emerald Valley", first part

As promised in my previous posts, I wanted to tell you about a mountain-tour with light extreme I participate when I was in Sochi.

For me, the greatest extreme in that tour were tight deep-lunged torques that continued every 50-100 meters all the 4-5 hours that we needed to reach the place and than -to turn back from there, after the visit. Imagine that we were only about 70-90 km from center of Sochi but we needed 4-5 hours for one way.

I remember when I came in Sochi for the first time, it was in 80-th. There was the same torques way from Adler (where there is airport) till Sochi. They built a new highway from Adler some years ago, and you need only about 40 minutes to come in the center now. But in this, opposite, side of the region, you can admire the original mountain-roads. As you see on my photo.

Somebody told me once that it was a simple method to build ways in the mountains: to follow the steps of an ass. Because the asses knew where and how to go.

We were in a minibus with guide Golubkova Elena and driver Ruslan. They went with us till the last point of the tour. And it was hard enough, you will see it in my next posts. Here I want to show you only some photos from the road to taste the first beauties of the mountains of Caucasus.

This first is a general look on a mountain river how it is near the sea. It is river Shakhe, I think.

This other photo -to show you the mountain-road. Do you see that line in the middle of the photo? With rocks over and rocks under? Nice, no? It's a canyon of the river Ashe.

The first stop on our way was in a bee's farm. The owners built this pavilion where they have an exhibition hall of all products they have to sell. As you see on the second photo, there are many different products and they are really superb while produced in this zone. The team told us many interesting things about honey and it's derivative, we could taste some different honeys. Than we could buy everything we saw there.

We were at the beginning of our way and bought only glasses of "medovukha" -honey-wine. Mmmm... Great!!!



Continue next time...