Great Journey 🏍 Day 362
"We're walking on a giant ham."
Right on the border with Azerbaijan, there are semi-deserts that offer very exciting landscapes. The temperatures are hot, really hot. We have the feeling that it doesn't matter whether we drink the masses of water or tip it directly onto our skin.
But we do what we love to do: hiking. We walk up and down, scramble over the colourful hills, some of which are as slippery as a fat ham. But we quickly sit down on our buttocks, slide down and continue on our way.
The dust mixes magically with our wet sweaty bodies. Hach - a joy! The shower in the evening will be bitterly needed.
The sloping sedimentary layers on the Iori Plateau reveal 1.8 to 23 million years of the earth's history. The different rock layers appear, depending on the light, as a play of colours of white, ochre, red and even green shades. Here, clay, sand and other types of rock alternate to form this play of colours.
There is also a lot of quartz lying around on our path, right in front of our feet. I immediately think of my first quartz watch from the 80s and can make absolutely no connection between these shiny and beautiful stone chips and my first Casio.
By the way, we learn from Alex, our guide, that there are a lot of poisonous snakes here. Oh yes, good to know. So much for "a quick slide down the mountain on your bottom". In Soviet times, the Levantine viper, which is now strictly protected, was bred here on a large scale to produce medicine from its venom. And as it happens, animals only want to live in freedom. But we also learn that the Levant Otter is super-shy, so it will probably run away when we trample across the semi-desert. We hope that it knows this itself and that it will be very shy, especially today!
#iori #steppe #Half desert #rambling mice #ramping
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