The Durgas

…and the road continues! We arrive late in the night to Sarpi, the Turkish Border post with Georgia, and get through it relatively fast. At the crossing, we create a comedy scene thanks to us all being totally over-tired: When our pictures are taken for security reasons, Christopher “graigrai” asks to see the picture, and is welcomed behind the booth. But he doesn’t see the glass that separates/protects the guard from the entering people (it’s so clean, it was invisible to sleep eyes) and bangs his head almost through it, making such a huge sound and commotion that it raises all the bored & sleepy guards to come rushing to the booth to see what’s going on! A few seconds later everyone breaks into hearty laughter and we become BFF with all the Georgian guards! Once we reach the “camp”, a super pimped up cheap hotel — the kind that was built in a rush with lots of “corners” taken — with Disco lights, lots of ‘made-in-the-Ukraine’ Security personal and “ladies of the night” servicing their clientele, we decide to move on fast. But not before a few drinks with surprise guests/friends that arrived all the way from Budapest to join the last leg of this tour! We exit Batumi and head for the beach by Kobuleti…at early morning dawn, a heavy rain storm surprises us in our sleep, and we all scramble into the van…not before most of us are soaked to the bones! Exhausted we try to catch a few more minutes of sleep, but realize that we need to dry up fast before we end up all with pneumonia! As we pack up wet sleeping bags and tents, we also see that we had set camp right in middle of cow manure!!!!!!!! That explained the smell we all tried to ignore — we thought it was us, after 10 days of hard traveling in a tin o’ sardines! Soon after the sun comes out again, we dry up at a friendly beach cafe, dip into the Black Sea and decide to move straight for the Caucasus Mountains towards beautiful Mestia! After several close calls with herds of cows that wander the streets in search for grass (and attention) we stop at the side of the road with Benjii rushing amidst them singing an improvised Cow-blues! In fact all roads in Georgia are inhabited by cows making the point that Caucasus means A case for the Cows, COW-CASUS!!!!!!!! This time, we break camp before night fall, to ensure better camping grounds…we find the perfect spot, right at the foot of the mountains, at one of the Svaneti towers that scatter the mountains of this region! Early a.m we slowly climb the mountainous road up to Mestia…with incredible sights at every bend! It is a slow climb for the van, thanks to the bad road conditions, but we reach Mestia about 5-6 hours later. Our second accompanying car, Team #8, with bass-player Joni, is catching up after driving through the nigth to Tblisi, picking up his girl-friend, Leo…they get accidentally side-tracked into Abkharzia, an autonomous region in the north-western part of Georgia. Being refused entry into Abkhazian by the border guards, Joni has to charm the guards at the entry point back into Georgia, because now they officially were in no mans land. It takes a bit of haggling, but imagine what the border guards were thinking when they see a small red car, packed to the rim with sleepy, German and American lost “tourists” in midst of closed-off “war zone”!!!!!! In Mestia, The Durgas manage to immediately connect with the most charmful, beautiful and helpful Bar in the caucasus: Cafe Laila! They happily agree to host the band and help set up local musicians to give us all a taste of Svaneti music. Svaneti is a small mountainous region, high up in the Caucasus, with a proud people of about 15 000, in the Northern part of Georgia, jammed between the two seceded Georgian States of Abkhazia and South Ossetia! Soldiers litter the landscape, protecting it’s borders. A local singer Ana “N”, opens up the evening with her incredible voice, and skillfully playing the “Panduri” , the local guitar-like instrument. She is an immediate hit!!!!! After concert they convince us to stay another night, and organize a local Svaneti men choir! That night The Durgas, inspired by the incredible, generous hospitality go off in full force and win the heart of Mestia! We will definitely come back!!!!!!!! After the concert, our hosts prepare an incredible full course meal, wine starts flowing and they break out the Chacha, the local moonshine brandy!!!!! With no sleep, we hit the road at 5 a.m to make the 12 hour drive back down the mountains and onwards to Tblisi…in Tblisi center we stop at first bar to ask for location to our club (Studio 33a) and the bar-manager happens to be scheduled to work that very same night at same place!!!!!! What a typical Durgas-like coincidence!!!!!!! And it is located right in main park of this incredible city…we text the rally teams its location and they soon arrive to celebrate another adventurous day o’ traveling! We play a short set, when we are suddenly brushed aside by a drunkard new friend, which causes some confusion and frustration, but after a long heartful man-to-man talk between Benjii and new friend, he willfully leaves the stage and we continue for a second set. Benjii has made a new best friend, indeed! This time we invite a local smiling guitar player, who rips one incredible Neil-Young-Style solo after another and the night takes on a rocking happy end!!!!! We all pass out exhausted at the club right after we discover the shower in the back of its labyrinth-like lay out! What a discovery…..:) Next on schedule is Lake Sevan, Armenia!…(to be continued)

A collection of photos from the the beginning of the journey in Budapest to the drive to Tbilisi! Check it out!

Budapest to Tbilisi

We leave Kastoria, Greece right after an accoustic show ending at roughly 2 am and decide to continue onwards towards the sea in Kavala, about a 4h drive! Alex and GraiGrai share this all-night drive while everyone else passes out in the van. We arrive at the camp site and catch sleep on the beach! In the evening we set up a show at a location set up for a huge wedding banquet to take place a day later. We promise to keep their beautiful wedding arrangement in order and play a concert with the sea right behind us. Next morning, after only a few hours sleep, we leave for the Greek-Turkey border and that’s where we run into the first serious border problems due to a stamp missing on our vehicle authorization papers. Frantically we try reaching the van owners, who happen to be far from any village, trekking in the Austrian Alps….we wait and see how to preceed. At that point Karcsi, the cook of the rallly finds another border guard at another booth, who winks us through with a big smile. Once through we stop in Marmara for a short coffee and Internet break to try to reach any contact in Istanbul in search of a concert possibility. We manage to Ferman, reach a Turkish rock star from the Manga, who connects us with a local bar owner right in the center of Istanbul Galata towers….our show is set for 2 am!!!! Right after we leave the cafe, we realize that the Rally organizer’s jeep has been broken into, with all their laptops, passports, 8000 Euro in cash, stolen!!!! Well, that’s the end of the trip for the main organizer Aravind, who, coming from India, has to travel to Ankara and depart for India to get a new passport, immediately!!! A real bummer for all the Rally teamsters! We roll on towards our newly set up gig in Istanbul. We find the club immediately thanks to GraiGrai and Alex’s Tuareq-like natural GPS capabilities. Remember, we are the only team travelling to the Caucasus without a GPS locator! Unfortunately there is no parking on the infamously crowded Irakli walking boulevard, so we have to drag all our instruments through the small alleywazs to the club, a quarter of a mile away. Due to the millions of people windows shopping, this makes for quite a difficult coordinated loading. At the club we meet well known local jazz musicians who join us for a song. Despite the last minute show, we play to a happy group of guests, mostly women!!! Right after the gig we leave straight for the airport to pick up Adrian, owner of our accompanying car, team number 8! At this point it is 5 am and we still have not slept a wink! We decide to leave towards Sinop, on the Black Sea, and pass out totally exhausted about an hour into the drive at a local truck stop. It has been a long day and night!!! We take to the road a few hours later and reach Sinop’s campsite at about 8 pm. A beautiful location indeed, right at the beach, with a huge bonfire waiting for us. Next day we decide to stay and set up a gig right at a river estuary where it meets the beach! We wade the instrument and equipment across a river and thanks to our 2 kilowatt generator, set up on the beach, just as the sun sets behind beautiful Sinop Peninsula, the northern most point of Turkey. We party hard until 2 am. At 4 am we wake and drive to a local city Alladin mosque, built in the 14th century, hoping to catch the muezzin’s call to prayer. The idea being to sing and play along. We wait in vain, because the call for prayer never happens! A funny moment indeed, as we sit, tired out from just two hours of sleep, waiting in vain!!! Two hours later we depart for Batumi, Georgia, taking us all along the amazing costal road that follows the Black Sea coastline…

Wake up around 9 a.m and leave straight for the Greek border. We get lost leaving Tirana, but somehow find our way. We cross a huge mountain range and come across other teams of the Challenge, who we parted from back in Sarajevo. We had already forgotten that we were part of a Rally! We get word that Team Arabian-Nights, the same team that had mis-fueled their diesel engine, had rolled their Mitsubishi trying to pass a truck. Luckily no mayor injuries were sustained, but their vehicle was totaled. Last word we heard was that they were trying to find another vehicle and meet up with the Challenge somewhere in Turkey. We continue onwards to Kastoria, Greece and manage to set up a great impromptu acoustic night at the local square with about 50 young teenagers. We shared songs from Britney Spears to Greek rap & reggae. We pass the guitar around all night until we decide to head on to the Sea and make camp in Kavala…

We take a swim in the lake (Jablanica Lake), and shoot a daily playing on a small house-boat that happens to be right in front of us when we open eyes. We head to Mostar by late afternoon. After a quick visit, we head to the coast of Montenegro for a spectacular sunset! After some more coffee, we head straight into Albania where we set camp on a construction site somewhere off the road by Skoder. After only a few hours of sleep we are awakened by the blazing heat. Welcome to Albania, where every car is a Mercedes!!!! Wished I had time to buy a few spare parts for the Mercedes back home in LA. We fuel up with more coffee and head for Tirana, Albania’s wild capital city. At a local Internet cafe, we manage to connect via a friend in Kosovo a possible contact to help us set up a show for that evening. The venue (Tirana Ekspress) is a collective art space right in center city at the edge of the rail-road tracks. On the way to the club, we pass the great Pyramid, built by the daughter of the infamous Albanian strongman Hoxha (who ruled Albania with an iron hand for half a century), and decide to shoot a daily of the band scaling its slippery walls! Maomi volunteers to keep an eye on the van, and soon comes running in panic as the police are in the process of towing it away. Luckily she manages to charm them first, but then when she comes running for us to move the van she falls and almost breaks her leg! After that little missadventure, we have great night, a great show. (Thanks to the word of mouth, our contact, Roots Rubin, manages to secure a good crowd). We set up camp at the venue and finally get some sleep around 4:30 a.m.

Super early wake up call at 5:30 am to the sound of frying eggs and coffee. We head to the starting point of the Caucasian Challenge at the famous Communist Statue Park outside Budapest where all old Commie statues rest in peace! We find out that we are the first one’s there (the good German punctuality in us all), however we leave last because our drummer Gabor stays true to the infamous drummer jokes by showing up way way late!!!! At the site, after a quick warm welcome, we are handed our road books, itinerary and number 07 sticker and head straight for Sarajevo, Bosnia. We spend way more time at borders than anticipated due to the cornet/paperwork that the camera team has to fill out for all their equipment. Good to know for borders to come as we decide to abandon this time-consuming process! And cross our fingers that we do not get into trouble for this decision!) Soon after the border we pass one of the teams super pimped out all terrain vehicles on the side of the road, broken down! (NEVER PUT UNLEADED FUEL INTO A DIESEL ENGINE!!!!)…We roll onwards to Sarajevo trying to make up lost time and once again arrive first to the location. Show in Sarajevo is short but fun and we decide to leave straight for Mostar…half way there we find a nice lake and set up camp for the night!