Long time since I wrote, I know. In fact I’ve been spending a lot of time in front of a computer. I’ve been writing every morning and now have written 95000 words of my book. I met one of my sister’s friends a couple of days ago who has just finished writing a book she wrote during university, a total of 150000 words. I was very impressed with her ability to be that organised and find somewhere peaceful to write during university! The book is a novel called ‘We All Fall Down’ and she is sending it to publishers now.
I’m at home now in the UK. I spent April, May and June in Tbilisi. My time has been split up between organising work and research, mountain biking, and everyday life in the city.
There were the demonstrations in Tbilisi against Saakashvili about the state of the economy and the war with Russia that he lead the Georgians into last year. Improbably, a famous Georgian singer came up with the idea to create welded steel framed cubes covered in white canvas with numbers on them e.g. ‘cell 150′. People then lived in the cells for 2 months and over the course of a week they appeared up all over the city. The most were around the parliament building on Rustaveli Street and in the area of Saburtalo.
They blocked the streets and thus the main streets in the city centre were completely car free. I thought this was great. It was much calmer without cars, less polluted, and you didn’t have to worry about dying crossing the 3 lane main road or the crazy carousel that is freedom square at rush hour. Instead the population was presented with a near Idyllic city centre area of people strolling about happily, eating ice cream, chatting, men sitting outside their cells playing cards, children playing and one heartwarming moment I saw was a dad teaching his son to ride a bike in the middle of the recently closed road.
It was a logical progression forward undeniably improving things. However, I’m sure this episode of inadvertant environmental enlightenment will be swept up under the carpet and go unnoticed. I hope otherwise. I spoke to many people who thought it was an improvement and I mentioned it at a presentation I gave at last week – more about that later.
Saakashvili has cleverly dealt with the demonstrators, doing nothing for 2 months (reportedly he was seen on a yacht on the black sea on holiday). After a few days of feather-ruffling between the parties, a meeting was arranged between the president and the opposition. Gradually things calmed down with only a couple of hiccups of police clashing with protestors on a minor scale.
Quietly Saakashvili’s cronies have been removing the cells around the city as people got bored and complacent with the whole thing and now it’s down to a few cells outside the parliament. The stage was still there was I left two weeks ago and there were still talks and speeches going on. The saga continues.
I’ve been dedicating a lot of time to my passion for mountain biking. It became very clear to me, whilst meditating on my bike in India, that I should help to start a cycling project in Tbilisi. Georgia is perfect for mountain biking with wonderful countryside and many mountain-bikeable paths and of course the culture, food, drink and friendly people. Tbilisi, as a city has excellent mountain biking within a 5 minute cycle from the city (could be less if you already live up the hill!). The population seems to be open minded on the subject of cycling and I’ve seen an exponential increase in cyclists since I was in Georgia last year.
I wanted to refine my passion for cycling down to it’s mountain biking core. I have the opportunity to follow my passion, be part of a community of riders and help to develop the scene in Georgia and Tbilisi, offering my experience, minor celebrity status and website skills.
Through a friend, I met David and Merabi, two serious and very good mountain bikers in Tbilisi and organised to go riding with them. I’ve been going with them pretty much every week since, and discovered some brilliant trails- crazily enough my bike is still holding out, after riding 15,500km, I’m now riding it over technical rocky trails.
Even more crazy is the fact that the breakage on my frame (which snapped in Delhi and I got immediately welded up by the omnipresent Indian welding contingency). It’s still holding strong! Kona are supplying me with a new frame – a 2008 Kona Caldera which is their top of the range aluminium mountain bike hard-tail frame. I concluded that even though steel is the ideal material, most tourers I met were actually using aluminium frames through ignorance or the increased availability, with no problems at all.
The website I created for mountain biking in Georgia is http://www.mountainbiking.ge. It is a service ran by my Georgian friends offering mountain bike holidays in Georgia as well as guide, bike hire, and purchase. In addition it is a social portal with a forum, blog and flickr gallery- and will no doubt develop in the future. I am constructing GPS routes available for download on there and want to create a collaborative application for that so people can upload their own routes. There have been a huge number of hits on the website already and many people interested.
David and Merabi went riding with one of the first guests a few weeks back, a Philippine lady who was staying at the Marriot (paying $300 per night). She got way more than her money’s worth, and rode from 8 am to 6 pm, an epic all-dayer, and had a stonking time by the looks of the photos. Merabi and David are both kind, friendly and very experienced bikers, not short of a few stories to tell. They are both originally from deep in the mountains, from the village of Gudauri, where there is the popular ski resort in Georgia. They are the first people to take mountain bikes over the mountains in this area, and the photos are stunning from their experiences. I think the next Lord of the Rings should be filmed in Georgia.
We are planning to make a race in October, inviting anyone to come and race round a course on the mountain next to Tbilisi and hopefully find a sponsor to stump up a prize and some banners, and food for the riders.
The weather in Tbilisi over the last 2 months has been bizarre to say the least. When Tom and I arrived in Georgia in Winter of 2008, it was the coldest winter for 30 years and I would hazard a guess that it’s probably been the wettest summer ever! There were, violent thunderstorms practically every day for 2 months. I experienced the full brunt of these sometimes seemingly instantaneous events with vast quantities of water falling from the sky.
I was talking on the internet to Mark saying ‘this storm is crazy, I’ve never seen such as volume of water so quickly’ and Mark said ‘wow, that must be amazing’ which coincided with a capitalised swear word written in reply to mark ‘**** my bedroom roof has just fallen in!!!, and Mark’s response ‘****, are you alright mate?’ after which I ran in and tried to salvage everything including the furniture, which somehow through adrenalin, I managed to move all of (a chest of drawers, wardrobe and bed) out of the room in about 2 minutes. After the landlord and I had sorted the whole mess out and it had finished being redecorated a few weeks ago I could barely move the wardrobe back because of it’s weight. It took me about 30 minutes of straining in the heat.
The weather has been clear and fresh in the morning, progressively getting hazier and culminating in a muggy heavy afternoon. Around 5/6 pm a familiar earth shakeningly loud clap of thunder could be heard reverberating around the Tbilisi valley, and not long after, huge torrents of rain turning the streets into veritable rivers of silt and dirty water. This is a serious problem. People died caught in these storms. Some of the old houses aren’t in a state to deal with that kind of weather (such as mine), people aren’t used to driving in the wet and don’t slow down much, and it caused flooding because of inadequate drainage systems.
I made a presentation on the 1st July at a CENN (Caucasus Environment NGO Network) organised ‘Climate Cafe’ in the New Art Cafe in Tbilisi. It was an informal event to raise discussion about climate change, what the people of Georgia think about it, what part they play in the solution and what standpoint to come at the problem from. Through my presentation I wanted to introduce my cycle adventure so far, present some clear facts about accelerated climate change and explain why cycling is such a logical and practical mode of transport for a city.
Tbilisi is ideal for an increased use of bicycles because it’s actually quite a small city and most of the main areas are easy to navigate to. Basically it’s better to be on a bike for 20 mins than sitting in traffic for 2 hours and the ‘status-symbol’ 4x4s are pointless in the city. Although useful on some of the destroyed high mountain roads (probably better to take donkeys). I also got the opportunity to talk about the effects of climate change that we witnessed whilst cycling, the project for which we got sponsored by the WWF. It was nice to see something tangible come of that.
I put a considerable amount of effort into the presentation and crafted it down, getting inspiration from the TED lectures, Paul Deegan’s, and Ben Saunder’s public speaking which I have admired since I first saw them in person at Explore 2007.
I:
- Kept text to a minimum
- Used plenty of photos
- Used exciting music and a short impactful photo slideshow
- Kept my deliverance clear, succint, earnest, energetic, with emphasis where necessary
- Tried to weave in interesting anecdotes and (short) stories where possible
It appeared to go down very well and I’ve been invited to make presentations at schools in the winter when I get back to Tbilisi. It was an excellent opportunity for me to develop a slideshow and presentation for public speaking which I can use to promote my environmental concerns and journey wherever I get the opportunity. One unexpected challenge was being patient after every slide as a chap translated it into Georgian for the non-English speakers.
It was a huge rush to talk and I loved it. I think it was a reasonable success for the 1st attempt although there’s a fair amount I could improve. Many people seemed inspired by bikes, acknowledged (and seemed already quite knowledgeable about) climate change and there is going to be a follow up story a special eco-edition of the popular ‘Hot Chocolate’ culture magazine which is circulated in Tbilisi.
I filmed it so I will be putting it up on Youtube in due course.
In addition there were some Swiss motorbikers, riding from Beijing to Istanbul. They were also promoting awareness of climate change, aware that motorbikes are not zero emissions they were carbon-offsetting their trip and using the lowest emission motorbikes possible. I took the positive aspect that at least they had a strong conscience to to something about reducing their impact.
Obviously having flown myself, and felt that I had little choice other than to do that, I understand that the infrastructure isn’t there yet (in terms of bureacracy) meaning that there is sometimes a last resort compromise made (well I choose that in my case. My philosophy is still that flying is a last resort for travel). I personally believe that if you are going to seriously carbon-offset an expedition, you should know exactly where the money from the carbon credits is going and make sure it is effective.
I think that sometimes the benefits on the people of the travel perhaps outweighs the negatives of if they had stayed at home and burnt the carbon emissions from their home. Travel is the greatest lesson anyone can take to further their awareness of the reality of the world. They were good guys, intelligent and realistic, if a little jaded from long hours on the bikes. Listening to their experiences, trying not to compare them to mine, I still feel convinced that bike travel is unparalleled travel experience other than walking (or possibly skiing) which are different (non-ball)games altogether anyway.
Since I started travelling I have been unable to avoid making any excuse to half-arse my creative projects. In the past I’ve done a lot of creative artwork, and design and I used to be disorganised with it, but now I’ve organised everything with the aim of moving forward. I don’t half-do things or let myself get distracted. I concentrate on doing things meticulously, setting solid uninterpreted blocks of time to do things and being aware in each moment whether what I’m doing is productive with my overall goals.
I’ve looked to the methods of GTD and elements of Timoty Ferriss’ 4HWW (Four Hour Work Week) Amazon Link – The 4-hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich
(which I think is great but can be improved upon a lot- a lot of it is based on GTD (getting things done) Amazon Link -Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
methods on first glance. Funnily enough also based heavily on lateral thinking) Amazon link – Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity
. The GTD methodology is based on Steven R Covey’s – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Amazon Link – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
which I heard first time around and was very impressed by. What impresses me about GTD is that is helps you to deal with the information overload we are faced with with the internet and, if we get lazy, from Facebook, gmail and a million other similar websites that add the danger of timewasting and stress of procrastination which is an entirely new phenomena. If you’re interested you can watch the video of Dave Allen (the creator of GTD) speaking at Google.
I’ve created my design portfolio at: http://www.andrewwelch.info. I’ve organised all the music I’ve made which was just sitting on a dusty hard disk together and put it at http://andrew-welch-music.blogspot.com and I’ve relaunched my Truefocus tee shirt and art project at http://www.zazzle.com/truefocus* (so make sure you get your birthday and Christmas presents from there- or perhaps just treat yourself!). I have organised all of my photos quickly using Picasa 3- an astonishing piece of software allowing me to get onto the important task of picking the very best ones. I looked at some of the photos with my friend Aurilien who is an experienced photographer on the journey home and I find it a lot easier to be really self-critical when I’m looking at the photos with someone who I respect a lot and knows his profession.
Which brings me onto how I got back to the UK. I caught a bus full of 18 year old Georgian Folklore dancers all the way back to Lyon in France via Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and France. We spent a day in Venice and went swimming in the sea in Greece which made a welcome break from sleeping on the bus seven nights in a row!!! I must say a huge thank you to Zaal and Aurillien for their kindness, taking me on the bus.
Finally I was unsure how I would feel about being at home again, but this time it’s easier as I’m a lot more flexible and I did the travel back last year too. It’s wonderful to see friends and family at home. I will be here for 3 weeks and then I’m heading again to France for 1 month and then back to Georgia in time for Tommy’s wedding- I’ve still got to come up the Speech! Eek! (any ideas?)
A Two Month Storm
Long time since I wrote, I know. In fact I’ve been spending a lot of time in front of a computer. I’ve been writing every morning and now have written 95000 words of my book. I met one of my sister’s friends a couple of days ago who has just finished writing a book she wrote during university, a total of 150000 words. I was very impressed with her ability to be that organised and find somewhere peaceful to write during university! The book is a novel called ‘We All Fall Down’ and she is sending it to publishers now.
I’m at home now in the UK. I spent April, May and June in Tbilisi. My time has been split up between organising work and research, mountain biking, and everyday life in the city.
There were the demonstrations in Tbilisi against Saakashvili about the state of the economy and the war with Russia that he lead the Georgians into last year. Improbably, a famous Georgian singer came up with the idea to create welded steel framed cubes covered in white canvas with numbers on them e.g. ‘cell 150′. People then lived in the cells for 2 months and over the course of a week they appeared up all over the city. The most were around the parliament building on Rustaveli Street and in the area of Saburtalo.
They blocked the streets and thus the main streets in the city centre were completely car free. I thought this was great. It was much calmer without cars, less polluted, and you didn’t have to worry about dying crossing the 3 lane main road or the crazy carousel that is freedom square at rush hour. Instead the population was presented with a near Idyllic city centre area of people strolling about happily, eating ice cream, chatting, men sitting outside their cells playing cards, children playing and one heartwarming moment I saw was a dad teaching his son to ride a bike in the middle of the recently closed road.
It was a logical progression forward undeniably improving things. However, I’m sure this episode of inadvertant environmental enlightenment will be swept up under the carpet and go unnoticed. I hope otherwise. I spoke to many people who thought it was an improvement and I mentioned it at a presentation I gave at last week – more about that later.
Saakashvili has cleverly dealt with the demonstrators, doing nothing for 2 months (reportedly he was seen on a yacht on the black sea on holiday). After a few days of feather-ruffling between the parties, a meeting was arranged between the president and the opposition. Gradually things calmed down with only a couple of hiccups of police clashing with protestors on a minor scale.
Quietly Saakashvili’s cronies have been removing the cells around the city as people got bored and complacent with the whole thing and now it’s down to a few cells outside the parliament. The stage was still there was I left two weeks ago and there were still talks and speeches going on. The saga continues.
I’ve been dedicating a lot of time to my passion for mountain biking. It became very clear to me, whilst meditating on my bike in India, that I should help to start a cycling project in Tbilisi. Georgia is perfect for mountain biking with wonderful countryside and many mountain-bikeable paths and of course the culture, food, drink and friendly people. Tbilisi, as a city has excellent mountain biking within a 5 minute cycle from the city (could be less if you already live up the hill!). The population seems to be open minded on the subject of cycling and I’ve seen an exponential increase in cyclists since I was in Georgia last year.
I wanted to refine my passion for cycling down to it’s mountain biking core. I have the opportunity to follow my passion, be part of a community of riders and help to develop the scene in Georgia and Tbilisi, offering my experience, minor celebrity status and website skills.
Through a friend, I met David and Merabi, two serious and very good mountain bikers in Tbilisi and organised to go riding with them. I’ve been going with them pretty much every week since, and discovered some brilliant trails- crazily enough my bike is still holding out, after riding 15,500km, I’m now riding it over technical rocky trails.
Even more crazy is the fact that the breakage on my frame (which snapped in Delhi and I got immediately welded up by the omnipresent Indian welding contingency). It’s still holding strong! Kona are supplying me with a new frame – a 2008 Kona Caldera which is their top of the range aluminium mountain bike hard-tail frame. I concluded that even though steel is the ideal material, most tourers I met were actually using aluminium frames through ignorance or the increased availability, with no problems at all.
The website I created for mountain biking in Georgia is http://www.mountainbiking.ge. It is a service ran by my Georgian friends offering mountain bike holidays in Georgia as well as guide, bike hire, and purchase. In addition it is a social portal with a forum, blog and flickr gallery- and will no doubt develop in the future. I am constructing GPS routes available for download on there and want to create a collaborative application for that so people can upload their own routes. There have been a huge number of hits on the website already and many people interested.
David and Merabi went riding with one of the first guests a few weeks back, a Philippine lady who was staying at the Marriot (paying $300 per night). She got way more than her money’s worth, and rode from 8 am to 6 pm, an epic all-dayer, and had a stonking time by the looks of the photos. Merabi and David are both kind, friendly and very experienced bikers, not short of a few stories to tell. They are both originally from deep in the mountains, from the village of Gudauri, where there is the popular ski resort in Georgia. They are the first people to take mountain bikes over the mountains in this area, and the photos are stunning from their experiences. I think the next Lord of the Rings should be filmed in Georgia.
We are planning to make a race in October, inviting anyone to come and race round a course on the mountain next to Tbilisi and hopefully find a sponsor to stump up a prize and some banners, and food for the riders.
The weather in Tbilisi over the last 2 months has been bizarre to say the least. When Tom and I arrived in Georgia in Winter of 2008, it was the coldest winter for 30 years and I would hazard a guess that it’s probably been the wettest summer ever! There were, violent thunderstorms practically every day for 2 months. I experienced the full brunt of these sometimes seemingly instantaneous events with vast quantities of water falling from the sky.
I was talking on the internet to Mark saying ‘this storm is crazy, I’ve never seen such as volume of water so quickly’ and Mark said ‘wow, that must be amazing’ which coincided with a capitalised swear word written in reply to mark ‘**** my bedroom roof has just fallen in!!!, and Mark’s response ‘****, are you alright mate?’ after which I ran in and tried to salvage everything including the furniture, which somehow through adrenalin, I managed to move all of (a chest of drawers, wardrobe and bed) out of the room in about 2 minutes. After the landlord and I had sorted the whole mess out and it had finished being redecorated a few weeks ago I could barely move the wardrobe back because of it’s weight. It took me about 30 minutes of straining in the heat.
The weather has been clear and fresh in the morning, progressively getting hazier and culminating in a muggy heavy afternoon. Around 5/6 pm a familiar earth shakeningly loud clap of thunder could be heard reverberating around the Tbilisi valley, and not long after, huge torrents of rain turning the streets into veritable rivers of silt and dirty water. This is a serious problem. People died caught in these storms. Some of the old houses aren’t in a state to deal with that kind of weather (such as mine), people aren’t used to driving in the wet and don’t slow down much, and it caused flooding because of inadequate drainage systems.
I made a presentation on the 1st July at a CENN (Caucasus Environment NGO Network) organised ‘Climate Cafe’ in the New Art Cafe in Tbilisi. It was an informal event to raise discussion about climate change, what the people of Georgia think about it, what part they play in the solution and what standpoint to come at the problem from. Through my presentation I wanted to introduce my cycle adventure so far, present some clear facts about accelerated climate change and explain why cycling is such a logical and practical mode of transport for a city.
Tbilisi is ideal for an increased use of bicycles because it’s actually quite a small city and most of the main areas are easy to navigate to. Basically it’s better to be on a bike for 20 mins than sitting in traffic for 2 hours and the ‘status-symbol’ 4x4s are pointless in the city. Although useful on some of the destroyed high mountain roads (probably better to take donkeys). I also got the opportunity to talk about the effects of climate change that we witnessed whilst cycling, the project for which we got sponsored by the WWF. It was nice to see something tangible come of that.
I put a considerable amount of effort into the presentation and crafted it down, getting inspiration from the TED lectures, Paul Deegan’s, and Ben Saunder’s public speaking which I have admired since I first saw them in person at Explore 2007.
I:
It appeared to go down very well and I’ve been invited to make presentations at schools in the winter when I get back to Tbilisi. It was an excellent opportunity for me to develop a slideshow and presentation for public speaking which I can use to promote my environmental concerns and journey wherever I get the opportunity. One unexpected challenge was being patient after every slide as a chap translated it into Georgian for the non-English speakers.
It was a huge rush to talk and I loved it. I think it was a reasonable success for the 1st attempt although there’s a fair amount I could improve. Many people seemed inspired by bikes, acknowledged (and seemed already quite knowledgeable about) climate change and there is going to be a follow up story a special eco-edition of the popular ‘Hot Chocolate’ culture magazine which is circulated in Tbilisi.
I filmed it so I will be putting it up on Youtube in due course.
In addition there were some Swiss motorbikers, riding from Beijing to Istanbul. They were also promoting awareness of climate change, aware that motorbikes are not zero emissions they were carbon-offsetting their trip and using the lowest emission motorbikes possible. I took the positive aspect that at least they had a strong conscience to to something about reducing their impact.
Obviously having flown myself, and felt that I had little choice other than to do that, I understand that the infrastructure isn’t there yet (in terms of bureacracy) meaning that there is sometimes a last resort compromise made (well I choose that in my case. My philosophy is still that flying is a last resort for travel). I personally believe that if you are going to seriously carbon-offset an expedition, you should know exactly where the money from the carbon credits is going and make sure it is effective.
I think that sometimes the benefits on the people of the travel perhaps outweighs the negatives of if they had stayed at home and burnt the carbon emissions from their home. Travel is the greatest lesson anyone can take to further their awareness of the reality of the world. They were good guys, intelligent and realistic, if a little jaded from long hours on the bikes. Listening to their experiences, trying not to compare them to mine, I still feel convinced that bike travel is unparalleled travel experience other than walking (or possibly skiing) which are different (non-ball)games altogether anyway.
Since I started travelling I have been unable to avoid making any excuse to half-arse my creative projects. In the past I’ve done a lot of creative artwork, and design and I used to be disorganised with it, but now I’ve organised everything with the aim of moving forward. I don’t half-do things or let myself get distracted. I concentrate on doing things meticulously, setting solid uninterpreted blocks of time to do things and being aware in each moment whether what I’m doing is productive with my overall goals.
I’ve looked to the methods of GTD and elements of Timoty Ferriss’ 4HWW (Four Hour Work Week) Amazon Link – The 4-hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich
. The GTD methodology is based on Steven R Covey’s – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Amazon Link – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
(which I think is great but can be improved upon a lot- a lot of it is based on GTD (getting things done) Amazon Link -Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
methods on first glance. Funnily enough also based heavily on lateral thinking) Amazon link – Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity
which I heard first time around and was very impressed by. What impresses me about GTD is that is helps you to deal with the information overload we are faced with with the internet and, if we get lazy, from Facebook, gmail and a million other similar websites that add the danger of timewasting and stress of procrastination which is an entirely new phenomena. If you’re interested you can watch the video of Dave Allen (the creator of GTD) speaking at Google.
I’ve created my design portfolio at: http://www.andrewwelch.info. I’ve organised all the music I’ve made which was just sitting on a dusty hard disk together and put it at http://andrew-welch-music.blogspot.com and I’ve relaunched my Truefocus tee shirt and art project at http://www.zazzle.com/truefocus* (so make sure you get your birthday and Christmas presents from there- or perhaps just treat yourself!). I have organised all of my photos quickly using Picasa 3- an astonishing piece of software allowing me to get onto the important task of picking the very best ones. I looked at some of the photos with my friend Aurilien who is an experienced photographer on the journey home and I find it a lot easier to be really self-critical when I’m looking at the photos with someone who I respect a lot and knows his profession.
Which brings me onto how I got back to the UK. I caught a bus full of 18 year old Georgian Folklore dancers all the way back to Lyon in France via Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and France. We spent a day in Venice and went swimming in the sea in Greece which made a welcome break from sleeping on the bus seven nights in a row!!! I must say a huge thank you to Zaal and Aurillien for their kindness, taking me on the bus.
Finally I was unsure how I would feel about being at home again, but this time it’s easier as I’m a lot more flexible and I did the travel back last year too. It’s wonderful to see friends and family at home. I will be here for 3 weeks and then I’m heading again to France for 1 month and then back to Georgia in time for Tommy’s wedding- I’ve still got to come up the Speech! Eek! (any ideas?)
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