Gunnar Rundgren på resa / on tour

Here you see the Southern part of Crimea.
Simferopol - the capital of Crimea - the wine bottle
Sevastopol - the ex-Soviet fleet base - the water bottle
Bahkchisaray - the "capital of the Crimean Tartars - the grapes
Yalta - the famous resoirt - the point of the key
Gurzuf - where I stayed longest - point of knife
Sudak - Swiss army knife (thanks ITF!)
Feodosia - tea bags
Bolshoy Canyon - the canyon where I camped - point of pen.

I have now done quite a lot of touring, cycling and trekking in Crimea. After passing over the mountains to Yalty the 3 December, I have had my night quarters in Gurzuf some 15 km East of Yalta. From there I made excursions to many other places. The weather has been pleasant with day temperatures between 14 and 19 I believe, night temperature perhaps five degrees lower. Sun almost all the time. On the south coast of Crimea the commercial agriculture production is grapes. It has a very nice climate and in protected places you find olives, sharon fruits, organges, palms and in a few places even bananas!


Gurzuf
I stayed in a pension style of hotel where I have been the only guest for five days. The manager has made my laundry against a small fee, Cleaning of the room and making the bed doesn't seem to be part of the deal. But I got a very nice room (two rooms actually) with sea view for 12 Euros per night so I will not complain. It is located on the main street of Gurzuf, Leningradskaja. It is the white building to the left in the picture.





It is good to be a goat in Gurzuf!!!! A human being almost risk falling of the streets. The streets of Gurzuf are very steep, as a matter of fact in many places there are stairs and no streets at all. I believe I should be in pretty good shape after 2300 km bicycling, but I must say it was quite an effort to walk up and down those streets. A big advantage is that there are very few cars in the older parts of the town, it is simply difficult for them to drive in those steep narrow streets and there is very little parking space.



Here you see a combination of stairs and strett. Also note the paintings on the walls. Most houses along the main street had some kind of art on the walls.


Gurzuf is between these grapes and the "bear mountain".
Grapes is clearly the dominating agriculture crop in the area. Other fruits and vegetables are mainly grown in small plosts.




The sea front was not so attractive in my opinion. There were beaches, but they were mainly caged in. You can see the dacha of the author Anton Checkov at the sea front. All in all Gurzuf was a very pleasant place to stay. But if you are into partying this is just too off season - most bars and clubs are closed, also most restaurants. I believe it is only in Yalta where there are enough tourists also during low season to allow for all the fun to take place. I am just happy if it is a bit more quiet.

Livadya

In the Livadyia palace in the outskirts of Yalta the victorious countries of the WW II met to discuss what to do with Germany in particular and the European map in general. Stalin, Roosvelt and Churcill were the guys, and the border of the Iron curtain was in a way drawn there as well as adjustments of a lot of borders in Europe. The palace was built as a summer residence for the Czar, just a few years before the revolution.

A walk to Nikita
I took off for a walk to Nikita, supposedly some 10 km from Gurzuf. I realised that the coast line is really not made for walking. There are geographical challenges, there are steep cliffs and deep gulleys here and there. But more disturbing I found that som much of the beach front is restricted behind fences. But also behind the beach front there are fences everywhere and nobody seem to think about how can a person walk/go by bicycle/ride from A to B. I think it would really add a lot of value to tourism in the area that you can walk around (in the mountains there are marked tracks etc). I ended up in a place where I had to jump over an elecric fence and then found myself surrounded by security guards shouting in walkie-talkies to some command center. The boss came and soon things cooled down. They checked my passport and showed my out from the estate. It was little chateau style building with a wonderful garden.....

I continued and reached a natural reserve where the only remnants of the original vegetation is.


From there I progressed to Nikita Botanical Garden. Who needs the Amazone when there is Nikita? In Nikita there are twenty six thousand different spcies and varieties grown. It was established some two hundred years ago to collect all plants that could grow in Russia. It is a truly fascinating place and very popular. When I visited Livadyia the place was empty, Nikita was full of people. It has a collection of 2000 varieties of roses.

Of course December is not really high season for roses....But some where still flowering.

A trip to the Wild Coast
The coast stretch from Alushta to Sudak is consider the Wild part of the coast. It is a lot less developed than the Alushta to Sevastopol stretch. It is a bit hard to understand why as it is really beautiful. However it looks dryer than the rest and more deforested. The road is really hard. A stretch that is no more than 50 km as the craw flies take four hours for the bus. I took a trip for some distance along the coast up to a town called Ribache. There the beach was a lot better than in Yalta or Gurzuf and the best of all, it was fully accessible!
 
There are not many hotels there. But in the high season there must be quite a lot of tourists as there were caf'es all along the shore. However not one singel place was open neither along the shore or in the town centre. There are some disadvantages with off-season tourism......

I will leave the coast stretch tomorrow and get back to Simferopol to catch a plane for Turkey. All in all I find Crimea very beautiful and worth while to visit.