Greetings ,

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.
J. R. R. Tolkien

Sochi:

Well we got lost. I would add to Mr. Tolkien quote that all those who are lost may not be all wonderers. 

Sochi is a big resort area stretching for 145 km along the Black Sea coast, in the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains. It was a great drive through Caucasus Mountains. I had a wished before to visit this area and now we are driving through it. There is a story In Greek mythology- the Caucasus was one of the pillars supporting the world. Prometheus was chained there for life whose body parts will be eaten by vultures by Zeus after Prometheus had presented man with the gift of fire, which was stolen from Zeus but Hercules released him after 30 years.
A German anthropologist discovered that the people leaving in this area were healthiest and with good masculine body. Thus he gave these people name "Caucasian" even though they were not all white. Now you know how the term Caucasian came about.

It's small busy city and due to weekends it was full. Everybody seemed to enjoy full hot day at black sea. All one way systems, let alone no signs and few available are in Cyrillic. Finally found the hotel. Hotel Moscow: Huge tall building but a drag. Old, torn carpets. Old ancient elevator ready to plummet you to bottom of the earth . lobby with torn couches and a bar. So when they say they have renovated the hotel , take it from me it's only lobby. As we were parking our car in front. We attracted few tourists who started taking our pictures and bombarded us with questions.  We were rock starts for 30-40 minutes or so. Well the harbor was close by and we needed to catch a ferry to turkey next morning and we were not in mood of driving in this city. We found the harbor and ticket office. The ferry was schedule to leave next day around 4PM but they cannot guarantee that ferry will leave on time or not at all. If the ferry does not get enough passengers then it waits till next day for more passengers and I didn't fancy to stay one more night in that expensive rat hole. We were also advised that we should bring our car at 2PM to custom for clearance. We had a good walk on black sea cost that evening where there are nice restaurants, bars and gift shops. We met again hare Krishna group here, chanting and dancing. If they keep showing up like this I may just joined them. We watched football, Russia annihilating Greece that night in very noisy bar but with full of fun.. We met up with a young gentleman from Serbia -Nicoli, who is n engineer working in Russia and building new hotels for upcoming winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014--advised us that we should avoid Bulgaria and go through Greece as Bulgaria has bad roads and boring drive. We liked the idea even though it will create a longer drive. The road is on Aegean Sea coast and the drive is very scenic. We watched the football and drank good amount of local beer for rest of the evening.

Next day sharp 9am we drove to custom --with no signs or direction, we just parked in front of the gate obstructing the gate, this brought the custom guy out of his office so we asked him where we should take the car.  Here in parking lot we met a Syrian doctor studied in Russia and practicing in St. Petersburg  with his family. They drove from St. Petersburg to Sochi and got caught by police check point--fine $400 wow we consider our self lucky. We also met another Russian guy driving BMW -- fine 5000 rubles. Our Syrian friend was going to Tarbzon, Turkey -eastern port of Turkey-than drive to Syria. We will cross Turkey from east to west while he will go south at half way point, town called Samsun.  He spoke little English enough to understand me and helped me with custom. We filled out more forms. Went through passport and the lady took almost 20 minutes to check our passports. Custom guy was good. He asked us to bring everything out of car and put through the scanner. I dreaded opening up my roof bag and get all the camping gears and other stuff. I purposely left that on roof hoping that they may not notice. We dragged all our bags to scanner and cleared the custom, finally, one of the guy noticed the roof bag and asked to see and I told him that it's hard to open as zipper was very hard. He was Ok with that and we got away with that. The ship departed at 7PM and our room had two bunk beds. It was hot and humid and there is no fan or AC. We spent most time in bar with our Syrian friend and drank some Turkish beer and watch the sunset on dipping in Black sea. somehow I was relaxed. Found a cafeteria in base ment, Curried potato and bread. it was good or we were hungry. Took a shower and jumped in bed sweating whole night.

Regards

arun