This report is about the tour: Cawe towns
We were lucky with the weather - the sun was shining and warm all week. Only once did the clouds scare us with distant thunder and lightning, but these phenomena remained distant.
We are also lucky with good ideas. For example, I figured out not to wander around the ruins of cave cities with backpacks. Each time, approaching another attraction, we hid our backpacks in the bushes and walked up lightly. The key word here is “up”. All cave cities are located on small plateaus, although not very high (up to 500 meters), but quite inaccessible. And storming each of them (and we came across as many as 7 cave cities) with full equipment would have been too great a feat.
Although we did accomplish one feat. For unknown reasons, it suddenly occurred to us to climb Mangup (the plateau and the cave city of the same name, the capital of the Principality of Theodoro) at night. We specially stopped at the foot, had dinner, waited until dark and hit the road. Apparently it was something like a boyish prank or an entrance exam for a “real Indian”. The fact is that the trail to Mangup passes through an ancient Karaite cemetery, so there was something to run wild with.
Fortunately, the spirits of the ancient inhabitants of Mangup were not angry with us, and we climbed the plateau without any problems. Moreover, we managed to find an excellent topic for conversation, and we chatted animatedly all the way, which helped to take our minds off the difficulties of the climb.
As I already said, this was my first visit to the cave cities after a long break. A lot has changed in two years. The biggest surprise was the revival of the monasteries. The cave abodes, empty for several centuries, have regained life. The monks settled in the mountains and began to actively restore the former beauty of the cave temples (Sholdan, Cholter, and Mangup monasteries).
The picture of their vigorous activity against the backdrop of mountain landscapes somewhat reminded me of the post-apocalyptic world from films like “Waterworld” and “The Postman”.
For my tourists, the very existence of such mysterious places as cave cities in Crimea turned out to be a huge surprise. And no one could even think about the presence of life there.
In addition to the cave monasteries, Balaklava really surprised me. Its wonderful bay has turned into a luxurious yacht club. The rusty submarine has disappeared, but a sophisticated system of berths for luxury yachts has appeared. All these changes slowly floated towards us from the thickest fog - the sea “floated”.
And when we climbed up to the Chembalo fortress, it suddenly appeared before us in its new guise - overgrown with scaffolding. Apparently someone decided to rebuild it. Well, let them build, but we have no time to sit still, we ran along a winding path to Golden Beach. We really wanted to swim in the sea. And to make it more fun for us to carry our backpacks, we were entertained all the way by dolphins hunting in a school in the bay below us.
And when the fog fell on the beach again in the evening, another guest came to us with it. He crept hidden behind clouds of water vapor and only his eyes sometimes sparkled in the rays of our flashlights. It was the great and terrible... beach cat. It's funny, although his eyes are really impressive.
This is the happy ending we got from our fun trip through the cave cities of Crimea.