Almost Dead in Sudak

YALTA: Our other main day trip for Simferopol, the one that had confounded us previously, was a trip down to the Genoese trading fort in Sudak and then along to Novy Svit, famous for its champagne, before hiking back to Sudak.

Sudak itself is like a sleep English seaside town though, in the off season, perhaps sleepier. Literally everything in the town was shut. It was charming enough though. We walked along the seaside and then across country until we got to the entrance to the massive, wall of China-esque fortress. Inside we could hike along the walls, scurry up the cliff that provides it's oceanside rampart and even sneak into a tower that seemed to be off limits.

Afterwards we stood on the roadside until some random guy picked us up in his car and deposited us outside the wine merchants of Novy Svit. Thankfully we decided against quaffing a couple of bottles as we had a seven k hike back to town. Unfortunately the track that "the book" described has long disappeared and we were lead a merry dance down a number of precarious hill tracks. At one stage Jacqui was forced to cling to the gritty dirt as her legs wobbled, only some pine needles and a few rocks seperating her from the ocean thirty metres below. We went up hills, we went down them, we backtracked, we walked through isolated coves, we scrambled over rocks, we walked on the road and then went back in search of the path again. All things considered we made it back to Sudak in daylight, alive and in time for some grub from a worker's canteent.