Summer 2021 - Georgia Part 2

 Georgia 2021– Day 10. A day of leisure

Today was scheduled to be a day of leisure, for us to enjoy the resort town of Batumi. Sofia had stuff to do, so Ines, Chrissy, Zsuzsa, Raimond, and me created a team and went for a bike ride along the Boardwalk. Ines was still in guide mode, and had done her homework in a school notebook, so she was able to tell us all sorts of details about the places we were visiting. The tourist part of Batumi has a very pretty skyline, although some of the more interesting building are “fake”. They are part of the tourism-focus of the president who was in office from 2008 and 2013, who was described to us as an 8-year old imagination trapped in the body of a man. Fancy buildings were erected to house a Technical University, a corporate complex, and the city government, but the regimes that followed de-funded those projects and now they stand empty waiting for a investor to buy them. Even Trump considered building a Trump Tower in Batumi!

A couple of other gentrification projects that apparently turned out to be great successes was the Italian Piazza, which looks a bit like a Venetian Piazza, and the Plaza de Europa, which could be modern downtown Frankfurt. Both of them have successful businesses and restaurants around them, and attract many tourists at night. In the Plaza de Europa there is a handsome statue of Medea holding the Golden Fleece.

On the other end of the Boardwalk there are three or four monstrosities that copy the overall features of the Tower of Pisa (but not leaning), the Colosseum of Rome, the Parthenon of Athens, and some weird contraption presumably inspired by the Capitol in Washington DC. Weird.

We followed our strenuous excursion by lunch, where Chrissy, Zsuzsa and I had the local dish Khachapuri. Imagine a flat, thick bread with the footprint of a boat, where the “deck” is filled with yogurt, cheese, and a raw egg. You tear off the prow, and with it you mash the “cargo” all together to form a kind of fondue, which then you proceed to eat by tearing pieces of the boat as you go along. It is delicious, and we showed we could do it without making an absolute mess.

And after stuffing our faces the time finally came to swim in the Black Sea, which alas is not Black but the most brilliant blue one could imagine. The water temperature was perfect, but getting to the water was a type of cruel Georgian torture. I had never seen a beach where, for miles and miles, all you have are pebbles. No sand whatsoever. So you have to ouch your way through the pebbles, stumble into the water, and give yourself a pebble massage if you want to lay down on the “beach”. Mondo bizarro.

After a well deserved siesta we went back to the Boardwalk and boarded a boat that took us for a bay tour where we could see the lights, the pretty city, and the largest petroleum-products receiving port in the Black Sea. Big tankers thread their way through pleasure vessels to bring in the fuel used by Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan (and perhaps to load crude from Azerbaijan to the refineries in Russia and Ukraine).

Georgia 2021– Day 11. The road to Mestia

After spoiling ourselves as simple Black Sea tourists we have resumed our role as hard-core adventurers and are now headed for the high Caucasus in the north. That means we have a long way to go, but we broke it off by first visiting the Batumi Botanical Garden, which is a monumental collection of trees and shrubs from all over the world. They even have a Mexican section, which Ines and I visited to see magueys, agaves, and opuntia cactuses. Very nice.

We stopped for lunch at a town whose name I cannot remember, where we ate a delicious polenta with cheese, and a dish that for all practical purposes was beef slow-cooked in a pipian sauce. Yumm!

Our next stop was at the hydroelectric project of Enguri. It is a monumental arch dam, 270 m high, which was built in the 1970’s to generate 1,000 megawatts. It is the third tallest dam in the world! It impounds 1,000 million cubic meters (or about 700,000 acre-ft), and is the most important power producer in the country.

Eventually, after a trip of 7 hours, we made it to the Alpine village of Mestia, just in time to enjoy a glass of wine courtesy of our driver, Misha (this is the wine his father makes), and eat an abundant supper. Tomorrow we are going to go hiking, so we have to gather our strength for an early start.

Georgia 2021– Day 12. Cha cha is the drink of the Devil!

Our wine tasting degenerated into the traditional string of Georgian toasts, and in that way evil thinks happen without noticing we migrated from wine to cha cha, cut down with lemonade. Ay, ay, ay!

Our original plan was to take the ski lift to the nearby ridge, and from there work our way back to Mestia, but alas the ski lift was not working, so our trusty Misha took us up and up until we found a suitable valley that provide for reasonably level ground until we got a good view of the two horns of Satan that together form Mount Uschubi (which at 4,737 m or 15,537 ft elevation is the tallest peak in the Caucasus). The image of Satan was well-earned because we were laboriously trudging through our hike. The fact is, the day after tomorrow we have an even tougher hike, and we need to acclimatize to the high altitude. Our base elevation is 2,200 m or 7,200 ft.

Once we were back in Mestia we went to see the local film Dede, which won several prestigious awards in Cannes. The story takes place in the high mountainous region of Svaneti, in the town of Ushugi, where people live far removed from the modern world. A purely patriarchal society that revolves around forced marriages, pride and tradition dictate the code of daily life. Dina is a young woman promised by her draconian grandfather to David, one of the soldiers returning from the war. Once a marriage arrangement is brokered by two families, failure to follow through on the commitment is unthinkable. Dina finds herself unable to love David, instead falling for his handsome friend Gegi who saved David’s life during the war. Dina attempts to recruit the help of her grandmother, but the old woman harshly reminds her of their traditions and her obligation to accept her father’s decision. Humiliated after his fiancée reveals her true feelings, David attempts to kill Gegi but fails, and takes his own life rather than lose face. Dina is rattled, but relieved at the same time and marries Gegi. The pair flee the village and attempt to make a new life in a nearby community, but the family shame follows them to the end.

Georgia 2021– Day 13. Up, up, up!

Early in the morning we boarded two of those tough Japanese 4-wheel drive vehicles, and started on the way to Ushugi, the little town where the action of Dede took place. It started steep but easy because of the new road; however, the new road is only half done, and the second half was very hellacious. In fact, I cannot imagine how they are going to fit the road along the ledges of the deep gorges we crawled along.  

Ushugi is way deep into the mountains, but still about an elevation of 2,100 m. It has maybe 20 towers, and reportedly had as many as 200 towers in its hay day. These towers are pretty useless, difficult to build, and difficult to maintain. The first few must had been built as sentinel towers, but apparently they became a symbol of prestige and everybody just had to have one. To date most of them have become the place to store junk, but we visited one that has become a museum of some pretty faded icons and old farming tools. We also visited LaMaria (the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary), and a gallery that displayed the works of a local painter. At the gallery we met the old woman who played the grandmother in Dede!

Well, we are done with the acclimatizing, so tomorrow we get to walk up the valley and try to reach the glacier! We will take two horses, so we can take a break from the walking, which could take as many as 9 hours.

Georgia 2021– Day 14. The long hike to the Shkara glacier

By 8 am we were ready to go, but it still took some time to get the horses lined up. Our wrangler is the teenager son of the hotel owner, and he didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about spending the day with a bunch of foreigners. He looked at me with some alarm and his body language told me that he thought I was too fat for his horses, so he sent for another horse from a friend, who looked just as scrawny (the horse, not the friend). I felt sorry for the little horse, but hopped on the saddle and prayed for the best). Just as we were starting I noticed big chunks of milky quartz along the banks of the river, and I mentioned to Sophie that we should have brought a gold pan. On the quiet she told me not to say that because other people might hear me and start a gold rush. Legend has it that it was here in the high mountains that folks used the fleece of a sheep to capture gold particles carried by the turbulent river, that the fleece would shimmer with gold, and that it was this method of recovering gold powder that gave rise to the legend of the Golden Fleece. Incidentally, if I remember I will attach to this post the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, and the important role Medea played in handing the Golden Fleece to handsome Jason.

After a bit less than an hour I dismounted to give Roland a chance to ride for a while. Raimond did the same for Christine. After another half hour Roland’s horse tried to roll on the ground, and the guide explained that the horse was tired (presumably because he had had to carry me!). So Roland and Chrissy got off the horses, and from then on they had an easy day munching along as we walked up the path. Truth be told it was an easy climb, and in less than an hour we had reached an improbable café just before things got ugly on the way up to what we could all see was the muddy snout of a rock-covered glacier that snaked its way down from the Skhara Mountains. At this point Amone, Raimond and myself decided we had seen enough, and wished the others a happy climb. Christine and Roland got half way up, and Zsuzsa, Sophie and Ines got within a few hundred feet of the snout, on the other side of a much diminished, but still roaring, Ushugi river. I looked with interest to the photos that Sophie took, and was surprised to note that you could actually see the thrust faults in the dirty ice along which the glacier advances.

Easy way back, and I believe by 5 pm we were back in Ushugi, rewarding ourselves with a cold beer!

Georgia 2021– Day 15. Kutaisi or bust!

It thundered and rained pretty heavily last night. This was of immediate concern to us because we still had to get down the mountain, and the slate walls of the gorges we followed looked like they were ready to come sliding down at anytime. Our hostess had arranged for two 4-wheel drive vehicles to carry us down to Mestia, where we would rejoin our excellent Misha and his comfortable mini-bus. Down and down we went, sliding on the steep slopes, wading through tributaries that in a few hours had turned into turbulent outpours of water and mud, and skirting the slippery sides of gorge tracks that I swear had become at least a few centimeters narrower since we passed them on the way up two days ago. At the end there was only one incident in which the drivers had to get out with a mattock and hack to pieces a large rock that had slumped unto the road.

In Mestia we happily rejoined Misha to continue down the mountain. It was a good mountain road, and Misha is a very good driver, but the rain was coming down hard and from my second-row seat it looked to me like we were going too fast. So I couldn’t fall asleep like it is my normal, and actually got to enjoy a good look at the south flank of the Greater Caucasus mountains. Eventually we came to the upper reaches of the Enguri reservoir, and to me it looks a lot bigger that the 1,000 million cubic meters Sophie quoted to us. I will have to inquire further into this matter.

Under a steady rain we reached the foothills of the Caucasus, in the greater Kutaisi area. Sophiw took us for a look at her home town Tskaldubo, which despite its unpronounceable name is a lovely little town with rolling limestone hills and innumerable springs. In the 1950’s many of these springs were developed as palatial resort spas and sanatoriums, where the elite of the Soviet society would come “to take the waters” and bask in luxury. In fact, at the time there was a train line between Tskaldubo and Moscow, which would take two days to complete the journey one way (another good excuse to indulge in vodka and caviar).

I believe our next stop was Prometheus Cave, a beautiful limestone cave that has been well developed with a boardwalk and tasteful lighting. We joined a very large group, and the guide was doing a great job doing her explanations in Georgia, English and Russian. We, independent travelers that we are, hung at the back of the group, where you could barely hear the guide, and entertained ourselves by finding our own mysterious shapes among the speleothems. Top notch attraction!

Kutaisi is the third largest city in Georgia, with about 150,000 inhabitants. Looks like a nice city, but with the rain we were more interested on reaching our accommodations than on sightseeing. We realized that this was the last full day Sophie and Misha would be with us, so during dinner we rolled out the white wine and euphorically toasted to our new friends and their beautiful country.

Georgia 2021– Day 16. Kutaisi to Tbilisi

I like Ines. She is the only one who doesn’t cringe when I suggest we start our tourism at 6 am, and today she was the only one ready to follow me (or guide me) for a morning walk through rainy Kutaisi. It turns out she lived in Kutaisi for a couple of years working for an NGO, so she knows the town very well. We came down the hill (our guesthouse has a lovely view over the city, but we didn’t enjoy because of the heavy rain), crossed the Enguri river (which had turned into a roaring maelstrom of water and sediment), and walked past the area where she had lived, up the hill to the university, and down into downtown and the big monuments and plazas. The city was barely waking up, both because it was early and because the rain discouraged anyone from foolishly venturing out. Eventually we were soaked and tired enough to opt for a taxi ride back home, where we were expected to have a leisurely breakfast at 9 am!

Once on the bus we headed for the marketplace because everyone needed something different. It was great! Not quite the Istambul Grand Bazaar, but a series of warehouses and patios connected to each other where you can buy anything your heart could desire: Rubber boots, umbrellas, electronics, pig’s feet, fish, produce, latest fashions, cheap tennis shoes, money exchange, wine, submersible pumps, power tools, … and the list could go on forever.

Next we went to the Gelati Academy, a cloister established by King David the Builder (the father of Queen Tamer) both as a convent (groan … not another convent) but also as a boys school. Well, let me tell you, this was the convent to beat them all. It has a LaMaria, the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary, that is absolutely amazing. Half the frescos are not frescos but mosaic masterpieces in an excellent state of preservation, and those that are frescos are better preserved than most others we have seen. Gelati has gone through several renovations and improvements, but unfortunately in the last one they added some steel beams that UNESCO objected to, so it lost its designation as Patrimony of Humanity. I hope this is just a temporary slap on the hand, because this is truly a treasure that deserves to be protected forever. Incidentally, I am of two minds when it comes to restoring the frescos. On one hand you always wonder if a restoration can truly preserve the colors, textures, and lines of the original. On the other hand, some of these frescos have been deteriorating since the Middle Ages and are in danger of simply fading away.

By now we were pretty sick of wallowing in the rain, so we turned down the offer to visit another church, and of a visit to downtown (so Ines and I are the only ones who saw downtown 😊), and instead chose to head for Tbilisi and drier conditions. The trick is that we were going to cross a major mountain barrier between west and central Georgia, but through a 2-km long tunnel, and that this barrier is famous for separating one climatic zone from the other (like going from the Bay Area to the Central Valley over Altamont Pass). OK, here is the entrance to the tunnel … it is dark … it is monotonous … and I fall asleep! Rats! Everyone else got to enjoy the miracle of going from rain to shining sun, but I only noticed the lack of rain two hours later, just as we were entering Tbilisi.

It was with a sad heart that we said goodbye to our good friends Sophie and Misha, and to our fellow travelers Amone and Roland, but this was the end of the first leg of the trip. Tomorrow we will head toward eastern Georgia.   

Georgia 2021– Day 17. The David Gareschi monastery and the Oasis of Udabno

We are still under the capable supervision of Ines, but we have a new expeditionary vehicle (a Japanese 4-by-4 microbus, which I will refer to as the Argos) and a new driver Ghia (a form of George pronounced guia). We are heading due east of Tbilisi, toward the dry eastern portion of the country, and outside of a couple of stops to buy water and go the bathroom we were making a beeline toward the David Gareschi monastery. Funny name, isn’t it? As if David Gareschi were a designer or real estate tycoon.

No, he was a Middle Ages monk who was not afraid to speak his mind in front of the King, and who eventually got fed up with the shenanigans of the court and decided to go to the desert, together with about 20 of his buddies, to establish a monastery. He chose a strange place to build it, within the steeply-dipping ledges of a massive but moderately indurated sandstone, which makes it one of the most unique cave-monasteries, with every cell displaced up and to the side of the one below. Unfortunately for us, the ledges define the Georgia-Azerbaijan border, so half the monastery is in Azerbaijan and we could not visit it.

Eventually many more monks came to join David and his buddies, so satellite monasteries were excavated in the surrounding hills, and the total population of the community soared to several thousand. The monastery was very productive when it came to religious texts, and in its time must have hosted one of the greatest libraries of antiquity. Unfortunately, this treasure was lost to fire, reminding me of Umberto Ecco’s The Name of the Rose.

Massive sandstones … hmmm … well, I had to start to speculate, and one thing led to the other, and pretty soon our visit degenerated into a geologic inquiry about the shallow sea where those sands had been deposited, the ichnofossils found in them, and the transition to a coastal lagoon environment, where a thick sequence of colorful mudstones accumulated, and the final regression to a fluvial environment of deposition. My fabulous fellow travelers were enjoying themselves very much playing junior geologists, and hour excellent driver Ghia didn’t shy away from hurling our vehicle into deep ravines in search of the perfect outcrop.

Eventually we made it to a small reservoir (obviously it had once been the bottom of a big dam), where an old timer was fishing. He was delighted to have visitors and right away engaged us in conversation. His name was Nika, he was 75 years old, and he claimed to have been Soviet Wrestling Champion in his youth. He showed us the nice fish he had caught, explained his style of fishing, and then … as if struck by a flashing idea … focused on Zsuzsa and grabbing her by the elbow led us to his cabin for a glass of wine! We were a little scared at the prospect (you know wine leads to adoption … to speeches … to cha cha) but he was oblivious and pretty soon we were all rising our glasses in fashionable Georgian camaraderie.

On the way back out of nowhere I noticed many furrows that seemed to lead to nowhere. Like canals that have started to be dug and then abandoned. I jokingly referred to them as “recreational grading”, but was truly baffled as to why anyone had put so much effort in digging kilometer-long furrows.

We were all very satisfied with our geologic day, when we finally pulled into The Oasis Club in the infinitely small town of Udabno Oasis. It is not an oasis in the sense of palm trees, camels, and Bedouins, but it is a place where a bit of water is available (maybe a shallow water table and a well) and where this crazy guy from Poland has built a backpackers’ heaven. I believe he offers one-month internships of room and board to foreign adventurers who help him run the place, lays out a very good table, and operates seven small bungalows as a modern and very comfortable hotel. We will spend the night here and avail ourselves of the good food.

Georgia 2021– Day 18. A crazy adventurous day in the company of Xavier and Ghia

Imagine my surprise when I learned that the crazy Pole is going to be our guide for the day! He looks a bit wild, has probably not combed his hair in 10 years, and can speak several languages with charm and ease. His name is Xavier, and his goal was to take us to some of the other cave monasteries, which in David Gareschi’s time had been part of what was probably the second most important monastery of antiquity (the first one being the one on the slopes of Mount Atos in northern Greece, where each Orthodox branch had its own branch monastery). These cave churches/cells are way out in the countryside, and to get to them our driver Ghia had to use his best abilities as a 4-wheel desert rat. His task was complicated by the fact that last night it had rained pretty hard, and that for the whole day there was a light drizzle soaking the land.

The first monastery was carved on a thick layer of point bar fluvial sands, bound in the bottom by flood plain siltstones and on the top by channel gravels (this place is a sedimentary facies paradise). The only thing is that the contact between siltstones and sandstones is very crumbly, and my fellow travelers decided to take a pass. I was caught in the fever of geologic and archaeological discovery and kept on going, much to the amazement of Ines and Xavier, who kept babysitting me as if I were a babe on arms. Ghia, who is an gentleman in his late 50’s, with a couple of grownup daughters follows up as cool as a cucumber, carrying a big camera and simply enjoying being a Georgian tourist.

For our next stop we had to cross the river, which looked pretty fast and dangerous. So Xavier directed Ghia to a small bridge, which was probably no more than 4 feet wide and definitely too narrow for the Argos. Ghia never even blinked, and while die Medels cringed in panic he hurled across the narrow bridge as if it had been the Golden Gate. A fine piece of driving if I have ever seen one.

I forgot to mention that I had asked Xavier where the water for Udabno came from, and he launched into a really sad tale: Udabno had started as a kolhoz, or Soviet agricultural cooperative, where an incredible amount of engineering effort was invested in the 1980’s to build a dam (which we saw with Nika), pumps and pipelines to bring the water from a faraway river (a bit like the Central Valley Project), and irrigation canals to bring agriculture into the valley where Udabno sits. Then came the falling apart of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 and the money of the kolhoz project dried out. Unimaginable as this might be, in an act of incredible ecovandalism, the Georgians tore apart the facilities of the nearly completed irrigation project, dug out the concrete-lined canals (what I had referred the day before as “recreational grading”) to use the different sections as pen boundaries, and condemned themselves to a future of bare-subsistence agriculture.

We made two more stops to hike to unreachable caves, where I lamented the state to which vandalism had damaged these incredible relics of the Middle Ages, and eventually headed out of the valley, which by this time had transformed itself into a rich riparian forest, on the way to civilization. We crossed many fields of sunflowers (presumably grown for their oil content), and others that had been plowed and were ready for their winter wheat planting. Lots of fertile land around us, but little chance that it will ever be irrigated.

We understood that on reaching town we would find Xavier’s truck, so he could transfer, and that afterwards we would continue from there to Sighnaghi, We all recognized the truck as we entered town, and didn’t think much about the fact that it had the bonnet of the truck up. Xavier and Ines popped out, and after quick consultation Ines gave us the bad news that the guys had planned to offer us a picknick by the side of the river, but the truck had broken down just as they reached the town. But not to worry, because they had a plan B.

Right by the side of the road there was a lean to, with a big table and benches, and in no time the guys received permission from the owner to use it for our picknick. They also borrowed a grill an right there by the side of the road they started a fire, ready to do a barbecue. In the meantime we all started cutting the veggies (and the house owners brought us cucumbers and peppers to complete the repast). Xavier had arranged for wine and cha cha to be brought to the party, so while the guys were barbecuing we started the toasts and sat down to a bean stew, a ratatouille, the traditional tomato and cucumber salad (with added peppers thanks to the home owner), and an abundance of roasted beef and pork mixed with raw onion and spiced salt (also courtesy of the home owner). It was the best party ever, and when we asked in amazement why the neighbor had not made a fuzz they all just shrugged their shoulders and answered “that is the way here in Georgia”. Bless this hospitable land 😊

Georgia 2021– Day 19. Vashlovani National Park

True to our spirit of adventure we are going to enter into one of the most remote parts of the country, into Vashlovani National Park. On a map this would be at the easternmost part of Georgia, where it extends as a finger into Azerbaijan. By the way, Azerbaijanis are Muslim and generally pretty cool dudes; except, of course, when it comes to the international boundary, which they keep well monitored by army forces, rather than just the standard Border Patrol.

Our setting stage was the town of Dedoplistskaro, where the headquarters of the park are located. Here we met Amiran, who is going to be our local guide. He worked under the park service for many years, first as Senior Scientist and then as Assistant Park Director, but eventually left to establish is own eco-tourism outfit. Anyway, here we were in a new town, where our free-ranging chicken instincts immediately led us to scatter to admire the many nooks and crannies of the market place, then we had to scavenge for lunch items (mostly sweet stuff because my European colleagues have a seriously sweet tooth—but I don’t understand why they don’t take sugar with their coffee or tea), go to the butcher for barbecue meat, go to the wine merchant for wine and cha cha, go to the gas station or petrol and ice, and so on and on until our Argos looked more than a refugee transport than a sleek expeditionary vessel. Finally, around 11 am, we were ready to start.

Vashlovani’s claim to fame are the numerous species of raptors that can be seen in its canyons and lofty rocky perches. Amiran is an ornithologist, so he sang in rapture every time he sighted a kestrel, hawk, falcon, buzzard, eagle, stork, or vulture, stopped the vehicle armed with his monocular telescope and tripod, and right then and there proceeded to give us a super detailed explanation of the lifestyle of the different birds we could see as tiny dots in the telescope. He is also very good at botany (mostly as it refers to its role as habitat to his beloved birds), and speaks about them lovingly using their Latin names, as if they were individuals with whom he was long acquainted with.

Alas, among his many talents he has neglected to acquired the most basic knowledge of geology (a common enough trait among biologists) so in this wild paradise of canyons and cliffs he managed to say many wrong things. I did my best to gently introduce him to the principles of stratigraphy and sedimentology, but it was to no avail. So for the benefit of my fellow travelers I had to add quick rogue explanations here and there so they could unravel the geologic history of the area. For today, at least, we are looking at a very thick sequence of fluvial and lacustrine deposits (my guess is that they are Pliocene, 2.5 to 7 million years old) that had experienced at least two stages of deformation. The wisdom of the park was that they were marine deposits, somehow related to the Cretaceous reef I will describe later tomorrow. Mi amigo Amiran could not understand the vastness of geologic time, nor the fact that ancient environments changed in response to subsidence, sea level fluctuations, or tectonic processes, so he had come up with this wild idea that the sea had occupied the area until recently. He was impressed by my omniscience, particularly when I “predicted” that in these continental deposits they were likely to find fossils of horses, camels, and elephants, because they had indeed found the tusk of an elephant and he couldn’t make it jive with his marine hypothesis.

Vashlovani is immense, so in going from one ecosystem to another we went through about 90 kilometers of challenging dirt tracks. Ah, but our good Ghia was up to the challenge, and by late afternoon, thoroughly bashed by our 4-wheel driving trek, we arrived at the shores of the Alazani river, which serves as the boundary between Georgia and Azerbaijan. It is a very pretty spot along a broad meander, and in it the Park Service maintains a few cabins for visitors. Very basic, but we are tough and or us it looked like we were in for some serious glamping. Walking around to stretch my cramped legs I saw and attractive girl looking at her cell phone and thought “I know this girl. She looks like … Sophie!” My expression of surprise made her look up and with a big smile she came to greet me. I was speechless. Then I hear another shout from my right “Ghoghi!” and Ines jumps out of nowhere to embrace this tall young man. It was her husband 😊 Turns out both Sophie and Ghoghi had concocted this surprise and it had worked perfectly. Raimond was the best, because he sat by Sophie’s side, thinking it was Zsuzsa, and only a minute later turned to look at her, opened his eyes wide, and almost passed away at the happy surprise.

Needless to say we had an impromptu party. Ines got the guitar out of the car and entertained us with Georgian songs, while the boys got busy with the barbecue, and we all started the obligatory round of toasts to another great night in the Georgian outback.

Georgia 2021– Day 20. Vashlovani National Park 2.0

For starters, let’s go for a walk! Unheard of, but by 6:30 am several of my fellow travelers were up, and Amiran jumped at the chance of taking us for a morning walk, to look at tracks of small mammals (a river otter, a racoon), the spoor of a jackal, and the recently molted skin of Georgia’s only venomous snake. And then of course there were the birds, which greeted our early effort with many a chirp and a display of pretty colors.

Breakfast was a big affair, as always, and off we were to see more of the park. The park is divided into two sectors that are separated from each other by a broad agricultural plain. This is the breadbasket of Georgia, where 30% of the wheat needed by the country is raised (the other 70%, alas, is imported from other countries). Wheat, rice, and corn are the three strategic foods of any country, so Georgia is doing all it can to keep this area from shifting to other crops. Ines is very knowledgeable on ag matters, so she had much to tell us about the ag struggles of the country. I noticed they have not really developed their irrigation infrastructure, and Amiran responded that they haven’t to keep farmers from growing something else. Go figure!

After another very long drive on very bad roads, with a few stops in between to admire micro-ecosystems developed in the north-facing canyons, we finally said a sad goodbye to Sophie and Ghoghi. Sophie has a new paramour (her excuse for her incessant text messaging), who is also a tour guide, so she got warm invitations to come visit us with her beau in California and in Frankfurt. Hope they make it sometime soon.

Our last event was a visit to Eagles’ Gorge, and as we approached my ears perked up because we were now in a completely different formation, formed by poorly stratified limestones. Aha, the reef Amiran keeps talking about. Whenever I hear “reef” I think about the El Capitan reef, in the Permian basin of Texas, but what I was seeing did not jibe with that mental image. Somethings is fishy here. Looking down the spectacular gorge I saw what my problem was: These rocks have been tilted on their side, so they had a greater resemblance with the Caňón de la Huasteca, near Monterrey, than with the Permian basin. Once I figured that out it was easy to recognize the breccias of forereef, the massive prograding main reef, and overlapping back reef lagoonal facies. OMG, what a beautiful outcrop!

Amiran kept talking about corals, but I didn’t see any recognizable fossils. He had his secret outcrop, however, so I just had to be patient. When we got there I saw right away that we were dealing with rudist bivalves, so everything fell neatly in place. First of all the rudists were a very successful group of colonial bivalves, who liked to live forming big colonies, one of top of each other. They looked like ice-cream cones standing on their narrow bases, and the top valve was the equivalent to the ball of ice cream. Rudists evolved rapidly at the end of the Jurassic, and in Cretaceous time took over the roll of reef builders (so now we know that our sequence is Cretaceous in age), to the point that they almost pushed the scleractinian corals into extinction (and now we know why I couldn’t find any obvious coral fossils). Alas, the rudists became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, the scleractinian corals recovered and blossomed during the Cenozoic, and the sequence in Eagles’ Gorge got tilted on its side, probably as part of the Caucasus orogeny.

You would imagine that Eagles’ Gorge would be a prime spot for observing eagles, but no. Here you can see all types of raptors building their nests in the inaccessible limestones cliffs, but eagles do not like nesting on cliffs so they stay away, much preferring a lonely tree with a nice 360-degree view. We did see some nice examples of the child-rearing practices of buzzards and hawks.

Reportedly the view was even more spectacular from “just over the ridge”, but I suspected a death march on the make and took my leave of the group, content with herding the cows down the hill and turning rocks to see if I found a spectacular fossil (I didn’t). I made it to the beginning of the gorge, where there is a Ranger Station, started a nice half-sided conversation with the young ranger, and eventually displaced him from his easy chair to await for the return of my adventurous companions a good hour later. “How was the view?”, I asked, and got some unenthusiastic platitudes in response, so I infer I didn’t miss much.

After thanking Amiran profoundly for his guidance we headed back to Sighnaghi, for a glorious dinner on a terrace that overlooked the Kakheti valley 500 m below us.

I have been asked about Georgian cuisine, and how it compares with say Italian cuisine. Georgian dishes are delicious, but there are a limited number of ingredients, so they cannot hope to compete with Italian, French, or Mexican cuisine. Breakfast at the hotels has normally been a buffet style, but with a limited number of items in offer: Fried eggs, hot-dog type of sausages, cheese, the ubiquitous tomato and cucumber salad, bread, butter, jam. Not bad, isn’t it? But this is the same breakfast we have had for 20 days straight! How about having quesadillas one day, and bacon and eggs the next? Or oatmeal with fruit? Chilaquiles? Nopalitos con huevo? Hot cakes? Chimichangas or burritos?

As for the main meal, we have of course been going to traditional Georgian restaurants, where we can always count on tomato and cucumber salad, khinkali (delicious dumplings filled with ground beef), khachapuri (kind of a pizza filled with a dryish salty cheese), Adjar khachapuri (a version of the previous dish that has the shape of a boat and a filling of cheese, yoghurt, and a raw egg), lobio (beans in all shape and form), mushrooms baked with cheese, and beef or pork barbecue. For variety you have to look hard at the last pages of the menu to find trout, veal ribs, several types of chicken dishes, and a delicious stew they make with liver, kidneys and heart. Now, I am sure all that pork produces pig’s feet, and we drove past small gaggles of geese and pecks of turkeys, plus any number of sheep and goats. How come one doesn’t find them in the menu? For pasta you would have to go to an Italian restaurant. We saw some fast-food Turkish outfits, but no Armenian, Russian, or Azerbaijanian restaurants (or Mexican for that matter). But the greatest weakness of the Georgian cuisine is it innocence of delicious salsas and moles, or their delicate white tongues who burn in fire at the mere hint of a spicy chile.

Georgia 2021– Day 21. A long-promised visit to Georgia’s Wine Region

The Valley of Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, is the recognized birthplace of viticulture, and where most of the wine production of Georgia is concentrated. I spoke about it on Day 3 of this blog, so I will not bore you again with the background. I do want, however, to describe the wine tasting we held at AB Wines, under the spell of the master vintner Hilarius, a Luxemburger who has spent his 65 years crawling, toddling, playing, and working in vineyards and wineries around the world, and who 15 years ago came to Georgia to stay. He is now modernizing the old “domain” of his Georgian family, and hopes to have enough life and energy to see AB Wines break into the West European market (I think he has a pretty good beach head in Switzerland).

Hilarius speaks excellent German, and insisted on taking us through a detailed walk around the domain. The first room, and he is very proud of it, is the distillery, where he can turn in anything he wants, from cha cha to German Brentwein, to cognac. He is a stickler for quality, and rather than let a substandard batch of wine go out he will turn it into liquor. In a sense, this room is the Quality Control unit of AB Wines.

Next he showed and explained to us the two production lines: One following the old Georgian method where the wine ferments in giant clay jars (300 to 2,000 liters a piece), and the other the western method where the wine ferments in stainless steel vats. Key of course is the quality of the grapes, so he only uses grapes from their own domain, rather than buy grapes from other producers. The grapes are carefully inspected to make sure they are not starting to spoil. Then, and I think this is where the art of the vintner comes into play, he either chooses to rely on the natural yeast present in the grapes (the traditional Georgian method), or manages the type and amount of yeast he introduces to tease out the flavors and aromas he wishes each wine to have. The timing is of course crucial, for a vintner needs to guess at which point the wine will be at its best, so it can be decanted from the fermentation vessel into the bottles.

Our wine tasting was absolutely delightful, with a traditional white (1), a modern white (2), a true rose (3) (developed by Hilarius by selecting only the very first few liters of grape juice pressed out of the best red variety of Georgian grape (Saperavi), a modern red (4), a traditional red (5; a “male” wine that benefits from airing before tasting), and a Spaetlese (6). My favorites were 2, 3, and 4; whereas Chrissy’s favorites were 1, 2, and 5. And the best part is that between each wine we got a story from Hilarius, who has an inexhaustible store of them after a lifetime of wine crafting. So here is a suggestion: Write to infor@abwines.de and ask for their 6-wines degustation set (the set will put you back 95 euros, but is totally worthwhile) and a possible date in which Hilarius could join you via Zoom to walk you through the wines (about an hour). He can probably do that in German or French, and perhaps also in English as well. Go ahead, try something new!     

Georgia 2021– Day 22. The last day. Back to Kazbegi.

For our last full day we are going over the same ground I went through on my Day 1, so I don’t need to describe it on detail. We didn’t get to do the rafting because the day is fairly cold, but we did stop at the Friendship Monument, where we conducted a brief but emotive ceremony to offer our driver Ghia the key to the joint friendship of the Georgian, German, Hungarian, and Mexican peoples. There was a hidden joke here, because Ghia carries an enormous bundle of keys and I had bought a slightly gaudy keyring with a big silver key encrusted with garnets to add to his collection.

Unfortunately Kazbegi peak remained stubbornly shrouded in clouds while we were there, and my colleagues had to content themselves with looking at the pictures I took three weeks ago.

Back near home we stopped to have one last dinner together, and we used the opportunity to present Ines, our guide and friend throughout these three weeks, with a small token of our appreciation: A cute little present bag filled with a small brick. She took a three-week break from the building of her house to be with us, and for the last week has been chomping at the bit to get back home and resume the construction of the walls of the main house (reportedly Ghoghi has by now completed the floor). Our gift was to wish her good luck with her construction project, and to help with the purchase of a few hundred bricks and a few sacks of mortar.

I believe I speak for all of us when I say that Ines was not only a fabulous support person and friend, but also a fun person to hang out with. She is adventurous and has great stories to tell about her different projects around the world, while still remaining enough of a German to be surprised and baffled by our jokes and shenanigans. She is a devoted environmentalist and hopes to write the next manifesto in sustainability once they finish setting up their farm. Good luck, amiga!

Finis