On Saturday 22 July we had a truly excellent breakfast at our guesthouse in Gori. Breakfasts in Georgia were pretty much all great. You would arrive to find the table laid with bread, jam, ham, cheese and obviously the Georgian classic: tomato and cucumber salad, at some homes the breakfast version thankfully didn’t include coriander. Just as you would be tucking into that, your hostess (or occasionally host) would appear with some additional items, ranging from eggs to khinkali (meat dumplings, a national delicacy). Sometimes your hostess would then come back with a second round of hot food. We never finished all the food we were given at breakfast in Georgia. On this particular day our hostess arrived not only with omelette but also with pancakes which she appeared to have fried in sugar – they were absolutely delicious.
Stuffed we then headed off to the train station and this time managed to successfully get on the train to Kutaisi, where the Georgian parliament was recently moved to.
The train was an old Soviet train, with signage all in Russian. It was packed full of Georgians leaving the heat of Tbilisi with their children to spend the rest of the summer in the countryside. The journey was long as the train went painfully slowly, stopped at every tiny village we went past, and then it took 45 minutes to reconfigure the train as only one of the five carriages was going all the way to Kutaisi. However the journey was comfortable, there was a decent toilet by train standards and we got to experience the renowned Georgian hospitality.
We shared a compartment with a man around our age and a woman with her two sons aged 10 and 8. The boys were playing around and we smiled at them whenever we caught their eye and said gamargoba (“hello”, not to be confused with gamargos – “cheers”). After about an hour, Chris and I were standing in the corridor of the train, looking out of the window when the older boy came over and offered us what turned out to be a bean pasty. We weren’t hungry due to our massive breakfast, but knew it would be rude to refuse. We sat down in the carriage and realised that the boys were each eating a pie, but the mother wasn’t – she must have given us her own lunch. We tried to return it, but without success. This conversation did reveal that the woman and the oldest son spoke excellent English, and we spent the rest of the journey chatting to them. The boys showed us videos of their performances of traditional dance, and we in turn showed them our wedding photos. We got on so well that apparently the old man in the next compartment thought that we were guests of the family.
After a long journey and dramatic change of scenery from the dry heat of Tbilisi, through tree-covered mountains, we reached the humid semi-tropical climate of Kutaisi. Kutaisi really is nothing to write home about and as this blog is the 21st Century version of writing home, I really ought to say nothing more, however there are a few things worth noting about our two days there:
- We stayed in a deserted hostel, which was a converted house in a residential neighbourhood some way out of town. There was literally no one there when we arrived. There were four bedrooms, one was locked (unlike the front door – there are so many police in Georgia that there is so little crime that no one locks their door, and also the everyone is very nice) and it was clear that no one was staying in the other three. We found the wifi code and contacted the owner, who told us our room wasn’t ready. We left our bags and returned many hours later to find fresh sheets in one room, but no people. An old woman banged on our door the following morning, but wanted nothing more than to check that we were there. She was gone by the time we got up. The owner popped by for less than 20 minutes in the evening. We saw two guests arrive, but didn’t see them again. That’s it. Those are all the people we saw at the hostel in two and half days. The place was dirt cheap.
- The cathedral was built in 1003, but left in ruins following a Turkish explosion in 1693. It was restored sporadically during the 20th Century and completed in 2012. UNESCO don’t like the restorations, and neither do I. It was a painstaking restoration, going to considerable effort to ensure the windows were exactly the same size, however the restorers also appear to have wanted to make it clear what was old and what was new, as you can see from the mix of different stones in the picture below and the steel structure on the side. Inside is even worse, with multiple steel columns. Chris likes it, and thinks that Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs would approve as the 21st Century restorers have made a lasting statement about the damage done to this church by Georgia’s enemies in the 17th Century rather than whitewashing over that time and sticking doggedly to the 11th Century plan. None of the signs went into this level of detail about the objectives of the restorers (probably better described as renovaters given the scale of deviation from the original plan), so this is all speculation on Chris’s part. We did get to see the Bishop though, a man clearly revered whom everyone was keen to talk to.
The ‘marmite’ Kutaisi Cathedral
- Kutaisi is generally pretty run down, but a few streets have been pleasantly restored (“the Royal District”). Unfortunately this area has also been overtaken by dogs. This pack literally prevented cars from coming down the street, leading to some particularly crazy driving even by Georgian standards as BMWs tried to do handbrake turns to get past the dogs.
The mafia dogs of Kutaisi
From Kutaisi we went to Mestia for a four day hike, which I have already written about here. From Mestia we went back to Tbilisi for one night, so that the following day (Sunday 30 July) we could head out to Kakheti, the main wine growing region (although you can grow wine everywhere in Georgia). Public transport in Georgia was fantastic and it was very easy to get around, however most services started in Tbilisi, which meant that we went to the capital four times in our two and a half week trip to Georgia. Accordingly we’ll write a separate post about Tbilisi.
Sighnaghi
Our time in Kakehti didn’t start off brilliantly: we arrived hot and sweaty off the marshrutka in the hot hill town of Sighnaghi and sweated some more as we walked with our backpacks to our guesthouse. Our walk was longer than we’d anticipated and we ended up walking 2km down the steep hill out of town. There was no pavement on the road and no buildings, we became suspicious that our excellent map app (maps.me) might be wrong for the first time. I checked my emails and the Google map attached to my confirmation email was difficult to see, so getting frustrated we decided to fork out for data roaming. Google maps told us we were going the right way. We continued, relieved, and after another five minutes we reached the the guesthouse. Except it wasn’t there. Nothing was there. Just a steep road on a hill, surrounded by trees. We looked back up the hill and couldn’t bear the climb up to the town. We had no other option but to lose our hitchhiking virginity.
After only a minute we heard the rumble of what sounded like an ATV. As the vehicle neared us it transpired that it was in fact a Lada Niva, a fine example of Soviet mechanical engineering. The driver paused for us, but wasn’t willing to run the risk of turning off the engine let alone taking his feet of the pedals, but somehow managed to push up the backrest of the back seats for us. He didn’t say a word and dropped us off in the main square without asking for a penny.
Following this easy experience we were faced with further difficulties. We asked a taxi driver where our guesthouse was. He didn’t know. We asked him if he could point us in the direction of the address. He couldn’t. He asked the name of our guesthouse owner. We told him. He didn’t know her. He asked his mates. No joy there either.
Becoming increasingly concerned we headed to where I thought I had seen a tourist information centre on the way into town. Fortunately my eyes had not deceived me and more importantly they knew where our guesthouse was: only a few hundred meters from where we had been dropped off and we had walked within 10 meters of the front door! Luckily the guesthouse was beautiful and our hostess a fantastic larger than life character (and excellent cook).
Admiring the view from the garden of our guesthouse
After that inauspicious start we had a lovely time in Sighnaghi, having received Georgian wine tasting as a wedding gift. Having made the requisite stop to the local convent (and finally resting place of St Nino, the evangeliser of Georgia) we started wine tasting. We began at Okro’s winery which Okro had started in 2007 when he was unable to find some good wine to drink with his friends (if only we all had the resources to buy wine making facilities during times of political difficulty and wine shortages). Okro’s sister gave us a tour of the place (the former family home, which has presumably been replaced with an even grander place given the apparent success of the wine business) and then a wine tasting. She was keen to impress her brother’s values upon us. Georgia has been making wine for at least 8,000 years, probably longer than any other country. This family only made wine using the millennia old qvevri tradition: fermenting grapes (skins on) in clay pots in the ground with no additives. It certainly is different and the white wine is more properly called amber, but when well made the results are delicious. At other wineries we tried the same grapes produced by the Georgian and European methods and frequently preferred the Georgian variety. We had a wine pairing dinner at another winery, Pheasant’s Tears, including sampling a glass of their Polyphony: a blend of more than 400 grapes (there are more than 500 grapes native to Georgia).
Wine tasting with a view at Okro’s
The next day we splashed out on a driver, who took us to a wine cellar housed in a 7.5km nuclear bunker, a wine making factory, and a monastery which used to make wine. We slept well on the marshrutka back to Tbilisi that evening.
What nuclear war? Wine tasting in a bunker
Qvevri vessels repurposed as a fountain
Qvevri holes at the monastery
The next morning we left Tbilisi once again for Kazbegi, a town in the shadow of Mt Kazbeg, a 5047m extinct volcano. Or so we were told: the mountain was hidden behind clouds when we arrived.
There is a mountain behind those clouds…
Chris’s head in the clouds
Kazbegi is very close to the Russian border and had been a tourist destination in Soviet times. We were therefore surprised to find a town where only the main road (i.e. the road between Tbilisi and Russia) was paved, cows wandered the remaining streets, and there were no decent let alone half-decent restaurants). Given that clouds covered the main event, we walked in the valley that day and were amazed by how different the scenery was from Svaneti, where we had previously hiked in Georgia.
The following morning the clouds were gone and we walked up to the church built on a hill in front of the mountain. The setting was beautiful, but given its proximity to Tbilisi, was filling up with daytrippers. We sought to escape them by walking up the mountain, but realised that was also the route for the many serious people with 80-100l backpacks who were here to climb the mountain. We walked as far as we could and got some pretty breathtaking views (despite the fact that the clouds reappeared to cover Mt Kazbeg) before we had even made it to the church) before we had to turn around to get the last marshrutka back to Tbilisi.
Mt Kazbeg! Finally!
And the clouds are back….view from the church
View back down on the church and the town
As is hopefully clear, Georgia is a pretty varied place with something to please everyone. Pretty much the only constant in each place we went to was the ubiquity of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Despite the repression of the Soviet Union the religious sites were in good condition and frequented by a devout population. It was evident that the convent in Sighnaghi was a site of pilgrimage, where parents brought their children to teach them about their faith and the history of this ancient and proud nation. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that in the 21st Century this country with a plethora of grand religious sites and little money due to to its recent and very recent history is building even more churches. Here is the new monastery in Kazbegi:
