Our journey from the Black Sea coast to the Caucasus started with a marshrutka to Zugdidi, followed by a grueling four-hour-long ride up into the mountains. The road from Zugdidi to Mestia is only around 140 km. long, but it is mostly unpaved, potholed, muddy and generally unsuitable for traffic — except there is no other road. Marshrutkas plow through this route once daily, early in the morning, a fact which we didn’t know. We arrived in Zugdidi at noon, but were very lucky to meet Gia, who lives in Mestia and was returning there in the afternoon.
The road is being repaved with concrete right now, as part of a massive project to turn Svaneti, the region, and Mestia, its capital, into a prime tourist destination. All along the way we saw crews with trucks and bulldozers, and next to them the villagers who were quick to set up little kiosks offering snacks and a wide variety of vodka bottles. The way was tiring but very rewarding: the Caucasus unfolded before us in all its glory.
Gia took us to his family guesthouse. Another couple of travelers was staying there, whom we suspected to be Israelis right from the first glance, and indeed were not mistaken. They were Tali and Ron, a brother and sister traveling together in Georgia for two weeks. There was another curious group of guests: Mestia is undergoing rapid development, with many building projects underway, and one of the building crews was also staying at Gia’s. When I was preparing to go to bed in the evening, the kitchen (always the communal center of the household here) was full of people, and they called me in. The workers were there, and so were Tali and Ron, snatched on their way to the bathroom just like me. The table was filled with dishes and bottles, and before long I found myself sitting next to it with a glass of chacha in my hand. We sat there for many hours, toasting, tasting, talking and shouting, me trying to provide a two-way simultaneous translation for the benefit of Dana, Tali and Ron, which was becoming progressively more difficult as the night marched on.
The next day we took a day trip to the Chalati glacier. It drizzled throughout most of the way but as we approached the glacier the clouds cleared. Half an hour later, as we left, rain started again.
The day after we went with Tali and Ron to “the cross”, a local landmark, sitting high on a hill above the village and overlooking the Mestia valley and parts of the southern Caucasus. The trail continues on to some lakes and a glacier, but we couldn’t go that far because we had reached the snow line. We walked in the snow as far as we could, and then, in a sudden lapse into childhood, Ron made his way back on his belly, and the rest of us on our behinds.
Laura, Gia’s wife, is the master of the kitchen, and since life in the house is centered around the kitchen, she’s the master of the house. Together with Lana, her full-time helper, she fed us three times a day. All the meals featured her khachapuri, which is basically bread with generous amounts of melted cheese inside; when told that Dana is a chef, she asked her to teach her to make pizza. So we had a pizza night after our trip to the cross. Ron did some dough acrobatics to the great amusement of Laura and the rest of the guests. Whether they liked the pizza is an open question — I think they’re not used to baked vegetables, so they picked them all out of the pizza before eating it, thus turning it into a version of a khachapuri with tomato paste. I guess you can’t really teach an old dog new tricks.
On our final day in Mestia we retained Gia as our guide and driver, and went out to explore more distant spots. From Mazeri, the village which Laura comes from, we tried to reach a glacier but the path had been recently swept away by a landslide. We picnicked by a spring which produces mineral water, lightly carbonated and full of red iron particles. Curiously, another similar spring serves as Gia’s barometer, and he’s able to predict the next day’s weather by tasting its water: if it’s carbonated, there will be sun. If it’s flat, there will be rain. I didn’t believe him at first, and kept checking online forecasts during our stay in Mestia, but I have to say that his method fared better than the websites.
In the afternoon we went for another walk, this time in the direction of the Guli pass, but before we could reach anywhere near it the weather turned spectacularly bad. In the space of a few minutes heavy clouds replaced the blue skies and rain started, followed by hail. I haven’t experienced such strong hail in a long time, definitely not while being outside — lumps of ice half a centimeter wide were being shot at us from above and we felt the stings very well through our coats.
The bad weather signaled the end of our travels in Mestia, as it was to last for many days, so the next morning we left with Gia back to Zugdidi. From there we intended to travel to Tbilisi by train, but another opportunity presented itself before we had a chance to buy a ticket. In Georgia, as it happens, it’s popular to buy second-hand cars from other countries. In fact, Gia bought his 4WD Mitsubishi from a family in Japan, and it had the steering wheel on the right side, as many cars do around here for the same reason. Now Gia’s friend in Tbilisi bought a car from the US, and it had just arrived; the friend’s young son was dispatched here to drive it to Tbilisi, and we joined the ride and shared the fuel cost. The car was very nice, a 10-year-old Mercedes with a sunroof and too much horsepower — the youngster couldn’t rein himself in and drove at breakneck speed, crossing himself at the sight of every church on the way. Since in our faith we have no analogous lifesaving gesture, we fastened our seatbelts tightly and prayed for a policeman to stop him on the way and give him a ticket. That didn’t happen. Four hours later we arrived at our hostel in Tbilisi.
May 15, 2011