After a few lazy days in Tbilisi, about which I will write later, we left to the mountains again — this time to another area of the Caucasus at the foothills of mount Kazbeg. A relatively low-altitude pass over the Caucasus ridge exists in this area, at 2300 m. above sea level, so an important route passes here, connecting Tbilisi to Russia, that has been in use for centuries. It was made into a proper road by the Russians; now it’s called the Georgian Military Highway. A highway it isn’t, especially around the pass where enormous winter-summer temperature fluctuations have chopped and washed away all remains of the asphalt, but the road is still in heavy use. The last settlement before the Russian border, Kazbegi, was our home for three days.
We stayed in a guesthouse run by a woman called Nazi, which, as it happens, means “soft” in Persian. She says that the sign on her gate, “Guesthouse Nazi”, is surely one of the most photographed spots in Kazbegi. Despite the name, she gets hundreds of visitors every year from Israel — almost half of all her guests, in fact. As is common in such small places, she offers full board accommodation, and for Seinfeld fans I must mention that not only does she make excellent soup, she also refills your plate before you even have the chance to say “no thanks”.
Since Nazi is recommended by the Lonely Planet, and just because she’s so great, other villagers get jealous of her success, and try to lure travelers arriving on the minibuses from Tbilisi by every means possible. The most popular, of course, is to pretend to be Nazi, so it’s not uncommon for a traveler to encounter three or four Nazis waiting for him when he unboards the minibus. A certain unscrupulous guesthouse owner, named Vasily, is also fond of this game, even though Nazi is a female name in Georgian, but of course travelers wouldn’t usually know that. Nazi told us that once her husband came back from Tbilisi with a backpack and a hat, and one of the women didn’t recognize him at first and tried to take him to her guesthouse. He removed his hat and asked her, “so you’re stealing guests from my wife, now you’re trying to steal the husband too?” She laughed, Nazi said, and everyone else did too. Georgians take everything in stride.
Oh the first day we had clear weather, so we started by climbing up to the Tsminda Sameba, a famous church on top of a cliff overlooking Kazbegi. From there we continued climbing in the direction of the Gergeti glacier. The path was steep, the way quite hard, in part due to the altitude (from 1700 to 3100 m. above sea level), and we couldn’t reach the glacier itself because the snow became too deep to walk in, but the views were worth it all. Mount Kazbeg looked down at us throughout the way, its 5000-meter-high peak seeming much closer than it actually is, and we never lost sight of the valley and the town of Kazbegi, even by the glacier, where it seemed like we were looking at it from an airplane window.
The next day we planned to rent bikes and cycle through some of the valleys around Kazbegi. The weather looked quite bad in the morning but we decided to go ahead with the bikes anyway. An agency in the town gave us two brand-new 21-speed mountain bikes and we cycled in a valley called Sno, named for a village by that name, in which we decided to stop for lunch. Next to one of the houses we found a little shelter with a bench inside, and happily sat down to have our sandwiches. The woman who lives in the house saw us; she went inside and returned with a bag of crackers and a big chunk of halvah. We thought she was offering us to taste some, but she pushed the whole thing into our hands, smiled, waved and left. We still have some of it. Such hospitality is really touching; this is something we’re definitely not used to.
Unfortunately back at the rental agency it was discovered that one of the bikes’ rear dirt shield was missing; the owner turned quite aggressive, refusing to return our passports until we pay for the shield. She even suggested calling the police — all that for a piece of plastic that costs 10 euros. Faced with a choice of paying that amount, or spending the rest of the evening arguing and shouting, we decided to do the former, and went back home.
We spent the evening in a much more pleasant manner — Nazi was making khinkali, the popular Georgian dumplings, and Dana took lessons.
The next morning we took a taxi to Tbilisi — a more expensive option than the minibus of course, but one that allows stopping at all the interesting sites on the way, among them a bizarre Soviet-era panorama above a gorge at the Jvari pass over the Caucasus, the Ananuri fortress, and Mtskheta, the ancient capital of Georgia and home to some of its most sacred and most beautiful churches.
Tomorrow we’re leaving Tbilisi again, this time towards the south: we decided to make a little detour and visit Armenia, even though that wasn’t part of our original plan. So in the afternoon we’ll be boarding the Tbilisi-Yerevan train. Finally, after so much time with buses and minibuses. We’re missing the train experience.
May 20, 2011