Georgia

All things considered, Georgia is the coolest place I’ve ever been. It’s like a 13th century Europe with a pinch of communist ideology and a twist of mountain culture that is overtly welcoming but with an almost vitriolic current flowing somewhere beneath. The food is some combination of Indian spices and sauces with the fresh herbs and light vegetable dishes of Levantine cooking, resulting in a cuisine unparalleled in flavor and incomparable to any other food I’ve ever tasted. It is hands down my favorite food in the world. Dry wine growing lands give way to rocky foothills and fast flowing streams that swell in the spring with the snowmelt. The northern borderlands are formed by the desolate peaks of the Caucasus Mountains where the snow remains all year like icing on some wild spine of the earth. I landed in Tbilisi around midnight and found a taxi to take me to an address that I had scrawled on a piece of notebook paper. The driver dropped me off in a square where I found some more taxi drivers and asked to use one of their cellphones to call my couchsurfer host, an Estonian named Mirja. Thanking the drivers with my single word of Georgian (genatsvale), I stood outside on the curb for her to come. Back at her apartment I had a few hardboiled eggs before collapsing on the couch. The next morning I got up early because Mirja said I couldn’t hang around in the morning as her roommate wasn’t so keen on having a stranger in the house, even one so endearing as me. I headed out into the city and decided to hike to the top of a mountain overlooking Tbilisi. I picked a spot on the mountain and took what seemed like the best route through the cobblestoned alleys up the hill. I walked up until I was above all of the houses and from there I found a well tread dirt path heading to the top. The air in Georgia is clean and free of industrial pollutants, which makes it unique in the former Soviet world. At this high altitude the sun beat down especially hard and I was feeling the tips of my ears and nose starting to redden under the celestial broiler overhead. I stripped down and bathed in an icy spring that was trickling forth from some crevice in the side of the mountain. On the way up I found a makeshift gym situated in a grove of trees. I did a few chin ups and dropped down with my hands covered in rust. There was a bench press where the weights were two car rims welded to steel rebar. They had this sort of outdoor gym in Kiev as well where big Ukrainians would go and lift old car parts.

On the way back down I stopped at an old church up on the hill. The good thing about churches is that they are always cool in summer and always warm in winter. I walked around the territory and started to walk down into what was apparently someone’s back yard when some funny looking bearded guy yelled at me not to go there. I retreated back saying I was sorry and the guy noticed that my Russian was a bit funny so we started chatting. He ended up giving me a ride back down into town with his wife and infant daughter. That night I met up with Mirja and some of her friends (two Germans, and a Spanish guy) and we all had an excellent, delicious, fantastically tasty meal at a hole-in-the-wall Georgian cafe. After that we went to someone’s apartment to watch football and get drunk. Mirja ended up traveling with me around Georgia quite a bit. After a day or two we went to a town called Kazbegi high up in the Caucasus Mountains about 3 hours north of Tbilisi. Mirja and I crammed into the very back seat of a minibus where we didn’t have a view out of the window. Squeezed in next to us were a group of Peace Corps volunteers and a British guy named Mashood (he was half Ugandan, quarter Pakistani, quarter Iranian). When we pulled into Kazbegi there were a bunch of locals hanging around the little bus stop with signs advertising their guesthouses. An old man came up to me and asked “English?” as he flipped through a worn out notebook to a page where some former guest had written a little description of his house for future clients. I had read about one of the ladies who was standing out there so we decided to stay with her along with the group of peace corps guys. Mirja and I stood out on the road as the owner’s son ferried the others to the house and then came back to pick us up. The guesthouse was really just the home of a family who vacated their beds when people showed up. We slept in their beds and they slept in the living room on couches. The grandmother worked out in the garden during the day, the high peaks a beautiful backdrop. The older son was a border guard and the other was around my age and worked at home. The older one spoke neither Russian nor English save for a few words like “devushka” ([young] girl), “America,” “Russia,” “Putin,” “Obama,” and “M-16.” But, he was very talkative and would say these words over and over again in creative combinations, so a conversation was something like: “devushka, America, Obama (thumbs up and smiling). Russia, Putin (sticks out his tongue and shakes his head in disapproval).” I spoke quite a bit with the grandmother and one of the sons in Russian. The younger son said that I was one of the only guests to have ever talked with them beyond just asking, “where are the towels?” The food at the house was decent, but a bit less spectacular than the restaurant food. Georgians usually just eat fried potatoes at home and save the really good stuff for special occasions. We hiked up to some ancient stone church perched high up over the city. The going was steep and I slipped a few times, but the view up top was fabulous. On the backside of the hill a mini glacier had formed where a big water hose was spewing out high-pressure mist. I climbed down to the now melting glacier and tried to fill up a water bottle with the clean melt, but I came back soaked as the wind changed and sent the mist my way. Mirja and I got a bit bored with the Peace Corps folks who were none of them too enamored by the country after living in impoverished villages and being hassled by locals for 2 years. Mirja and I were glad when we ran into Mashood and his Georgian friend walking through the village and invited them to come along with us up to the Russian border. We hired two drivers to take us along the dramatic mountain road to the border with Russia to have a look. A monastery was being built on the Georgian side, a masterpiece of churchy kitsch. These kinds of buildings are beautiful when they are 1000 years old, but a new stone monastery looks like it belongs at Disney World even if it is done tastefully. The border was uneventful so we went back. From the village Mirja, Mashood, the Georgian guy decided to hike up to a waterfall near one of the neighboring villages. We took the gravelly path across a boulder-strewn field where hundreds of cows were grazing. After about an hour of hiking and wondering where this waterfall was, we flagged down a passing car and asked for a ride. The Georgian guys driving didn’t say a word to us the whole time, but just stared on at the road as if picking up an American, Estonian, and Brit were something they did every day. I thanked them as they drove off with my one word of Georgian. At this, our Georgian friend started laughing and he explained to me that this word, genatsvale, while loosely translating to “thank you,” actually has a much stronger meaning. It is a word of tremendous thanks and connotes something like “I am so thankful that I take your burdens and sins onto myself.” Some strong religious imagery. I had been using this word to thank shopkeepers when they handed me my change, so I felt kind of silly. The waterfall was fantastic and from the top we held a vantage point of a neighboring village and huge mountains.

On the way back to Kazbegi we tried hitchhiking again. First I tried to flag a car and then Mashood tried, but no one stopped. Then we prodded Mirja to try and what do you know, the first car stopped! We hopped in the back and the driver drove on and didn’t say a word to us. When we came up to town the road was blocked off because president Sakashvili was apparently coming through. Our driver was cursing him as we climbed out to walk the rest of the way. We shared a taxi back to Tbilisi with Mashood and the Georgian guy. On the way back we stopped to help an older man whose car had broken down on the side of the road. Our driver climbed out and started looking down at the other guy’s engine as men tend to do whether they know anything about cars or not. Before long our Georgian friend hopped out and then so did I. We decided that we would have to push the car up to the next town, so we dug in and pushed. First up the hill and then down with the old guy steering. That night in Tbilisi I met up with another couchsurfing host named Robin. He was from New Zealand and lived in a luxury apartment in downtown Tbilisi. Robin was in charge of a lot of the legal work for a bunch of international corporations operating in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Basically, he was a big shot bachelor who thought it’d be fun to host some traveling folks and show them a good time. And that he did. Robin and I had an early dinner at some Georgian place not far from his house. An American girl came and met up with us to eat, Robin called her “Babs,” and she said she had taught English in Iraq for a while. We had a pretty good time drinking beers and vodka at the restaurant. I ended up doing most of the ordering in Russian because Robin doesn’t really speak Georgian. The next day I got up and met Mirja again and we headed to Stalin’s birth town, Gori. At the end of Stalin Avenue sits the house where Stalin lived as a child. Behind it is a palatial museum, erected during his lifetime I think. However, we had come on Orthodox Easter, so the museum was closed. Even the giant statue of Stalin had been ripped out of the ground- for renovation. We hiked up to the top of a hill overlooking Gori where some castle ruins remain. There was a sort of cellar structure remaining, but as I climbed down into it I noticed a weird stench. On the ground there was lots of bunched up paper and it wasn’t long before I realized that I was walking around in human feces. Mirja and I climbed around on some enormous bronze statues of armored soldiers down at the base, and then went into a neighboring cathedral to watch some Easter goings on. We found a taxi to take us outside of town to this ancient city carved into sandstone. The rooms and halls of this palatial underground complex had all been exposed after an earthquake a few centuries ago. It had lain in ruins for years until a few years ago when someone up top realized the obvious potential for tourism. Now the place is well set up with lots of handrails and wooden stairs. Still, the modern stuff doesn’t really detract since the place is so spectacular in its own right.

From Gori, Mirja was heading back to Tbilisi and I was going on to Mestia in the Svaneti region. But, since I had lots of time to kill and didn’t want to spent hours by myself in the rather dull city of Gori, I changed my ticket and took the local train back to Tbilisi with Mirja. The local train was absolutely packed and there was no sitting room left so Mirja and I stood in the aisle crammed in with a bunch of Georgians and a few friendly Iranians, as it so happened. The Georgians were infatuated with Mirja since she is tall, fare, and blonde. One soldier guy was really talking with her a lot in spite of his very broken English. I think he was asking her what the patron saint of her city was. In the Georgian Orthodox tradition people visit the graves of relatives and have a big picnic with lots of homemade wine. On our holiday train back to the city people started to pass around cups of wine and apples, so we happily imbibed. An old man next to us pulled out an accordion and started playing some American blues. Back in Tbilisi Mirja and I ate at a café where we were ripped off because we are foreigners and speak no Georgian— typical experience. We said our goodbyes and I went to go catch my train. I was exhausted and went right to sleep on the tiny bed in the stifling little sleeper car. I woke up covered in sweat as we were pulling into the town of Zugdidi, from which I would find a little bus to make the 6-hour drive to the remote Svaneti region. I came out of the train station and asked a police officer where I could find the bus. I found the bus and asked the driver when we would be leaving. He told me we would head out as soon as the bus filled up- about eight seats. It was 7 a.m. so I went to go find some breakfast. There was an open-air market up the street so I headed that way. I stopped to use the pay bathroom where I saw an old man taking a big shit in a squat toilet with no door. Having more or less lost my appetite, I went to browse the bookseller stalls and bought a Russian learning book for Georgian speakers. Back at the bus station I sat around waiting and trying to take a nap. A skinny guy who looked a little like Al Pacino in Scarface except much more pathetic was already drunk when he showed up at 9 a.m. He sat in the front seat sipping on homemade liquor and kept turning up the radio. The driver would come and turn it down and yell at him, and then he would turn it back up, and the whole game continued for hours. A Russian mother and son from Yekaterinburg showed up and the drunk Georgian started talking to them in Russian and telling them how great Vladimir Putin is and what an American puppet Sakashvili is. After a while I chimed in and told him I am an American, to which he started ranting at me in slurred-drunk-Georgian-accented Russian. Around noon we started off towards Mestia, but now before we loaded up the back of the little bus with boxes of dry goods to deliver. The driver was hauling along the narrow mountain roads, we passengers all bumping up and down and sliding into one another on the sharp turns. We had to dodge big boulders in the road fairly often, which made one think what would happen if one of those boulders came loose as we were passing. That and the cows in the road. But, the windows were open and the air was cool, so I was happy the whole way up. Georgia feels old, maybe even ancient. In the remote Svaneti region locals live in stone houses dating from around the turn of the last millennium and trudge up the muddy hillside in soiled smocks. The water from the sink is always running as it is fed by a spring from further up the mountain. At the house where I was staying I was served fresh milk each morning from the cow in the backyard and bread baked in the wood stove that heated the kitchen. I stayed with Svans, a Georgian people with a different language and culture. The woman spoke some basic English, her aunt spoke a bit of Russian, and her uncle and brother spoke only Svan.

The men spent the day working wood as per their profession. The house was full of elaborately carved furniture, all hand made in the shed up front. To reach the house you have to walk on a couple of logs over a swiftly flowing stream, all with a cow or goat looking at you and the two little dogs barking. I took a walk around the territory, which stretched up onto the side of the mountain. I saw the uncle and brother and stopped to help them shovel manure into a wooden sled that was being pulled by a horse. Horned cattle wandered the streets of the town, stopping and staring at the odd human passerby. Mestia is the capital of the Svaneti region, which is notable for its centuries old stone defensive towers (built mostly in the 9th-12th centuries) attached to most homes in town. I heard some other Georgians joking that the Svans built the towers not to protect against invaders, but to protect themselves from one another. The Svaneti region is home to the highest inhabited place in Europe, the village of Ushghuli, which is only reachable by off-road vehicle (and usually not in Spring on the muddy roads) or by four day hike. The Soviets didn’t come to Svaneti region until the 1960’s and tourists didn’t start flowing in until the mid 2000’s when the incoming president Sakashvili sent in army troops to kill the bandits who routinely terrorized and robbed tourists and locals alike at the point of sub-machine guns. There was a shoot-out in which the leader of the bandits and his two sons were killed. Like the rest of rural Georgia, Svaneti was essentially lawless until the ascension of Sakashvili who has brutally and speedily modernized the country. Perhaps too brutally as he just failed to be re-elected thanks in part to some leaked videos of prison guards beating inmates and sodomizing a guy with a broom. Georgia has one of the highest per-capita prison populations in the world, but also one of the lowest crime rates in Europe (on par with Holland or Switzerland). With Sakashvili came a rapid economic modernization and a complete purge in the government and police force to get rid of corruption. This was all heavily assisted by the American and European cash and credit. The signs of this money are very visible with new police stations in every little town and a big new highway named in honor of George W. Bush. In terms of resources, Georgia has relatively little to offer itself. Its value to the U.S., and more particularly to Europe, is its geographic position as a gas corridor. The position is fabulous for two reasons: 1) it is close to gas-rich Turkmenistan; 2) it bypasses Russia and Iran. Basically, Europe is incredibly anxious a out being so dependent on Russia for its natural gas consumption and it is desperately trying to diversify away from the screwy Russian state-monopoly supplier. Turkmenistan offers an alternative if a pipeline can be constructed through the Caspian Sea, into Azerbaijan, then Georgia, then Turkey, and into Europe. Russia is vehemently opposed to this, as the construction of this pipeline would be the kiss of death to state-monopoly Gazprom, who is already struggling on many different fronts. Russia stands to stop the construction of a pipeline by force, using its status as a Caspian Sea border state to conjure up some pretext for intervention.

For the time being, the Caspian pipeline is off the table. The 2008 Russo-Georgian war solidified this, probably at least for the next decade. The U.S. is unlikely to throw its full weight behind Georgia and the pipeline for fear of becoming embroiled in a Caucasian-Caspian conflict over European gas, especially as American shale gas stands to enter the European gas scene in a big way. Back in Svaneti, I was trying to find things to do in the cold and drizzly weather. I took a few hikes into the mountains and one time came up to some kind of camp that was being guarded by two kids with AK-47’s. I walked up to them, which I think they found rather surprising, and we had a time of it since they spoke neither Russian nor English. It was quickly understood however that I couldn’t go along any further to the little encampment where older men were playing volleyball and having a picnic. Up the road a bit from where I was staying was a brand new wooden chalet with a guard perched up on the driveway. I had been told that this was Sakashvili’s vacation house and I asked the guard whether it was true. He gave a non-committal answer, which basically confirmed it. A few days by myself in Svaneti with bad weather and I was feeling a little lonely and bored. I had read about a charter plane that sometimes flies back and forth between Tbilisi and Mestia, so I walked down to the airport to find out about it. They told me that the plane would probably be flying the next day if the weather held up. The next morning I called down to the airport and heard that they would be taking off. The brother gave me a ride down to the runway where I bought my ticket from the cute girl. A Canadian company owns the plane and the pilots were two tall blonde Canadians. I was in the plane with a family of Georgians and their kids, all babbling on in Georgian. The pilot turned around and hung out of the cockpit and gave the safety presentation: “welcome aboard, exits are behind you, put on your seatbelts.” The propellers started whirring and we were taking off over the stone towers of Mestia. From the air, Mestia looked like something out of Lord of the Rings, an embattled settlement perched high up in the mountains with the locals going about with their daily subsistence. The flight was about an hour long and we stayed low enough to not be pressurized. We flew right through the peaks, the pilots navigating entirely by sight. At times we passed just a few hundred feet above the snowy crags. The plane came out of the mountains after a rather jerky half hour. Heading for Tbilisi, a rolling emerald landscape stretched out like a doormat to the Caucasus, dotted by the occasional farmer’s field. Back in Tbilisi I took a taxi back down George W. Bush highway and headed to another couchsurfer’s house. I stayed the night with this really nice German couple who were both medical students. They rented the bottom floor of a Georgian family’s house. We told the Georgian family that I was a cousin visiting from America. I spent the next night at Robin’s apartment again and we had a good time drinking beers out on his balcony overlooking downtown Tbilisi. We talked about politics, his two Hungarian ex-wives, and the path a young man might take in life.