Celebrating my 50th in the Caucasus

Tbilisi, September 22

The face of 50

Impressive Georgian bubbly for my 50th

So it's over a week after my 50th birthday and I am still in denial that I've entered my sixth decade.  The festivities on September 13th itself were wonderful but slightly subdued since I not only had to teach that day but also attend an evening "Meet the Teachers" night and then teach the next day.  Terri, however, managed to make the entire day a series of celebrations, from a gourmet breakfast to a quick luxury afternoon apero between classes and the evening conferences, and finally a wonderful late dinner featuring luxurious wine, including some Georgian sparkling wine that was outstanding and some of the best brandy that I've ever had.  It was capped off by a fabulous chocolate birthday cake.

Since my birthday was on a Thursday, we had decided that the real celebrations should take place on the following weekend.  The next afternoon we were on our way out of town in a shared taxi bound for Kazbegi (or Stepantsminda, as it's been renamed), the same destination we had had two weeks earlier.  We arrived at 8:15, walked up to Nana and Alex's guesthouse (the same place we had stayed a fortnight before) and in no time Terri had warmed up some of the delicious leftovers from the birthday feast.  We were in bed early, worn out by the previous day's feasting and lack of sleep.

A massive breakfast spread that did us for two subsequent lunches

The plan was to mark my 50th birthday in the mountains, the environment that has meant so much to me over the (numerous) decades of my life.  After a brief morning juggling session and an extensive breakfast buffet that was so large that we ended up carrying away more than half of it for later meals., we were ready to go walking.  We started out with a brisk hike up to the Gergeti Trinity Church, the iconic structure perched 400 metres above Kazbegi.  I hiked up to the church twice back in 2009, but Terri had never been there, and we ended up taking a new route that I hadn't hiked nine years ago.  It was a pleasant hike, leading through the village of Gergeti and then up through meadows and a birch forest that brought me back mentally to my childhood in the Canadian Shield.  A new road has been built recently, and is still under construction in places.  As a result, most of the crowd of tourists up at the church now arrive by 4x4 Delica van, rather than on foot.

Mighty Mt. Kazbek flying its pennant of cloud

Stone carving on Gergeti Trinity Church

The church is one of the most dramatically situated churches I've ever seen.  Dating back to the 14th century, it's high above both Kazbegi and Gergeti, the village on the opposite bank of the river.  It took us about an hour and a half to get there from Nana's, and it was just as dramatic as I had remembered, although the number of tourists (probably ten times what I had experienced back in 2009) did detract somewhat from the serenity of the experience.  The stonework on the walls of the church is superb, as is usually the case on Georgian ecclesiastic architecture.  Most of the tourists were Georgian, kissing the icons and touching their heads reverentially to icons and the doorways, reminiscent of what I saw from Tibetan pilgrims in Lhasa.  There were quite a few Russian tourists as well, with a strong minority of French, Swiss and British represented as well.

Wonderful stonework on Gergeti Trinity

After examining the incense-filled interior of the church, we turned our attention to the scenic backdrop.  The view down to Kazbegi is pretty, but it's the wall of 4000-metre peaks behind the town that is the real draw in this direction.  Turning 180 degrees, however, the view is even more spectacular, with the 5033-metre peak of Mt. Kazbek as the centrepiece.  Terri and I spent a while eyeing up possible ski touring routes and hoping that the new road will be kept open all winter, since then we will be able to ski tour right from the parking lot.   We made our way back downhill along another route down a river gully and got back to Nana's moments before a brief cloudburst.

Hillsides below Mt. Kazbek

After the rain finished, we collected our gear and walked back down to the central square of Kazbegi to catch a lift to Juta.  As before, it cost us 60 lari (about US$ 24) for a 4x4 to drive us the 18 km.  With the improvement of this road, it seems excessively expensive, as any 2-wheel drive car can handle the drive (even a few Ladas that we saw parked in the village), but until we get our own vehicle, we are at the mercy of the driver mafia.  We got to Juta by 2:00, shouldered daypacks and hiked steeply uphill out of Juta, a different route than we followed two weeks previously.  We left the village behind, then passed Zeta Campground and made our way to our destination, Fifth Season.

Relaxing below Mt. Chaukhi at Fifth Season

Fifth Season has an unbeatable location, looking straight up a long valley towards the steep stone ramparts of the Chaukhi Massif.  We had seen the other side of those cliffs two weeks before, when we crossed the Sedzele Pass (by mistake; we had planned to cross the Chaukhi Pass, but got confused) and camped on the Roshka side with a brilliant view of the peaks.  The west face, though, was even more dramatic, really similar in feel to Cerro Fitzroy in Argentina.  We spent the afternoon lounging on beanbags, reading, juggling (for me, anyway) and watching the peaks play peek-a-boo through the clouds.  There were a lot of guests when we arrived, but they drifted away as the shadows grew longer.  As the afternoon wore on, we moved indoors into the restaurant, rather reminiscent of a Swiss Alpine Club hut, and had a delicious dinner.  There were several groups of other guests, and we struck up some interesting conversations before retiring for the night.

Chaukhi

This was where the experience of the Fifth Season lost much of its charm.  One of the groups of guests consisted of about six Georgians who got extraordinarily drunk and were incredibly noisy in their room.  Since the interior walls of the hotel are very thin, this meant that they kept everyone else awake, despite repeated requests for silence.  Finally the staff, who were also trying to sleep, arrived, gave the offenders a prolonged harangue and, eventually, the noise abated slightly.  It was a miserable night, and we awoke very tired and annoyed in the morning.  This is the sort of behaviour that a more proactive hotel staff should have nipped in the bud, but did not.  Given the high price of rooms at the Fifth Season, we expected much more, and were very disappointed.  It would have been a far better idea to eat at the Fifth Season and then retire to a tent quite some distance from the main building.

The ruffled green velvet slopes of the Caucasus

Sunday morning we ate the final remnants of the previous day's breakfast (the hut didn't serve breakfast until 9:00 am, very late for hikers!) and set off for a walk up the valley.  Since we weren't carrying heavy packs, we made rapid progress upstream, arriving at another restaurant beside a tiny mountain lake after an hour, and a climbers' campsite another 15 minutes beyond that.  The scenery was wonderful, with the steep, undulating hillsides carpeted in textured grass on one side (the sunny southern slopes) and low rhododendron bushes on the other side (the shady northern slopes).  There were big glacial erratic boulders scattered here and there like giants' playthings; some of them were clearly used for bouldering near the campsite.

Terri looking tiny in a huge landscape

We turned left and followed the path towards the Chaukhi Pass.  It was a gradual, gentle ascent all the way, and we eventually turned around when we obtained a clear view of the pass itself, a shortish, steep scree slope at the head of the valley.  The terrain was exhilarating, and as had been the case earlier, Terri and I scouted out some potential ski touring lines on the big wide-open slopes; winter will be here soon enough, and we will want to take advantage of the cold, snow and big mountains!

We scampered back down the valley to the hut, picked up our belongings and were headed down towards Juta before noon.  In the village we asked around for transport and ended up sharing a Delica back to Kazbegi with a couple of French university students who were doing internships with the French Embassy in Tbilisi.  Relatively quickly we shoehorned ourselves into a marshrutka and retraced our route back to the capital.  On the way, we noticed a new ski lift being installed on the north side of the Jvari Pass; if it's operational this coming ski season, it will open up a huge amount of new terrain for skiers!

By 4:00 we were back at our house in Dighomi, north Tbilisi, where Lilian and John, a New Zealand couple of self-described "grey nomads" who are friends of Terri had been staying in our absence.  They had cooked up a feast of Iranian-inspired food, very welcome for a couple of hungry hikers.  Lilian and John have travelled to more countries than I have, with their tally standing somewhere in the mid 150s.  They are inspirations to me to keep up my nomadism now that I am officially old!

You can see more pictures of this trip, and our previous jaunt across the Sedzele Pass, here.

Dinner with globetrotting world travellers Lilian and John