For years I had dreamed about returning to Svaneti, enticed by stories of its culture and the wonderful mountain trekking to be done, but there were other adventures to be undertaken, and the dreams remained unfulfilled. Then in February of this year I signed a contract to teach in an international school in Tbilisi, and I began thinking much more seriously about when and how I would return to Svaneti to do some hiking and to show Terri the sights.
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| The reds of autumn |
Monday morning found us in a marshrutka headed towards Ushguli. The government has been lavishing lots of money on improving roads around the country, and the Ushguli road is no exception. The climb up to the low Ughviri Pass and down the other side to rejoin the Enguri River (Mestia is located in a tributary valley) was all on newly laid cement. From that point onward we were in the midst of a muddy construction site for the next ten or fifteen kilometres as the government tries to finish the work before the snow sets in. The final fifteen kilometres are the same muddy, rutted dirt track that I remember from seven years ago, but the view as you pull into Ushguli is worth it. We wandered into town, selected a guesthouse from the dozens on offer, then set off to explore the valley.
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| The view from Ushguli towards Mt. Shkhara |
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| Birch leaves showing yellow against the rhododendron bushes |
When I had last been in Ushguli, it was cold and rainy and I had barely even seen its famous towers. Now the village was bathed in sunshine and the immense rocky ramparts of Mt. Shkhara (5068 m), the highest peak in Georgia, dominated the view to the north. We pulled on our hiking boots and set off towards the base of the mountain along a valley so gently inclined that a Delica track runs along it. An hour and a half of quick marching brought us to a point where we could sit and contemplate the source of the Enguri River as it bursts forth from the tongue of the Shkhara Glacier. Shkhara is a broad, imposing mountain that reminds me of a shorter version of
Nanga Parbat. A half-dozen glaciers drop vertiginously down its steep face, carving deep scars that eventually melt out into pristine mountain streams. We sat atop a glacial erratic and had a late lunch, contemplating the immense mountain architecture around us, before turning back towards Ushguli.
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| An autumnal morning in Ushguli |
Back in town we wandered around the streets, photographing Svan towers and looking at the outsides of St. George's Chapel and the Lamaria Church, both in improbably grand settings with Shkhara as a huge white backdrop. As we were returning to our lodgings, we ran into Mose, the eight-year-old child star of Dede, perched precariously over the saddle of a horse. He was trying in vain to adjust the girth of the saddle, and couldn't quite reach, so Terri gave him a hand. He gave a quick smile of thanks, then cantered off down the main street. I thought that having a taste for fast horses was probably healthier than some of the lifestyle choices of Hollywood child actors.
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| The unbeatable backdrop of the Lamaria Church |
That evening we had company in our guesthouse in the form of a Dutch couple,
Harry and Roelie, in the midst of a round-the-world cycle tour. We devoured a typically voluminous Georgian supper while swapping cycling stories and tips for sightseeing. Harry commented that while on a 3-month bicycle trip the previous year along the Great Divide Trail in North America, they had experienced an epiphany: they were just as happy living out of 4 panniers as they were living in a flat with three bathrooms and a closet full of tailored business suits in Eindhoven, so they decided on a radical downsizing of their lives. I thought of all the happy months that I have spent in the same situation and was happy for them.
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| The bells of the Lamaria Church in Ushguli with Shkhara behind |
Tuesday was spent in a state of pleasant sloth, ambling around the streets of Ushguli. We found the Lamaria Church open and peeked inside. Its tiny interior still boasts the remnants of medieval frescoes, and has a peaceful, contemplative air that captured my imagination. I find the atmosphere inside the intimate confines of a typical Georgian or Armenian church to be more conducive to contemplating the infinite than the Pharaonic scale of Western European Gothic cathedrals. The small dark interior also contrasts vividly with the blazing reflected sunshine and epic scale of Shkhara behind. Both the Lamaria Church (dedicated now to the Virgin Mary) and the Jraag (St. George) Chapel nearby are repurposed pagan shrines. Lamaria seems to have been dedicated in pre-Christian times to the Svan sun god Lile (or Lileo), whom many scholars seem to identify with the Sumerian sun god
Enlil. Jraag seems to be the Christian reincarnation of the pagan Svan moon deity, probably associated with the Mesopotamian moon god Sin,
whose temple I visited near Harran in Turkey back in 2009 on my Silk Road Ride. To this day there are strong surviving elements of the indigenous Svan religion overlaying Christianity, and it excites me to think that the ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian gods live on in some form in this magical out of the way corner of the world, millenia after they died out in their ancestral homelands.
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The Lamaria Church in Ushguli, dwarfed by Mt. Shkhara
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| Terri with Sopho, our new movie star/waitress friend |
After saying goodbye to Lamaria, we tried to hike up to another Svan tower high above the town in the middle of an ancient oak forest. We passed the hilltop tower associated with Queen Tamar, the only female ruling monarch of Georgia and the queen at the time of the greatest medieval flourishing of national independence, power and culture. Our hike led us steeply uphill through some cow pastures but then petered out in a stream bed that got steeper, wetter and more overgrown with rhododendrons. No sooner had we given up and turned around then a lone bull with a bellicose attitude came ambling down the stream bed, snorting, pawing at the ground and goring bushes with his horns. Terri, who has prior history with ill-behaved bulls, hid in the forest along with me until the bull stopped staring at us malevolently and began heading downhill. We set off quickly on a different downhill trajectory and calmed our nerves with a lunch and a beer in the Cafe Enguri. As it turned out, our waitress Sopho was another cast member from the film Dede, while one of the patrons drinking chacha at the bar was Nestor, a third cast member. We sat in the sunshine, soaking up the views, until the attentions of a pack of feral dogs became a bit much, sending us indoors. There we found a shrine to Dede, with a collection of trophies and awards from film festivals all over the world. As it turned out, the owner of the cafe is the twin sister of Miriam Khatchvani, the film's director, and the film is shown several times daily on the cafe's video screens.
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| The trophies amassed by the Svan film Dede, on display in the Cafe-Bar Enguri |
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| The Mulakhi Valley near Zhabeshi |
After much fussing about, our return lift to Mestia finally rolled up around 3:45 and we got going at 4:30. The sun had almost set by the time we got back over the Ughviri Pass and hopped out for the stroll up the Mulakhi Valley. It was a long walk, but eventually we were offered a lift by a passing pickup truck and were dropped at a huge guesthouse where we got a room and a sizeable meal before tucking ourselves into bed for an early night.
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| The Gates of Georgia above Zhabeshi |
Wednesday saw us up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready for a long hike up into the mountains. It was a comedy of errors when we set off at 10:00 am. I managed to forget both the paper map and the GPS unit back with our luggage at the hotel, and we both forgot which valley we were supposed to be hiking up. We got to the start of the Tvibeeri Glacier walk, then convinced ourselves that it was in fact the Tanneri Glacier we should be heading for. After backtracking into the village of Zhabeshi, we set off upstream again through a stunning autumn-tinted landscape but soon found our path dying out in series of impenetrable rhododendron thickets that had overgrown the disused path. We retreated again and tried our luck on the Tvibeeri trek again, and took almost half an hour to find the start of the trail. Eventually we got onto the right path and climbed steeply up towards the impressive narrow gorge known as the Gates of Georgia. We had a late lunch under the shadow of these impressive cliffs, contemplating the perfect weather and wonderful views, then trudged back down towards our guesthouse to pick up the rest of our luggage. We retraced our steps back to the main Ushguli-Mestia road, thumbed down a lift almost instantly and zipped the 10 kilometres back to Mestia in a quarter of an hour, past numerous clusters of Svan towers punctuating the copper and gold foliage of the hillsides.
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Looking back towards Zhabeshi
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| Fall dried flowers |
From Mestia we kept heading west, hiring a taxi to drive us along the main Zugdidi highway and then up the Becho Valley to the end of the road at Mazeri. The road was in abysmal condition up the valley, and apparently a week before our arrival angry Becho residents had blocked the road and staged angry protests until the government promised to hurry along a three-year road improvement project that had to date paved less than one kilometre of the eight-kilometre road. We tumbled out of the taxi, oohed and aahed at the imposing sight of Mt. Ushba dominating the head of the valley in front of us, then made a beeline for the nearest guesthouse. Luckily it was a wonderful choice, as the Baba Nikolozi is run by the gruff but hospitable Ange with assistance from her vivacious cousin Miranda. We spent three nights there, and found it the perfect base for our excursions.
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| The west side of Mt. Ushba seen above its eponymous glacier |
Thursday morning saw us up and off in the crisp cool of morning. Once again it was a bluebird day, and Ushba looked very vertical and hard to climb, meriting its title of the "Matterhorn of the Caucasus). We walked up the valley, past a series of mineral water springs bubbling to the surface. For the first time in Svaneti, the main forest patch was composed of pine, spruce and fir, giving the surroundings a very Canadian feel. We passed a border police post, then began a long steep uphill slog up a rather treacherous scree slope. We were bound for a point above a series of impressive waterfalls tumbling down the headwall of the valley, and we had to get up the precipitous incline. A couple of groups of hikers turned back, leaving Terri and me along with a Canadian insurance broker named Shawn.
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| Becho Waterfalls |
Eventually the path levelled off just below the tongue of the Ushba Glacier, leaving us with an unobstructed view of the west face of Ushba. This is the standard mountaineering route, and it looked pretty daunting to my untrained eye. We sat down and had a late picnic lunch, soaking up the view both towards the peak and also down the Becho valley to a series of glaciated 3500-metre summits to the south. The scramble back down was less treacherous than we had feared, and we eventually found ourselves marching back down the banks of the river, getting back at 6 pm after 8 hours on the trail. Luckily Ange had brewed up an exquisite mushroom soup (the woods are full of tasty fungi rather like Portobellos, and the soup was rich with their earthy flavours), which took the edge off our hard-earned hunger. We sat around the toasty warmth of the kitchen stove, chatting in English with Miranda and in Russian with Ange, until we could no longer put off the return to our cold bedroom.
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Terri with the irrepressible Miranda at our guesthouse in Becho
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| Moon over Svaneti |
On Friday we took it a bit easier and walked to the deserted hamlet of Guri. On the way we passed the village school where Miranda teaches (and where Ange once taught as well). Ange had told us the night before that they had once had 15 or 20 children in most grades; now there are only 40 students in the entire school (with a staff of 20 teachers), a symbol of the declining population and birthrate in rural Georgia. The walk was idyllic, with not another soul to be seen in the valley. This route can be extended high above Guri and then down to Mestia, via the Koruldi Lakes that we had almost reached on Sunday from the Mestia side. We sat outside the locked church, eating the immense picnic of bread, cheese, jam and persimmons that Ange had lavished on us, looking out at the colours of fall and feeling immensely at peace with the world. I felt as though I could gladly have spent weeks in the Becho valley, walking to perfect little spots like this and soaking up the atmosphere.
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Glaciated peaks south of the Becho Valley
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| Ange, Miranda and Terri in Mazeri, in the Becho Valley |
After another convivial evening around the wood stove, talking about Georgian history, bemoaning the collapse of the USSR (a common refrain among many Georgians) and eating more mushroom soup, and another slightly chilly night in our room (luckily our comforters were warm), Saturday morning found us saying goodbye to Ange and Miranda with real regret; we felt that we had been welcomed into the bosom of the family. We shouldered our packs and ambled downhill towards the Zugdidi road. Along the way we found the perfect Delica van beside the road being washed by its owner. He said that he was looking to sell it for the reasonable price of US$ 6000; we shook hands on the deal and continued along the way, happy at having found our vehicle at long last. (Sadly, it was not to be; the owner kept raising the price when we called from Tbilisi, and eventually we gave up and bought another Delica instead.) We caught a passing marshrutka back to Mestia and spent the afternoon at the Mestia Museum. It's a surprisingly good collection, lovingly curated and well displayed. The things that struck me most forcefully about the museum were the strong trade connections between the mountain fastnesses of Svaneti and the Mesopotamian lowlands 4000 years ago, and the wonderful illuminated religious texts preserved in some of the churches of the region.
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Gorgeous gold repousse work in Mestia museum
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| Vivid fall colours |
And then, sadly, after a final meal at Cafe Laila and a night back at the Keti Pilpani guesthouse, we were up early on Sunday morning for nine hours of hair-raising driving back to Tbilisi in a marshrutka. It was a relief to extract ourselves and our luggage from the cramped confines and stagger back into our house late on Sunday afternoon.
It was an unforgettable week, and it could not possibly have had more perfect weather or fall colours. Terri and I both look forward to returning to Svaneti over Christmas (this time driving our newly acquired expedition van) for skiing in the Tetnuldi resort, ski touring and (we hope) cross-country skiing. Svaneti was everything I had hoped for, and I expect to be back there more than once before I leave Georgia. It was definitely worth waiting seven years for!
