A Week in Magical Svaneti

The idyllic mountain village of Ushguli

Oak leaves

November 5, Tbilisi

A symphony of autumnal tones

There are places that I visit around the world that don't stick in the memory that much after I visit them; Denmark, Uruguay and Saskatchewan spring to mind off the top of my head.  Others are fun, but somehow don't live up to the expectations I created in my mind, like Tunisia or Morocco.  Then there are places that I visit once and spend years thinking about afterwards, hoping to arrange a return visit because I feel there is unfinished business there.  Svaneti, a mountain-girded valley in the far northwestern corner of Georgia, is in this category.

The quintessential Svan structure

I first visited in the summer of 2011, on a bike trip from Tbilisi to Tallinn.  With so many kilometres to cover during summer holidays from school, there was not nearly enough time to spend to get to know the hidden corners of this Caucasian jewel, regarded as the bastion of the purest essence of Georgianness because its remote inaccessibility spared it the not-so-tender attentions lavished on the rest of the country by invaders such as the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Persians, Timur, the Persians and the Russians.  I rolled across the high Zagar Pass and down into Ushguli under grey skies and spitting rain, then rolled onwards to Mestia.  The next day the weather was better, but I had a deadline to meet Terri in Sochi and had no time to linger.  I remembered the views of mighty Mt. Ushba and of the distinctive Svan towers, and cast longing sideways glances at the tributary valleys as I raced past on my bicycle.

Deep burgundy red leaves

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.

Vibrant fall colours above Mestia

As soon as we arrived in Tbilisi in August, we raced off to Tusheti, the other great mountain wonderland of Georgia, for a week of trekking.  After that, we started the process of looking for a Mitsubishi Delica, the ubiquitous 4x4 minivan that serves as taxis and marshrutkas in regions of the country.  With so many Delicas on the road, we had no idea that it would prove so difficult to buy one for ourselves, but with only a few days left before my fall break, it became clear that we wouldn't have our own wheels and would be travelling by local marshrutka minivans instead.

Terri underneath a Svan tower in Mestia

Early on the morning of Saturday, October 13, we jumped into a taxi with our backpacks and headed off to Tbilisi train station.  The day train to Zugdidi was inexpensive, modern and very comfortable, and the trip across the central mountain barrier of the country and down into the lush plains of ancient Colchis (fabled destination of Jason and his Argonauts, where the Golden Fleece was to be found) was comfortable and scenic.  At Zugdidi station we hopped into a battered Ford Transit minivan and, after much waiting around for passengers, we eventually drove off, past villages lined with walnut orchards and uphill into the first folded creases of the High Caucasus.  We were following the Enguri River and soon found ourselves looking down on the artificially azure waters of a giant hydroelectric reservoir.  The hillsides were cloaked in dense ancient stands of oak and hornbeam, their leaves various pastel shades of orange, yellow and brown in the afternoon sun.  Once past the reservoir, each tributary offered views of tall square-based stone defensive towers up below glaciated pe.  aks.  Eventually we tumbled off the marshrutka in the main square of Mestia, a town that has seen massive investment in tourist infrastructure over the past decade, resulting in a feel not unlike a small French Alpine resort.  We walked to our chosen lodgings, the Keti Pilpani Guesthouse, dropped our bags and then headed into town for a meal.  We picked the most touristy restaurant in the main downtown and ate well, serenaded by a group of the polyphonic folk singers for which Svaneti is famous.

Beautiful late-season wildflowers

Mt. Tetnuldi

Our first full day was spent climbing high up above Mestia town.  The weather, as would be the case all week, was perfect, with cool morning temperatures but bright sunshine and nary a cloud in the sky.  The light on the autumnal foliage was perfect, and it was almost sensory overload to walk through Nature's palette of colours.  It was a brutally steep ascent to a viewpoint just north of, and some 800 metres above, Mestia.  As we neared the top, some of the highest peaks in the High Caucasus hove into view.  Ahead of us to the northwest loomed the steep ramparts of twin-horned Mt. Ushba (4710 m), while behind us the broad pyramid of Mt. Tetnuldi (at 4858 m, it's 50 metres higher than Mont Blanc)  almost obscured the even higher peak of Jangitau (5058 m).  To the south a chain of anonymous 3500-metre peaks sported a heavy white covering of glacial ice caps.  We were on the roof of Europe, with the continent's highest peak, Elbrus (5642 m) just out of sight and out of reach on the Russian side of the international border.  After we caught our breath, we continued uphill for a while towards the Koruldi Lakes, but didn't quite make it, seduced by the perfect picnic spot that we found beside the path.  We ate a lavish picnic, watching Delicas shuttle non-hiking tourists up towards the lakes along a road that looked impossibly steep and narrow and precipitous.

An unusually patterned ladybug

Mighty Mt. Ushba

We walked back down the jeep road, passing a newly-built chalet that wouldn't have been out of place in the Swiss Alps.  It would make an amazing base for hiking, mountain biking or ski touring (although winter access would definitely be a serious issue).  We dropped back into Mestia along a country lane lined by oak trees and stone towers, perfectly content with our day's walking.  We were back in town in time for a matinee showing of the award-winning Georgian feature film Dede, shot entirely on location in Svaneti and with a cast of almost entirely amateur actors plucked from the village of Ushguli.  It was a well-made film, although more than a bit dark.  

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.

The view from Ushguli towards Mt. Shkhara

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Lamaria Church in Ushguli, dwarfed by Mt. Shkhara

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.

The trophies amassed by the Svan film Dede, on display in the Cafe-Bar Enguri

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.

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.

Looking back towards Zhabeshi

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.

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.

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.

Terri with the irrepressible Miranda at our guesthouse in Becho

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.

Glaciated peaks south of the Becho Valley

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.

Gorgeous gold repousse work in Mestia museum

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!

Below the end of the Ushba Glacier

Our first weekend warrior expedition, from Juta to Roshka

An Ansel Adamsesque photo of Chaukhi

The impossibly contorted green felt of the high Caucasus

Tbilisi, September 3, 2018

Nana and Terri on Saturday morning

It's Monday evening after a wonderful weekend spent hiking in the Caucasus.  On Friday afternoon, Terri and I caught a shared taxi from Didube station to Stepantsminda, formerly known as Kazbegi, the tourism epicentre for hiking in Georgia's mountains.  It cost us 20 GEL each (about US $8) and we got there relatively quickly, in about two and a half hours, including two fuel stops and a tourism stop at Ananuri fortress.  By 8:00 we were standing in the rain in Stepantsminda, trying to figure out where the bed-and-breakfast joint we had booked on Booking.com was.  Eventually we called, and Nana and Alex came to pick us up.  It was a lovely, welcoming, big room, and after an overpriced but tasty dinner in town at a new restaurant, we slept the sleep of the dead.

Insect life in the wildflowers

Camberwell Beauty butterfly beside the trail

Saturday morning we awoke at 7:30 to Nana's tap on the door, bearing the first of a succession of trays groaning with a lavish breakfast spread.  We fed ourselves silly, made lunch from the rest of the feast and then shouldered our packs and walked down to the main square to find a lift to Juta village.  Within a few seconds we had a lift for 60 GEL and were zipping back south along the Georgian Military Highway, then east up the Sno Valley on a newly-improved gravel road.  By 10:00, we were in the village of Juta, a rapidly-developing tourist village, and on our way.  Ironically, although we had a new technological toy (a Garmin 64s handheld GPS) and a new paper hiking map, we left town in the wrong direction.  We had planned to climb the Chaukhi Pass, but we ended up heading towards the Sadzele Pass instead.

Terri climbing up towards the Sadzele Pass

The skies were grey and threatening, but the scenery and weather slowly improved as we marched upstream, along a newly-constructed dirt road leading to a border patrol post where our passports were checked, just as they were last month in Girevi, Tusheti.  The Georgians are keeping a very close eye on their borders with the rapacious Russian Bear, and border patrol posts are popping up everywhere.  We continued upstream, looking up at a back route up the Chaukhi Pass that requires ropes and mountaineering skills, then climbed steeply to the Sadzele Pass, at 3056 metres some 300 metres lower than the Chaukhi.  As we climbed, a succession of buzzards soared above us, and a huge eagle, possibly a golden eagle, hurtled past at almost ground level like a feathered cruise missile.  The view from the top back the way we had come was curtailed by clouds wreathing the summits towards the Russian republic of Ingushetia, but looking ahead we had clear skies and a view of a beautiful valley scarred by the construction of another new road, this time north into an isolated border area; again, the Georgians seem to be improving the ability of their border guards and troops to move quickly to any border area.

Feeling pleased with myself at the summit of the Sadzele Pass

It was windy and chilly atop the pass, so we didn't linger and descended steeply to the east, with the first two hundred vertical metres being uncomfortably steep and crumbly underfoot.  Eventually we reached the first stream in the valley, via a tortuous series of switchbacks, and had a delicious, long-delayed lunch, lovingly prepared in advance by Terri for easy trailside epicurean delights.  As we munched on khachapuri, ham-cheese-tomato sandwiches topped with slatherings of fresh coriander, boiled eggs and a luxury trail mix, we watched two Georgian cowboys leading four sure-footed horses down the precipitous trail with nonchalant ease.  Terri thinks that Georgian horses are particularly good at handling steep terrain that would ordinarily only be suitable for mules; we were both amazed that one of the cowboys actually rode his mount down the path.

Eventually we resumed our descent and finally decided to pitch our tents at 2340 metres in the Abudelauri valley, where we rejoined the trail from the Chaukhi Pass that we should have been following all along.  We were rewarded with sweeping vistas of the stone spires of the Chaukhi massif as we cooked up another delicious meal (pasta with tomato paste, topped with more cheese, olives and fresh coriander).  We got chilled lying outside on the grass eating and toasting the day with a small amount of Georgian brandy, and were both shivering as we crawled into our trusty Big Agnes tent.

Feeling pleased with life as I brew up some soup on my MSR stove

Not a bad scene to wake up to!

We slept soundly, and woke up to clear skies and 3 degrees Celsius.  The morning sun caught the rock ramparts of Chaukhi, making a striking backdrop to our morning muesli, tea and coffee.  We were walking by 8:40 am, losing altitude gradually as the landscape softened and became lusher, dotted with increasing numbers of wildflowers and full of butterflies, bees, crickets and a host of other insects.  It was impossibly idyllic, especially as the morning sun dispersed the frigid chill of dawn.  We made it into the village of Roshka, perched at 2000 metres and looking as though it would reward a return visit some weekend for some more hiking.  

The characteristic brushed green baize of a Caucasus hillside

We then struck out downhill along a narrow path that had both of us questioning our route-finding a few times (we were reassured by our trusty GPS), across overgrown meadows and down through old growth hardwood forests to the main Shatili-Zhinvali road.  We reached the bottom at 12:15, near a series of beautiful waterfalls and swimming holes, and found a driver waiting beside his Nissan Pathfinder for trekkers like us.  We negotiated a lift to Zhinvali for 80 GEL and sat back to watch the scenery fly by as we took the rutted, potholed road at a higher speed than seemed feasible.  The only thing that slowed down our manic progress was a huge flock of sheep and goats being driven down from the highlands after a summer of blissful grazing, an example of the millenia-old pattern of transhumance that typifies the high mountains from Europe across to Central Asia.  We descended the Pshavis Aragvi River, passing numerous side valleys that all beckoned us to return for more exploration some weekend in the future.  By 2:00 we were squeezing ourselves and our luggage onto a marshrutka bus and careening towards Tbilisi.  We hopped off 300 metres from our front door and were unpacking and hanging our dew-soaked tent out to dry before 3:00 pm, very satisfied with our weekend of exploring a new corner of the Caucasus.

The south wall of Chaukhi, seen from our campsite

Bucolic scenery near Roshka

Terri and I would love to return both to Juta and to Roshka, perhaps to stay indoors and do some day hikes through the spectacular scenery, unencumbered by heavy backpacks.  In two weeks' time, when I will be celebrating my 50th birthday, we might well spend the weekend in Juta, this time climbing partway up the Chaukhi Pass to get a view of the spectacular north wall of the mountain, described as Georgia's answer to Torres del Paine and the Dolomites.  In the meantime, we hope to buy a vehicle this weekend for easier access to the remoter corners of the country; we are hoping to buy a Mitsubishi Delica, a rugged 4x4 minivan that would be a perfect vehicle for camping, carrying skis and bicycles, and handling the rough roads of the Georgian backwoods.  We are hoping to spend most weekends away from Tbilisi, getting to know the wonderful countryside and mountains of this appealing and enchanting country.

An ovine traffic jam on the way out of Roshka

Retrospective (July, 2012): Footloose in the Kyrgyz Mountains

Thunder Bay, May 11th

After my disappointing result on Peak Lenin back in July, 2012, I arrived back in Bishkek on July 18th to meet up with my partner on the upcoming Muztagh Ata climb, Eric.  He had arrived from Europe the day before and we met at the Asia Mountains Guesthouse, where we were installed in a comfortable room.  It was good to see him, and to look forward to new mountains and (we hoped) more success than I had had on Peak Lenin.

Kyrgyz life is all about horses and mountains 

July 18th and 19th passed in delightful sloth in Bishkek, buying supplies, eating and drinking well and planning our next move. We were leaving with the rest of our Muztagh Ata expedition on July 30th, which left us with 10 days or so of freedom to do some exploring.  Eric had just arrived from sea level, so we wanted to get some altitude into his blood, and some hiking into his legs.  We tossed around various ideas, including the Inylchek Glacier, one of the world's largest glaciers outside the polar regions, but logistics and timing were tough for the Inylchek, so we decided to go hiking on our own in the Terskey Ala-Tau mountains south of Lake Issyk Kul.  I had cycled along the north shore of the lake back in 2004, but hadn't gone to the south shore or stopped to do any hiking, and our guidebook made it sound like a great place to explore.  We stored our skis and heavy mountaineering gear in the storage room at Asia Mountains and set our alarm clocks for early in the morning of July 20th.

It was just as well that we got up at 6 am, as it took a while to get to the mashrutka stand and get going.  We inadventently took the long way to our destination, the town of Kyzyl Suu; we went first around the north side of the lake to the large regional centre of Karakol (the old Przhevalsk) and then took another marshrutka to Kyzyl Suu, rather than taking a direct marshrutka to Kyzyl Suu along the south shore of the lake.  This was, perhaps, a foreshadowing of route-finding to come!  It was a long ride in the minibus, although the scenery was pretty in places.  We were retracing my 2004 cycling route in reverse, and I remembered highlights like the ruins of the old Blue Turk capital of Balasagun (now called the Burana Tower near the dismal town of Tokmok).  The views across the lake were stunning, with a backdrop of snow-capped mountains (our ultimate destination) rising over the deep blue water.  We drove past the town of Cholpon Ata, where I had explored the ancient petroglyphs on the outskirts of town back in 2004, and stayed with a friendly Kyrgyz cyclist and his wife.

With a stop for food at a little roadside cafe at the northwest corner of Lake Issyk Kul, it took six and a half hours to get to Karakol. Once there we visited the rather unhelpful tourist office to try to figure out how to get to our hiking trailhead, and stopped to buy necessary supplies like bread, beer and gasoline for my MSR stove.  Eventually we caught another marshrutka for another hour to Kyzyl Suu, and then found a taxi driver to take us to Dzhyluu Suu, where we would start hiking.  We negotiated a price, threw our bags in the trunk of the Lada and set off.  As we drove, I thought "this isn't the road shown on the map!" and talked with the driver, but he insisted that we were headed to Dzhyluu Suu.  I was dubious, and when we got out of the car after a long drive, beside the entrance to a Soviet-era hotspring complex, I questioned some locals as to whether this was Dzhyluu Suu.  Only when we were reassured that it was did we get our packs out and set off up the valley.  It was already 5:30 pm and we only walked 15 minutes up a narrow valley beside a rushing river to the first decent camping spot we could find.  We erected my tent and cooked up some eggs, bread and sausage for dinner and then lazed beside a fire that was tough to light, as dry wood was in short supply.  It felt good to be out on our own, free to walk wherever we wanted, out in beautiful mountains and soul-restoring conifer forests.  

Camping in another idyllic meadow

We slept well, lulled to sleep by the burbling water of the river.  By 8:00 we were up, gobbling down some muesli, yoghurt, tea and delicious fresh peaches.  A group of local Kyrgyz herders wandered by to say hello; although it was only 9:30 am, they were wobbly with vodka, and it was a bizarre, disjointed conversation.  Like so many post-Soviet states, serious drunkenness is a problem in Kyrgyzstan, despite most of the population being nominally Muslim.  By 10:00 we had packed up and were hiking upstream, headed towards a pass marked on our map.  We followed the path as it climbed away from the river up some fairly steep slopes and then petered out in a meadow full of beautiful wildflowers.  We were puzzled; our map showed this as a major hiking route, used also by local herders, and yet there were only vague suggestions of tracks and some trampled grass that looked as though it had been done by grazing herds.  We kept pushing onwards as the grass and bushes got deeper and denser, and within a couple of hours we were utterly flummoxed.  Where the hell was the path?  The slope of the meadows kept getting steeper and steeper, and the footing grew ever more precarious.  We kept hoping that at any moment we might stumble upon the proper trail that we assumed we had lost.

Lovely scenery; pity it was the wrong valley!

Eric in the lovely but trackless Suruu Valley

As we continued to flounder, Eric got more and more annoyed, and his mood was not improved when he slipped on wet grass and twisted his ankle pretty severely.  Moving at a hobbling pace, we eventually decided that we needed local knowledge, so we made our way downhill and across the river on a small footbridge, then up the other side of the valley to where we had seen several women walking around a couple of yurts in the middle of their jailoo (summer high-altitude pasture).  Almost everyone in Kyrgyzstan, and particularly older people, speak Russian, and my Russian is good enough to get by, but I didn't understand what our interlocutor, a middle-aged Kyrgyz matron, was saying.  It didn't seem to make any sense.  We showed our map and asked which of the two possible notches on the skyline was the pass we were looking for.  She frowned at the name of the pass (the Taleti), and said that the valley we were in led to a pass that was really fit only for mountaineers with ropes, and that she had never heard of the pass we named. We kept asking, and after much head-scratching and miscommunication, suddenly the light went on in her eyes.  She asked what village we thought we would reach across the Taleti Pass, and then cackled with merriment.  WE WERE IN THE WRONG VALLEY!  My initial misgivings about the taxi driver's direction had been right.  But how had this happened?  Wasn't this Dzhyluu Suu?  The woman looked at me pityingly.  "Don't you know what Dzhyluu Suu means in Kyrgyz?  Hot Springs.  There are hot springs in almost every valley; there are at least three near Kyzyl Suu,"  The taxi driver had taken us to a different Hot Springs than the one we wanted, and we had been floundering around up a dead end valley, the Suruu, that ended in cliffs.  We hadn't found a path because there wasn't one; the local herders drove their animals up to graze where we had been flailing, and we had been following animal tracks for hours.  "Why didn't you tell us we were heading the wrong way?" I asked, rather lamely; she had been watching us for quite some time, and could easily have signalled across to us.  "I thought you were looking for mushrooms," she replied.  "The only reason anyone other than us ever goes up there is to look for mushrooms."  

Cute Kyrgyz girl on cheese-making duties in the mountains

There was nothing for us to do but to cut our losses and retreat the way we had come, muttering imprecations about our own stupidity and about the taxi driver.  We were two valleys west of where we should have been (the Jety Oguz valley), and the Suruu valley (the one we were in) really didn't lead anywhere.  Eric's ankle was swelling and painful, and we needed to get to a real trail that was on our maps.  It was hardly an auspicious start to our hiking adventure, but at least we knew what had gone wrong.  We bought some fresh bread and some fresh ayran (a salted yoghurt drink) and headed slowly back down the valley until we found a promising meadow to camp in.  We cooked up a nice dinner and sat around a campfire, shaking our heads at how we had managed to delude ourselves for so many hours that our reality corresponded to where we thought we were on our map.  It was funny now, but it hadn't been so amusing when we were completely lost and mystified.

Filling the valley with our campfire smoke

We slept deeply again that night, and woke up to beautiful weather.  We breakfasted on muesli and ayran, and had a visit from the lady from the jailoo.  Having talked that evening with her husband about the crazy foreigners, she was concerned that we would try to climb the treacherous pass at the end of the valley, and was relieved when we assured her that we were headed downhill instead.  She brought us more ayran for free (Kyrgyz hospitality in the mountains is legendary) and we put it into the side pocket of my backpack.  We traipsed down the valley for an hour and a half, including a rather cold river crossing, to the hot springs where we had started our little misadventure.  A local taxi driver agreed to drive us back to Kyzyl Suu for 600 som (a bit over US$ 10), and off we went.  We stopped in town just long enough for Eric to buy 2 kg of amazing raspberries, then caught another 600 som taxi to the Jety Oguz sanatorium, where we thought we had been two days earlier. This was a much bigger, grander hot spring development than where we had just been, and we walked along the road upstream with dozens of Ladas passing us in both directions, stuffed full of families and groups of friends.  Eventually we got tired of the traffic and flagged down a lift with a group of drunk Kyrgyz men (the driver was only slightly less sloshed than the others) in a minivan.  We got dropped off in a huge meadow full of yurts and tents that wasn't even slightly appealing as a place to camp, then hiked upstream along the river to the final bridge before our valley, the Taleti, branched off.  The scenery was grand and sweeping and beautiful all along the valley, much more so than the previous day, and we actually knew where we were!  We passed a series of meadows and pine glades before settling on a quiet, secluded spot in a long, narrow riverside meadow.  We set up camp and relaxed around a roaring but smoky fire.

Eric climbing painfully up the Teleti Pass

The next day, July 23rd, we finally got our planned hike underway.  We slept as soundly as ever and woke up at 7:40 to cloudy skies that presaged a change in the weather.  We finished off our our ayran supply on our muesli, then packed up our tent and headed off.  We passed the tent of Petr and Adam, two Czech backpackers whom we had met briefly the day before.  They were headed the same way we were and we checked in with them to see if we were going the right way; we had lost confidence in our route-finding ability during our debacle of the previous two days.  Having confirmed our route, we hiked uphill for an hour until the Teleti valley branched off.  We turned into our valley and continued uphill, stopping in at a yurt for some fresh cream and cheesy nibblies before continuing uphill.  At 2700 metres' altitude we entered a lovely open, flattish landscape.   Our path led through a marshy area, and despite our best efforts to stay dry, we both broke through the mat of vegetation on the surface to mid-thigh (Eric once, me twice).  We were very soggy when we met Petr and Adam again, leapfrogging each other at snack stops.  We had another river crossing (more cold water soaking the boots, as it was too rocky for either of us to want to take off our boots) and then climbed steeply and sharply uphill towards the crest of the Teleti Pass.

Eric started to lag behind badly, suffering both from altitude (we were up at 3350 metres) and his increasingly painful sprained ankle. I had lots of time to wait for him and to look around at our surroundings.  They were magnificent, with grey stone spires rising into view as we escaped the steep valley walls that had imprisoned our lines of sight.  Big patches of snow still lingered here deep into July, but below the rocky peaks there was a luminescent green of fresh grass and fir trees, speckled by millions of blooming wildflowers.  It was something out of an 19th century romantic painting, and I realized that this, rather than the harsh high altitude deserts of Peak Lenin, was what I liked most in the mountains.  Rather than being just a warm-up for Muztagh Ata, maybe this was the main course?

Campsite with a view below the Teleti Pass

The skies continued to darken, and I decided to move ahead to arrange some shelter in case it started to rain.  I found a flat patch to pitch the tent (no easy task in this very vertical world) and had everything set up when Eric finally wobbled into camp, clearly suffering from the pain in his ankle. We had a huge feast of pasta, tuna and tomato sauce and then lounged around on the grass watching the afternoon light fade on the peaks.





The wildflowers were everywhere, and burrows and droppings indicated that there must be animals as well, but they stayed out of sight.  I imagined that there were probably marmots and foxes, and perhaps wolves too, although I hoped that the wolves would keep their distance from us.  As we lay there in the grass, Eric smoking his daily hand-rolled after-dinner cigarette, it all seemed impossibly idyllic.

Eric reclining on the grass, a touch of Italian elegance around his neck

The next morning, July 24th, we were up at 7:00 am, our earliest morning yet on the trail.  For breakfast we finished the last of the raspberries from Kyzyl Suu (just before they fermented) atop our muesli and yoghurt.  Petr and Adam stopped by, having camped below us the night before but being earlier risers than us, and continued on their way towards to the summit of the pass, some 400 metres above us at 3760 m.  We packed up and got ready to go, but when Eric went to the nearby stream to get water, his ankle failed him and he fell in, soaking himself.  He was not amused, and it was a sign of things to come, as his ankle was in bad shape.  We left at the leisurely hour of 9:20 and took a little over 2 hours of easy climbing to reach the top of the pass, passing through a riot of wildflowers and butterflies before entering a world of rocky scree just below the pass.

Descending from the Teleti Pass

As it turned out, the climb was the easy part.  The descent from the pass down into the Karakol Valley was long, steep in places, treacherous in many spots and absolute hell for a man with a bum ankle.  In addition to the ankle itself, Eric's new, very stiff mountain boots were giving him horrible blisters, and he was hobbling downhill.  The last 400 vertical metres into the main valley were nearly vertical, and our well-defined path disappeared into a tangle of indistinct indentations in the grass.  Footing was tough, as water was seeping out of the ground making everything slick, and we both went down heavily a few times, luckily without further injury to Eric.  Eric was convinced that we must be going the wrong way, down the wrong side of the river, but there were no signs either way, and once we were committed, the river was almost impossible to cross.  We soldiered on, and eventually came out on flattish ground down in the Karakol Valley just as it started to rain.  We were a dispirited pair as we trudged to the nearest possible camping spot and put up our tent.  Supper was an affair of instant noodles, and Eric was in serious doubt about whether he would even be able to walk the next day.  Given that Muztagh Ata was our main objective, it seemed best for us to curtail our walk and head as soon as possible to a roadhead to catch vehicular transport somewhere where he could rest his leg.

Our kind-hearted saviour in the Suruu Valley

Re-reading my diary now, I realize that I'd forgotten what I was reading those long evenings in the tent on Peak Lenin, and now in the Terkey Ala-Tau.  My Kindle was stocked with lengthy, worthy literature that I might not have the patience to wade through in other settings.  That evening I finished off Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (which I had been inspired to read by William Irvine's recent book A Guide To The Good Life) and settled into Michel de Montaigne's Essays (which in turn I had been inspired to read by How to Live, by Sarah Bakewell).  I had been hard at work (and it was hard work!) on Remembrance of Things Past (or, as the new translation I was reading had it, In Search of Lost Time), Marcel Proust's epic doorstopper, the longest novel every published, but I was taking a well-earned break after spending all of my Ladakh evenings with him.  I had always tried to bring at least one tome with me on long summer expeditions; previous trips had found me with the complete works of Shakespeare, Thomas Musil's great pre-WWI Viennese novel The Man Without Qualities, and both War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  It was always good to feel that I had improved my cultural education when I came back from a long hike or bike trip.

July 25th found us slow to wake up, as there was no sunshine to wake us up, and we were both pretty tired after a long day the day before.  We cooked up some oatmeal, finished off our yoghurt supplies and then slowly wandered down to the tourist yurt camp at the mouth of our valley, where we bought some overpriced bread.  We continued downhill in the main valley for a couple of hours on a track that was deteriorating.  It was spitting rain, but we paused under a sheltering tree beside the track for a delicious salad and cheese lunch.  We then hobbled further down the valley to the beginning of the road, past yurts and small houses.  The scenery continued to be beautiful, despite the grey skies, and I wished that we could continue our footloose odyssey for a few more days, but Eric desperately needed to be off his leg as soon as possible.  At the roadhead we tore a taxi driver away from his vodka and cards and had him drive us to Karakol, where he found us a cheapish room (800 som, or US$ 16) in a dismal hotel/brothel.  It didn't matter to us; there was a roof over our heads, and good takeout shashlik to eat just down the street.  We had showers (which felt good after 5 days of hiking), called our respective partners (it was the first phone signal we had seen in days) and went to bed.

July 26th found the skies clearing and us keen to get somewhere on the shore of the lake.  We ended up bargaining a good price with the driver of a Mercedes to get dropped off in Cholpon Ata, and found ourselves on the main strip of the highway.  Issyk Kul is a very popular summer lakeside resort for Kyrgyz and (especially) Kazakhs, and it's a clone of many of the resort towns I had stayed in in Russia and Ukraine on the Black Sea coast the summer before.  We found a cheap room in a small anonymous hotel and settled in for two days of people watching, good food and relaxation.

The water was frigid, but it didn't deter hardy Kyrgyz holidaymakers.  Eric thought it reminded him of Italian beach resorts on the Adriatic in his youth, and there really was a feel of the 1950s or 1960s to it.  The town had once been a massive sanatorium, and the ruins of the old complex still dominate the foreshore, with small bits dolled up as smaller hotels or privatized sanatoria.  We visited a slightly weird museum, the Ruh Ordo, all grandiose national pride and slightly pompous modern architecture, dedicated to Kyrgyzstan's greatest modern writer, Chingiz Aitmatov, to get our cultural fix.  Mostly, though, we sat on the beach or walked, unencumbered by big backpacks, along the sand.  It was fun to spend a couple of days on the beach and a couple of nights reclining in chaikhanas, eating delicious lamb shashlik and sipping green tea and cold beer, but it was a poor substitute for hiking in the transcendent mountains of the Tien Shan.

I really enjoyed cycling through Kyrgyzstan back in 2004, and I really enjoyed our brief hiking journey in 2012.  If I were to recommend one area of the world for some really wonderful off-the-beaten-track adventures, either on foot or on bicycle, Kyrgyzstan would be near the top of the list.  I would love to go back again for more adventures, or even work in Bishkek and explore the country on weekends and holidays.  The fact that an almost unknown minor mountain range like the Terskey Ala Tau contains peaks higher than any in the Alps tells you how much exploring there is to be done in the mountains of this Central Asian Switzerland.

We walked past so many wonderful wildflowers

July 28th found us in a marshrutka, heading back to Bishkek.  Asia Mountains' main hotel was full, but they put us up in their overflow complex, Asia Mountains II.  The Olympics had started in London, and we spent a lot of time watching the early events.  As well, since most of the climbers I had met on Peak Lenin had been employing the services of Asia Mountains, I met a few climbers whom I had last seen moving up the mountain while I was retreating.  Tim, one of the northern English climbers I had met at Camp One, was back and had summitted, one of the very few successful summitteers during that period.  Alex Goldfarb was back as well, and had a harrowing tale to tell.  He and his guide Dasha had pushed towards the summit in horrible winds (go figure!) and had made it to within 100 vertical metres of the summit, but they had been moving slowly and when they finally made the decision to turn around, they ran out of daylight before finding their way back to Camp Three.  They had wandered around lost, with Alex convinced that they would freeze to death out in the open, for hours until Dasha finally found the tent around midnight.  They had made it down, but barely.  I was starting to feel a lot more confident that I had made the right decision in turning back.  Branko and his fellow Slovenians were back as well, having made it to the top of Razdelnaya Peak (the 6148 m bump on the ridge behind Camp Two) but no further.  It certainly seemed as though this summer was a particularly tough one for success on the 7000-metre peaks of Central Asia, the so-called Snow Leopard Peaks, and I had been unfortunate in terms of choosing 2012 as my mountaineering summer.

I also had a run-in with Turkish Airlines while I was in Bishkek.  I wanted to know how much it would cost to change my flight back to Geneva if our expedition were delayed in China (I had no margin of error, being scheduled to depart less than 24 hours after our scheduled return), but Turkish said that if I wanted to change anything, I would have to buy a new ticket.  I was surprised, and not a little annoyed, but there it was.

And then, suddenly, it was July 30th and Eric and I were loading our skis, our mountaineering gear and everything else into a hellaciously overloaded minivan for the 2-day drive to Kashgar.  Eric's ankle and feet had healed, and we were ready for the last leg of my 2012 summer adventure:  Muztagh Ata!