The Rain in Iberia Does Not Fall Mainly in the Plain (Georgian Caucasus)

I’ve been travelling on my own for a little over three weeks now and the main factor determining my travel choices has been rain. I’d originally planned to head up to Kazbegi, due north of Tbilisi and near the border with Russia, for some mountain hiking in early July. But the weather forecast portended steady rain so I went south to Armenia for a week. On my return. Kazbegi was still looking rainy, while the Svaneti region in northwest Georgia looked a little less so. So I headed up to Svaneti for four days of hiking from the 13th to the 16th and then dashed over to Kazbegi in a single long day to catch the one rain-free day on the forecast on the 18th.

Looking at an old map in a museum in Yerevan, I was puzzled to see parts of the Caucasus region marked as “Albania” and “Iberia.” Apparently the ancients weren’t especially original in coming up with place names. The Greeks and Romans named an ancient kingdom focused in present-day Georgia the “Kingdom of Iberia” (maybe worth noting that Georgia is also an exonym for a country its locals call Sakartvelo) while Caucasian Albania mostly overlaps with present-day Azerbaijan.

 

Unlike the proverbial rain in Spain, the rain in this Iberia falls mainly in the mountains. Luckily I managed some great hiking and only got a little wet.

 

Up to Svaneti

 

The upside to being flexible with travel is that I can try to work around the weather. The downside is that I’m somewhat at the mercy of what last-minute booking can arrange for me. It turns out the best spontaneous option for getting to Svaneti (and also the cheapest) is to take an nine-to-ten-hour marshrutka that leaves Tbilisi at 7am. That meant leaving my Airbnb at 6am to make sure I could find the right place and get a seat on this first-come-first-served mode of transportation.

 

While this isn’t a high bar to clear, the roads in Georgia seem better than the ones in Armenia for the most part. For some distance out of Tbilisi, we were on a four-lane dual carriageway that was much smoother than the two-lane highways in Armenia, where the space straddling the dividing line often doubles as a passing lane. Things got bumpier as we passed out of the lowlands and along the winding road into the mountains. I’m learning I can measure the bumpiness of a ride by how many “steps” my phone thinks I’ve taken along the way. By that measure, the drive up to Svaneti was about an 8000-step ride, with the step count accelerating the farther we went.

My "step count" from the journey up to Mestia (plus about 1000 steps before boarding the marshrutka)

The Caucasus region is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world. In addition to Indo-European and Turkic languages, the region is home to three language families found nowhere else in the world as well as a distant offshoot of the Mongolic language family (fun bit of trivia: if you’ve ever noticed that Lenin has slightly Asiatic features, that’s because he was one-quarter Kalmyk, a Mongolic ethnic group based in the north Caucasus). Armenian is an Indo-European language, but it forms its own distinct branch of that language family, as different from all the others as the Romance languages are from the Slavic languages. Georgian belongs to its own language family, the Kartvelian languages, and is totally unrelated to any language outside the Caucasus.

 

But Georgian isn’t the only Kartvelian language. The primary language of Svaneti is Svan, which is related to Georgian, but the two languages are mutually unintelligible. Pretty much everyone in Svaneti speaks Svan and Georgian, and the ones who work in tourism tend to speak English and Russian as well.

 

The Svans not only have their own language but also their own culture. The most visible sign of this are the Svan towers you see dotted about the villages, which historically served both as dwellings and as defensive structures, permitting residents to retreat to a higher ground where they could fend off unwelcome visitors.

Svan tower in the village of Chvabiani

As the practical purpose of the towers suggests, Svaneti has historically been a bit of a prickly place. As recently as a few decades ago, outsiders walking in the countryside ran a real risk of being robbed. The Georgian government built an improved road to the region and persuaded Svans that tourism would be a more lucrative way of getting money from outsiders than banditry and now it’s a trekker’s paradise. A network of trails leads between picturesque villages where enterprising locals have set up guesthouses amidst crumbling older buildings.

 

Arrival in Mestia

 

The most popular hike in Svaneti is a four-day trek (which can be compressed into two or three if you’re in a hurry and don’t mind long days) from Mestia to Ushguli. Mestia is the main town in the region: it has a population of about two thousand. The main strip has restaurants and bars set up to attract tourists. Looming above the low-slung buildings, you can see white mountains beckoning nearby.

 

On my marshrutka up to Mestia, I met Andy and Fraser, a Swiss (Andy) and English (Fraser) pair of ex-pats living in Tbilisi who know each other through a local running club. They were heading up to Mestia in preparation for an ultramarathon Fraser was planning to run the following weekend. I had dinner and a drink with them that evening, where we were joined by two other members of the Tbilisi running confraternity: Anton (Russian) and Irakli (Georgian), the latter of whom was “only” going to run the 50km race rather than Fraser’s 100km.

 

Fraser is maybe ten years older than me, with wavy shoulder-length greying hair, and arms and legs that look like matchsticks. He grew up in Sheffield and learned a little Russian in school as part of a program by the left-wing city council to give promising state school students the requisite language skills for when the good guys won the Cold War. He trained as a lawyer and has since had a globetrotting career, spending time in the Solomon Islands setting up their judicial system and now using Tbilisi as a home base for trips to Nigeria and Iraqi Kurdistan where he trains investigative judges (aka examining magistrates), the type who do pre-trial investigations.

 

Fraser’s plan for this weekend is to wake up at 3am on Saturday for the 5am start time for the race, and then run 100km, with 7000m worth of elevation gain over the length of the course, probably finishing well after dark on Saturday night, before catching a Sunday morning marshrutka back to Tbilisi in order to catch a red-eye flight to Erbil in northern Iraq so that he can start a week of work with the judges starting Monday morning. I’ll bear this in mind the next time I think I have a busy weekend ahead of me.

 

The ultramarathoners are an interesting bunch. Anton and Andy seem to have permanent grins glued to their faces, as if they’ve got the runner’s high and have never come down. Fraser comports himself with a preternatural calm. Only Irakli, who joined us immediately after a long day of running in the mountains, seemed to exhibit a mortal sense of being hallway defeated by the challenge he’d undertaken. Fraser told me about the psychological effect of running ultramarathons. Basically no one can run a race like this by relying on physical fitness alone. It takes a willingness to push oneself well beyond the point where the sane part of the mind has given up yelling “stop!” Fraser talks about hallucinating for much of the latter parts of the race. But the payoff, he says, is a feeling that there’s no challenge you aren’t equal to. I think I saw this in the good cheer of the people I met in their circle (I met a few more on my return to Mestia four days later). If you can push your body to run 100km over mountain trails without stopping, there’s not a lot that can stress you out—including judicial investigations of human rights abuses.

 

The Mesta-to-Ushguli hike

 

The hike I had in mind is popular enough that, logistically speaking, it was pretty straightforward. There are four main villages that make the most natural stopping points on the trek, and those villages, as well as a number of others, have guesthouses that provide showers and beds and meals, including a packed lunch if you want one. Most of them also have rudimentary WiFi so I didn’t even have to vanish from the grid. As a result, I could leave unnecessary items at my guesthouse in Mestia and hike from village to village without packing camping gear or food.

 

The trek itself wasn’t especially demanding—on average, it called for only five hours of hiking per day. I took a different route on my first day at Fraser’s suggestion, climbing up to a ridge above Mestia that he said offered better views than the lower-altitude “official” route. This ridge route is a bit harder, he said, but worth it. As I trudged up to the ridge, I was reminded that “a bit harder” translated out of ultramarathonese into civilian speak means “a lot harder.”

 

Mestia is at about 1500m of elevation and this route took me about 1000m higher than that. Nothing extreme, but I could notice that I was shorter of breath than I might expect to be, even given the uphill slog and the pack on my back. But the ridge walk was indeed quite beautiful, affording me several hours of strolling along relatively flat terrain admiring the wildflowers while gazing down at villages far below and snowy peaks above.

Ridge view with the villages of Askarti and Atsi below

The day was hot and the hike took me about eight hours in total and this was a problem because my Nalgene water bottle only carried a litre of water. I was pretty badly dehydrated as I started descending from the ridge to the village of Zhabeshi for my first night. The last hour or two had me walking along roads (the downside to taking a non-standard route) and I came across a shack by the side of the road where a small group of Georgians were hanging out. I approached them and asked if they had any water. They did, but one of the guys insisted I take a shot of vodka first. He also offered me a chocolate dough ball and they invited me to join them for a bit. It was already late and I was parched and uncomfortable so I regretfully declined the offer but did chug down a bunch of water and then refilled my Nalgene for the final stretch.

 

It turns out I was wise to turn down their hospitality. About an hour after I arrived at my guesthouse in Zhabeshi—run by the vivacious Tengo, dispenser of abundant cheer, maker of overabundant meals—the heavens opened. A look at the forecast before I set out suggested mostly clear skies but with rain later in the day. Weather forecasting in the mountains is an approximate science, though, since mountain topography makes weather very changeable. It had been hot and sunny all day and then, in a very short span of time, the sky clouded over. That evening it started raining, then raining harder, and then raining even harder. I was very glad to have a roof over my head.

Thunderstorm in Zhabeshi

And then the following morning it was sunny and clear and the only evidence that there’d been any rain was mud on the trail. I set out into the hills above Zhabeshi in the middle of a line of cattle.

Setting out from Zhabeshi on a clear morning

Cattle on the trail

I spent most of this day hiking with Penny from Shanghai. Over the first half hour or so, we discovered we were walking at about the same pace so ended up falling into conversation. In addition to speaking pretty good English, she’d learned some Korean and spoke very good Japanese, which was a surprise to some of the Japanese tourists we passed on the trek. She loved the mountain wildflowers and spent more time photographing them than the stunning vistas. Which was not unreasonable, since the wildflowers are indeed beautiful. But so were the vistas.

My guesthouse in Adishi on the second night was bigger and busier than Tengo’s, and I had my dinner at a communal table where I was mostly in conversation with a German guy and a pair of French friends who were hiking together. Jeanne, one of the pair, had been working as a designer but had grown disenchanted with the work and was planning to start training this autumn to be a nurse. We connected enthusiastically over the career-change-to-nursing idea. I’m unlikely to go that route now but I have been diligently keeping up with my anatomy and physiology flashcards throughout this trip.

 

I’ve also been enjoying the multilingualism. There were quite a few French and German people on the trek, and while English is usually the default language, I’ve shifted into their languages on occasion. And a lot of the Georgians will speak Russian but no English so my Russian has also got some use. I also learned the Svan for “thank you” from Tengo (ivasu khari) and managed to elicit surprise and delight from a few hosts by thanking them in their language.

 

The third day of hiking, from Adishi to Iprali, was the most spectacular, and would have been the longest day if I hadn’t taken Fraser’s scenic route on the first day. I caught up with Penny, who’d stayed at a different guesthouse (guidebooks and the like recommend booking ahead, although I’m pretty sure it would have been fine to arrive in any of these villages without a booking) as well as a Korean guy called Sang that she’d met at her guesthouse. We set off down a long valley to the west of Adishi. The south slope of the valley was densely forested while the north slope was much sparser in vegetation—a phenomenon I’ve noticed elsewhere, which is due to the north slope retaining less moisture on account of its greater exposure to the sun.

Along the valley hike, we were passed by a number of men with horses. There’s a river crossing about 6km west of Adishi, and especially at this time of year—early enough in the summer that a lot of snowmelt is running off the mountains—it would take a brave person to try to ford it unaided. The men with horses generally work at the guesthouses, so once they’ve breakfasted their guests and sent them on their way, they saddle the horses and overtake the hikers on the way to the ford so that they can ferry us across for a fee. The river is fairly narrow but it would have gone over waist deep so I didn’t begrudge the somewhat steep fee. I got my phone out to take a picture after I mounted the horse but quickly realized that trying to take photos while riding a horse and carrying a pack on my back was a pretty good recipe for losing my phone to the river. So you’ll have to be content with seeing Sang and Penny crossing instead.

 

Sang (left) and Penny (middle) crossing the river

On the far side of the river, we ascended a trail that passed between shoulder-height wildflowers, as the snowy peak of Lakutsa-Laartkol came into view. We could hear rumbles of avalanches coming from the mountain and could see piles of snow falling through a rocky outcrop, like a waterfall of ice.

View of Lakutsa-Laartkol from the meadow

 

Sang (left), me (middle), Penny (right)

From there, we hiked up to the Chkhunderi Pass, from which it was possible to take a short detour to a hilltop that was the highest point of the hike, at 2811m. Thinking back, I realized that this was the highest I’d been since my trek in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia twelve years earlier. Although (spoiler alert) I topped it a few days later and (knock on wood) hope to go even higher in August. From the hilltop, we would have had an even better view of Lakutsa-Laartkol, its glacier, and the surrounding mountains, but clouds had started to obscure them. But we were also greeted by ground-hugging rhododendrons. I find mountain wildflowers to be (literally) small miracles. They spend about seven or eight months of the year covered in snow and then blossom vigorously in the short growing season.

The view from 2811m

Coming down from the pass, we snaked along another valley wall as the skies gradually clouded over and the rain started. We took temporary shelter in a trailside café/restaurant/shack near the village of Khalde, where I separated from Penny and Sang, who were planning to hire a car and skip ahead since both of them had limited time, having travelled all the way from East Asia for a week’s holiday. The rain abated and I plodded along to the village of Vichnashi in the post-rain humidity and was very glad of the shower I had at the end of the day. My hosts in Vichnashi had piglets who were at least as curious about me as I was about them.

At my guesthouse in Vichnashi, I met the lovely Yusef and Katie, an English couple who’d been travelling around Asia for nine months and had three months left on their year-long journey together before returning to England. For two people who’d been in such close quarters for so long in often trying circumstances, they were impressively cheerful and fond of one another. I have high hopes for their future together.

 

The last day of hiking was the easiest—less than four hours from Vichnashi to Ushguli. There was some nice walking halfway up a valley wall for the first chunk but it ended on a somewhat unlovely stretch of road, which was at least a way of easing out of the beauty of the hike.

 

Ushguli sits at 2100m and is apparently one of, if not the, highest continuously inhabited settlements in Europe. This surprised me a little. Granted, 2100m isn’t an ideal altitude for whale watching, but it’s not exactly Himalayan either. There are a few points of interest in Ushguli but I didn’t linger because I wanted to get back to Mestia and take care of a few things before setting out the following morning. Shared taxis ply the route from Ushguli back to Mestia in about half an hour, which sort of makes a mockery of the roughly twenty-two hours I’d spent walking in the other direction. But the route I took made for better views.

A view of Ushguli, which has a claim to being the highest continuously inhabited settlement in Europe

Mestia to Kazbegi

 

Finally it was time to travel to Kazbegi, a mountain town due north of Tbilisi, which is the most accessible of the three main hiking regions in the north of Georgia. (The town’s official name is Stepantsminda—Kazbegi was a Soviet-era name that officially reverted to its original name in 2006—but most people still call it Kazbegi.) A rainy forecast had postponed the visit for two weeks but, checking the forecast in Mestia, I saw there was exactly one clear day in Kazbegi on Friday. I got back to Mestia on Wednesday. So if I could get from Mestia to Kazbegi on Thursday, I could take advantage of the good weather.

 

Easier said than done. There’s no more direct route than going via Tbilisi. The marshrutka from Mestia to Tbilisi left at 8am on Thursday morning but some sort of jam-up on the highway into Tbilisi meant we didn’t arrive until after 6pm. I made my way to the central bus terminal—really a maze of different parking lots and market stalls with no clear signage—and I found myself wandering in circles trying to find the marshrutka up to Kazbegi.

 

I’d read that they left every hour on the hour until 7pm. I’d just missed the 6pm departure and, asking around, I was twice told that the last marshrutka had already left and was twice directed to a guy with an SUV who said he would take me once he’d found enough people to fill the vehicle. It was pretty clear no other people were appearing, so after a bit of futile hunting around, I asked him how much he’d charge to take me on my own. How much are you willing to pay, he asked. I’d read that hiring a private car up to Kazbegi would cost in the range of $50 to $80 USD, so, for negotiating purposes, I started by offering the equivalent of $36. He accepted quickly and happily, which makes me wonder how much lower I could have gone. I think he was driving back to Kazbegi that evening regardless, so I was basically giving him $36 for a trip he was going to take anyway. For my part, a private taxi for a three-hour drive at a cost of $36 seemed very reasonable, even by Georgian standards.

 

The driver didn’t speak English but he did speak Russian so we had halting conversation in Russian on the drive up. The trouble I have with Russian and Turkish is that I have a very limited vocabulary and my interlocutors don’t know which words I know and which I don’t. When I show some basic competence in their language, they seem to assume I can understand twice as much as I can say, when in fact it’s more like half. I probably do this to non-native speakers of English all the time.

 

But the two of us hit on a point of connection early on in the drive when I asked him his name. David, he said. He does a lot of driving for tour groups and splits his time between Tbilisi and Kazbegi, as well as spending some time in Vladikavkaz on the Russian side of the border. Kazbegi is close to the Russian border and I noticed a large number of Russian tourists when I was there.

 

David offered to make stops for me along the way but it was late enough already that I mostly just wanted to get to Kazbegi. We did make one pit stop, though, so I could grab a snack and he could have a smoke. We’d been driving along the side of a large reservoir (formed by a hydroelectric dam) as the evening sun turned the landscape to gold. David pulled in at the Ananuri fortress at the north end of the reservoir. Because I hadn’t been planning to visit this part of Georgia, I was totally unprepared for its beauty. Especially in the evening light after the daytime tour groups had all packed it in.

Ananuri fortress overlooking Zhinvali reservoir

The shadows deepened as we climbed up into the mountains and arrived in Kazbegi shortly after 10pm. It’s always a bit strange arriving in an unfamiliar place at night. I checked myself into my room went to bed and woke up the next morning wondering where I’d arrived. I drew the curtains and stepped out onto the balcony to the stunning sight of Mount Kazbek rising on the opposite side of the valley. That was a great start to a great day.

The view from my Airbnb balcony in Kazbegi

The room that I’d booked through Airbnb was in a house with five or six separate rooms that had been converted into rental suites with a shared kitchen and living room. I came down that morning to find three Russians getting things ready for their journey back home. Sergei, who was maybe ten years older than me, was from Kamchatka in Russia’s far east but now lived in Krasnodar near the Black Sea. He was deeply earnest and treated me with a courtesy that made it feel like ours was a meeting of great moment (and who am I to say it wasn’t?). This might have been his first trip outside of Russia and he spoke about having visited Armenia and Georgia and fearing that it would be dangerous and being relieved that people were good. When he learned I’d been to Russia, he asked if I’d been afraid and he was relieved and pleased to hear that the people I’d met on the Trans-Siberian railroad were generally very sympathetic. There was a solemn handshake and expression of great esteem when we parted.

 

Hike to the Gergeti Glacier

 

The limited window afforded by the weather forecast was only one factor in my whistlestop visit to Kazbegi—for reasons I’ll outline in the next blog post, I’d resolved to leave Georgia on the 22nd, which didn’t give me a lot of time. Basically time for one day hike. And man was it worth it.

 

Kazbek, the mountain I saw from my balcony that morning, is a dormant volcano and, at 5054m, the third highest mountain in Georgia. Getting to the summit requires several days and mountaineering chops but civilians like me can hike as far as the Gergeti glacier in a single day without special skills or equipment.

 

The hike begins at Gergeti Trinity Church, an iconic hilltop church overlooking Kazbegi that shows up in a lot of Georgia travel brochures. Viewed from Kazbegi, it has Mount Kazbek as its backdrop. From the trail heading up toward the mountain, it cuts a lonely figure against the mountains rising up on the opposite side of the valley.

Gergeti Trinity Church, which overlooks Kazbegi

The forecast had been accurate and I had clear skies as I set out. The one exception was the summit of Mount Kazbek itself. Mountaintops have an unfortunate habit of attracting clouds and I had to make do with occasional glimpses of mountain through the cloud as I began my ascent.

A view of all but the summit of Mount Kazbek and a neighbouring mountain on the trail up

The hike was arduous without being unpleasantly so—and because this was a day hike, I’d bought an extra 2L bottle of water in addition to the litre in my Nalgene—but it wasn’t just a walk in the park. I started out around 2100m above sea level and reached the glacier at 3336m (told you I’d top the 2811m from the Svaneti hike). The views on the way up were stunning, both looking forward to the looming mountain and looking backward at the receding church and the mountains on the opposite valley. By about 3000m, I felt a little dizzy and short of breath, but nothing too concerning.

 

Most of the hike went up through lush grasslands with a deep canyon to one side. Eventually the vegetation gave way and I was clambering amongst dirt and rocks and streams of brown water running off from the glacier. The weather got windier and chillier as I ascended and I was glad to have an extra layer.

The canyon alongside the trail

Gushing brown waterfall on the approach to the glacier

When I reached the glacier, groups of grim-faced mountaineers with heavy packs were putting on crampons and getting ready for the trudge up the ice. There was no way I was following them up the icy slope in my hiking shoes, so I had to admire their intrepidity (and the intrepidity of a dog that accompanied them) while accepting that this was my turnaround point.

Mountaineers beginning the ascent up the glacier toward Mount Kazbek

I ate my lunch at the foot of the glacier and marvelled at what I was standing on: a massive sheet of ice with rivulets of meltwater cutting crevices through it. The clouds obligingly cleared so that I could also get some excellent views of Mount Kazbek. Another trekker offered to take my picture at the foot of the glacier if I’d take his.

Me at 3336m, as high as a boy without crampons can go

I could have lingered longer but—you’ll be surprised to hear—it starts to get a little chilly when you’re standing around at 3336m and surrounded by ice. So reluctantly I made my way down.

 

It was one of those wonderful days of hiking that I didn’t want to end. The physical challenge had been invigorating without being exhausting, I had enough food and water and time that there was no rush, I was encumbered only by a day pack, and it was just so flabbergastingly beautiful. Some enterprising souls had built a café partway up so I decided to chill out there with a cup of tea for a bit so as not to come down too soon. I could have also used their outhouse if I’d needed to.

Cup of tea with a view of Mount Kazbek

Best outhouse view ever

But eventually the day had to end and so I made my way back down the mountain as the afternoon sun gave a golden hue to the hillsides. I slept soundly that night and woke the next morning to eat breakfast and plan next steps from my balcony.