“Georgia The Land of Slumps and Slides”

• June 24, 2021
• By Daryl
• 2 Comments

We drove from Tbilisi to the Black Sea for a fifty mile trip, which took 11 hours to finish our drive. We are so lucky they are rebuilding the roads, because if it wasn’t for bad luck we would not have any for this adventure. We started out with huge potholes all over the road and found a much rutted mud road, so bad we had to ride the high side to keep from hitting our frame. With beautiful scenery all around us, all we could see was the road slowly pass under us, to drive safely.

Thousand-year-old bridges are still in use for pedestrians and roaming farm animals. 28 thousand year old bridges span rivers in Georgia. They are hard to find, but when do find them, they are fun destinations.

We get to our Black Sea town of Batumi, and finding an open hotel was an exhausting treasure hunt with very little treasure. In another area of the coast, we drove back and forth, and up one road and back. A policeman was watching us and we just knew he was going to pull us over. Without a common language, the traffic cop put away his ticket pad and sent us down the road. We found a place and got dinner, then a hotel.

Next, we headed to a fairly large mining town but the Old Soviet town did not have any hotels open. We headed out of town, looking for a home stay. With no signs, knocking on doors gives access to rural living styles and dead ends. Maps leads us on false destinations, with darkness soon to follow. One last lead took us to a road from hell, past beautiful pastures and hillsides. Maps disappointed us again, but I caught a glimpse of a winery down a short road. Turning around led us to the end of the rainbow. The gates opened up to an old-world setting with new, clean buildings. I walk past men cleaning subterranean wine vats with lids just above the ground level. Our room turned out to be a two hundred year-old-style home with a huge room, built with thick beams for floors and walls. A tour of the property revealed an organized wine cellar with hundreds of 2018 labeled bottles. The wine tasting room had historic costumes and interesting decor. The grounds had a stream running next to it with a picnic areas and resting areas.

After only one night, we headed out down the road like bouncing tumble weeds, taking pictures and heading to our next town.

We drove to a destination that would eventually lead to Ushguli and the ninth to twelfth century Georgian towers and the highest and longest inhabited community in Europe. After a short distance, the road turned into another nightmare. Luckily the mud was full of mica and rock. The muddiest areas were only navigable because of this mercy, so we continued on. We passed road equipment all along, the mostly, one lane road and thankfully little traffic. After much time, we came to the one landslide we could not pass. We turned around with only twenty miles to go. We felt beat. We headed back down before a huge rain storm dropped gust of wind and rain that surely would make the trip impossible for days.

The drive up to Georgian Sav Towers, from the opposing direction was much better. The narrow concrete road following a torrent manganese grey colored river. We climbed up the canyon with deep green trees. The sav Towers can be seen all along the way.

We wake up to a sunny day, and as we drove, we saw the trees sweep down from the peaks with grass that seems to flow out to the valley floor. There were snow white-caped mountains over above this small village of Mestia. The towers were all over the town and the next stop was a UNESCO site, with even more towers in the area.
The canyon walls are grey mica with land-slides hugging the side of the roads. Room-sized boulders stand like soldiers, never to be moved. Some boulders are in the middle of the road, giving narrow easement on each side. Small meadows of green, have yellow flowers with purple ones, and blue flowers dispersed throughout. This gave the sense that eyes were looking at us through the yellow field. Streams cross the road across a wide path.

Finally, we came to several communities with the tall Sav Towers. What a sight to see, as we walked through the community with the near thousand-year-old structures, and some as old as twelve hundred years. There is some poverty here, but these Georgians are rich with family history. They make do with the wealth of their homes, a few cattle and pigs, that rule the roads and roadsides in search of the abundant green grass that fills their range. At night they come home; cows to be milked and sheltered in their stone built barns, next to the villagers home. The pigs have a strange amount of hair, uncommon to most pigs I’ve ever seen. We are at an elevation of 7020 feet above sea level so it can get very cold here. With a glacier within view of our hotel, it has constantly been cold for some time.

This is the Lamaria Church,  built on the moraines where the Glacier stopped
We took a couple of horses and a guide up another canyon with two young dogs who chased the cows and pigs and played all the way. Streams flanked both sides of the rock road with streams racing down steep mountains, white water foaming as it meets the river; many with snow on the North facing slope. The glacier ahead was almost all the way to our hotel a thousands of years ago. The Lamaria Church, a centuries old church was built on the moraines of the last ice-age glacier that stopped just before the church hill. Moraines are the accumulation of rocks that have been pushed along by the glacier and left as the glacier melts back.