Bananas Don't Travel Well

shrine and Sameba cathedralOur Azeri visas and train tickets to Baku finally in hand, we made our escape from the sticky heat of Tbilisi and headed for the mountains. We took a marshrutka to Kazbegi, a village about 20km from the Russian frontier in the high Caucasus range. The road up is somewhat ironically called the "Georgian Military Highway," having been built by the Russians to facilitate their conquest of the Georgians. The road continues into Russian Chechnya but the border has been closed for several years so it is really a one-way track, with Kazbegi the last major town.

Aside from a run-down Soviet monstrosity, there are no hotels in Kazbegi, so most people end up in homestays. We headed for Bela's place in the adjacent village of Gergeti, which came highly recommended, where for about $9 per night you get a bed and huge meals made fresh from Bela's garden and animals. Bela doesn’t speak any English (and we don’t speak Georgian or more than a few words of Russian) but she and her husband were very friendly and welcoming. Also staying with Bela were Tomasz and Peter from Poland and Nicolas from France. We stayed three nights.

Gergeti villageThe main attraction in Kazbegi is hiking in the spectacular Caucasus mountains. The village is in a valley ringed with grassy sloped mountains that dwarf everything—we haven’t seen mountains with such a sense of scale since Nepal. Indeed, the Caucasus are higher than the Alps, yet have seen virtually no development for tourism. The town was really interesting too. Although most houses have electricity and satellite TV (Brazilian soap operas seem to be a real hit), the houses are traditional stone and mud constructions and the people still seem to be mostly living off the land. Virtually all the labour seems to be manual: we saw people up on the slopes harvesting hay with scythes. Every house has some combination of chickens, cows, goats, sheep and pigs; the herd animals go out to pasture in the hills each day. Bela has four cows and some chickens, and she makes her own butter, clotted cream, and cheese.

While most of the mountains surrounding Kazbegi are green in summer, in clear weather you can see one of the higher, glacier-tipped peaks—Mount Kazbeg—from the village. An hour’s steep hike up the nearest hill takes you to past one of the series of ancient watchtowers that line the valley, to a more impressive view of Kazbeg and the surrounding peaks, as well as Kazbegi’s other major attraction, Sameba cathedral.

Sameba on SundayThe quintessential symbol of Georgia, the church itself is quite small, but its proportions and its setting, perched on a green hill with Mount Kazbeg as a backdrop, are lovely. Georgian Orthodox churches are very different from most Western churches. The ceilings are very tall in proportion to their compact floorspace and there are no pews. Sameba had lovely old frescos on the walls, blackened with smoke from candles and incense. On our first full day in Kazbegi, we hiked up the church with Tomasz, Peter and Nicolas. For Chris and I, this little "pilgrimmage" had sentimental meaning. We had just heard two days prior the unexpected and sad news that a friend and colleague had passed away. It seemed appropriate to light a candle for him at Sameba.

mount KazbegIt threatened to rain all day, and Mount Kazbeg was hidden behing the clouds. But the second day the sky cleared and we made another foray up the hill with Nicolas, the Poles having already returned to Tbilisi. We intended to hike up to a spot with a supposed panoramic view of the higher peaks, but we were feeling lazy and out of shape and gave up a few hundred meters beyond the church to sit in the grass, eat bread and chocolate, and enjoy the view for a while before heading down to a delicious supper.