City escapes

The three to four months I spent in Georgia were thoroughly enjoyable, though I didn’t manage to take as much time as I would’ve liked to explore outside of the city. Met with challenges from both a lack of money and trying to create a stable work schedule teaching English online. There wasn’t much freedom remaining for adventures.

I did, however, manage a few escapes from the city… 

My first was a solo trip to the north-east of the country, to a small town called Kvareli. I stayed with a family who host people at their home as a BnB / ‘Georgian experience’. While there I was shown around the edge of the eastern mountains, taken to an old monastery, and had an excellent cooking course which involved some of my favourite Georgian food – exceptionally tasty dumplings and aubergine with a walnut paste.

Around one month into my time in Georgia, my dad and his partner Mel came to visit. It was September, and so they joined me as I continued my resolution for my 30s, to spend each birthday out enjoying myself somewhere in nature. For my 30th I had a cycle tour in Ireland, this time, we spent a few days in the northern mountain town of Stepantsminda. We went on several different hikes whilst there, on my birthday, choosing a lesser known route a short drive from town. We delighted in being the only humans we saw from the moment we left a small roadside village, to the moment we returned.

I took one other trip out of the city to a mountain village very near to Stepantsminda, called Juta. A little more off the tourist route, the entrance to this village was down a long, uneven, road which hugged the side of the hills. This turned out to be the final, shortest and most eventful of my mini adventures.

I had headed to the mountains for a weekend with my now partner, Miki. I wanted to explore a little more of the country and this gave us a chance to get to know each other better while we stretched our legs and opened our lungs in the wonderful fresh, grassy pastures. 

In the descending part of an amazing walk into secluded mountains, a rock scramble resulted in Miki sustaining a broken shoulder. This was followed by a midnight trip in a local car ambulance (down that very uneven road) to the hospital in Stepantsminda, and an early retreat down the mountain the following day to visit a larger hospital in Tbilisi. Though short, it most certainly made for a memorable trip! 

We took ten minutes to stop at the Russia-Georgia friendship monument on our drive back, the second time I had been there. Firstly, with dad and Mel when the place was full of life, and looking down over the cliff edge the monument is built on we could see an array of colourful, drifting parachutes. This time we had the whole place to ourselves.

Though I left so much of it unexplored, Georgia left a strong imprint on me. Perhaps as it was my first time in that part of the world, a new language and culture, different from any I had come across before. A slight mix of European and Asian lifestyles, yet also so completely different from either in many ways be it through the food, the architecture, or the history. I felt a sense of pride in the people of that small country, determinedly strong and independent despite its struggles with neighbouring Russia.

It is certainly a place I hope to visit again one day, to take more time to see the lifestyles and landscapes outside of Tbilisi. The rugged, beautiful vistas, which feel barely touched by humankind, and some of the ancient, unique structures such as the cave network of Vardzia.