Trampers in Sakartvelo (Georgia). Part 2: police cars, barns and hay trucks in the wilderness of Svaneti
Mestia is a beautiful mountain town, but it is currently under complete reconstruction. In the middle of the huge mess, one can find a brand new tourism office, street names (which the inhabitants seem to not even know) and ATM's. For the rest, its dust and construction trucks. One of the man who supervises the construction said that everything would be done within a week, in the georgian conception of time I guess...
The environment is wild, it is amazing to see what mountains are like without skiing resorts and hiking paths. It is however, too easy to get lost, and we did. Although we had a beautiful map given by the tourism office, our glacier hike led us deep into the bushes, where we met a group of people picking berries. Elmira, one of the svan women there, spoke english and amazed me with joy and positive attitude.
We never saw the glacier, but instead found the road and rode back on a hay truck.
The next day we decided to leave early for Ushguli, one of the highest human settlements in Europe (it is actually right at the geographic end of Europe, if one considers it being the Main Caucasus range). We had some more funky rides at the bac of trucks and police cars.
I was stunned by the beauty of Ushguli, its unpaved streets filled with tiny piglets and goats, villager kids riding on horses, women wearing traditional clothes, the many medieval protective towers. It really seemed like a piece of heaven at the end of the world (which it was almost litteraly seeing how hard it was to reach, and the fact that there was no true road connecting to the rest of the country until about 1935). We met the policemen who had given us the last ride to the village in the only caffe of Ushguli, and after sharing some food and drinks with us they offered to take us to the glacier with their jeep. It was a crazy ride, which was also one of the best georgian lesson that I got. One of the policemen decided that I should stay with him in Georgia, but well, I thought a few hours spent together might be enough ;) Then, we decided to give up all of our comfort privileges and to look for a free place to sleep, which, not having enough warm sleeping bags for 3 people, had to be a comfortable and well insulated barn. We spotted a good one, and managed to explain with feet and hands to the owners that we wanted to sleep in it. They accepted, and it was the beginning of the real rough part of our trip. We were introduced to the family as we asked them to heat our disgusting food on their stove (you had to see the look on their faces as they saw that we were going to eat pasta cooked with canned olives and tomato sauce...). With my georgian phrase book I managed to make some sort of conversation, and they all seemed to be amused by the weird tourists that were so excited to sleep in their barn.