Mestia, Georgia July 2011

July flew by without any incident until the end when my colleague and I spent a long weekend in Mestia, Georgia. We flew on one a propeller plane from Tbilisi through the mountains arriving on a small landing strip 1400 meters high at the base of the high Caucasus Mountains in the Svaneti region of Georgia.

The flight was awesome. The mountains in Georgia have this way of beginning and ending abruptly. At one moment you are flying at 3000 meters and the ground is far below you and the next you are a few hundred meters from the ground looking out the window at 4000 meter snow capped peaks.

Upon arriving we met a colleague from the TLG Program teaching police officers English in Mestia. When we arrived at the station I ran into Amirani who was my student in Tbilisi when he was a trainee at the police academy. Now he is a working police officer in Mestia about a four hour drive from his home in Zugdidi, in the Samegrelo region of Georgia which is home to the Migrelian people, which is not an ethnic group perse, but they do have a different language and a different way of preparing food which is by far superior to the traditional Georgian food you get everywhere else. It is kind of like a New Yorker and a Texan. They are both American, but speak differently and certainly have different tastes in food.

Anyway, it was surprising to randomly meet a former student an hour flight into the mountains just standing outside the police station after his English lessons. His English was still good which made me proud. Our colleague took us to her host family's house where we would be staying for the next three nights. It was difficult to really get a handle on who was who but it went something like this, one mother, four daughters, a son and wife, two or three babies not sure, three children, roaming cousins in groups of three and five. At any one time there was between twelve and sixteen people staying at the house.

The mother cooked everything. She made fifty loaves of bread a week for the family and military camp she sold bread to, milked the cow in the morning to produce cheese in the afternoon, buy some things that she couldn't get from her garden and prepared all this all day everyday we were there for everyone who was there. She lived in the kitchen and her children lived in the kitchen and the babies lived in the mother's arms, and the activity never ended as long as you were in the kitchen.

The rest of the house was a two-story affair with the equivalent of six large rooms that was rather quiet most of the time. It originally started as a one room affair and over a decade or so another room was added and another and another until there were about six in total. I think in a few years there will be a few more rooms as the family grows and this place eventually makes more money from functioning as a guest house than as a baker for the military camp across the way.

Upon arriving at the house you can't help but notice the view. Sitting in a valley your view is spectacular from both direction. Behind you is Ushpa one of the highest peaks in the mountain range that runs along the whole border between Georgia and Russia and Azerbaijan and Russia. It kind of towers over Mestia like a judge towers over the lawyers and other players in a court drama. In front of the house is a million dollar view, literally, the v-shape of the valley is eighty percent filled with snow covered peaks and faces some of the largest mountains in the range.

What would be a million dollar view in Colorado or Switzerland is commonplace in this small town and surrounding villages. It is a place that doesn't know from the tourist trap and overpriced cost of things that it is going to become. It is a place where people milk cows for cheese and bake bread in ovens fired by wood and debris. A place without landfills because everything is consumed or burned for fuel. A place that just broke ground for a hotel because there is only one in town and it is fully booked so why not. A place that only has one flight a day with seventeen passengers and a road going in and out that no one wants to take because it is so bumpy and uncomfortable. A river runs through the middle of the town and just like everywhere else in Georgia you are always amazed at just how much water this country has. It seems never ending.

On the second day of one of the hottest days of the year we went to the "lake" which was little more than two small pools of water concentrating into what was effectively a very large puddle from run off from the little stream of water sliding down from a mountain. To get there you walk through of concrete factory as if it is no big deal to be surrounded by moving cranes and heavy stone crushing equipment and then walk across a small creek of icy cold mountain water. As we were walking through the concrete factory I couldn't help but think about how many laws in America this was breaking.

The next day we went to Ushguli which is the highest inhabited village in Europe. Well not really, but that is how it is advertised and it is sometimes OK to let people think what they want. Georgians strongly believe it is so let's not tell them about the other six places in Europe with higher inhabited places. Anyway, Ushguli is high, some 2100 meters above sea level and at the base of some big ass mountain, Shkhara Mountain to be exact. A six hour hike from Ushguli is a glacier that you can see from a distance in the village.

The old part of the village is sparsely inhabited and basically a cow shit covered ancient place infested with flies and roaming cows who piss and shit at there own accord all over the place. The museum is slightly interesting if you are into old bibles that you can't take pictures and an old bracelet or pot. They coolest thing was the view of course. You can't help but wonder what it was like in the 12th century when some nomads said, "This looks like a nice place to set up camp and start a village. Let's go to the river and collect stones for a four story tower that we will live in year round." Ushguli would not have been an easy sell for anyone especially in the winter time where the village is effectively shut off from the rest of the world due to heavy snows and freezing temperatures.

By the third day the fresh food started to become weary to me as it was essentially the same thing over and over again with a little twist here and there, but then again, city life isn't that much different. The flight home was pretty cool but not as exciting as going into the mountains. If was one of those trips where you go back in time briefly and leave wondering what it would be like to live off the land in a place isolated from the rest of the world in many ways but still functional to be comfortable enough. I thought that it would be a great place to buy land as in twenty years people will be paying stupid amounts of money for these kinds of views and the skiing that goes along with it.