MOUNTAINS
Mt Ushba, from the approach to the Kuruldi Lakes, above the scenic town of Mestia.
By the time every single seat had fallen off the bus, I knew we were nearing the airport. The final one had hit the floor quite suddenly and with a deadening clunk, joining its partners at our feet and pressed up against a slender and rusted wheel arch. Looking closer I could see rushing tarmac through a penny-sized hole in the metalwork. Climbing partner Maciej and I – the only passengers by this stage – sat heavier on our own irregularly sprung cushions and continued to hold them in place through the strength of our own exhausted gravity. The northern horizon, as ever, flowed by languidly – a distant mountain wall lit either by the lilacs and oranges of dusk and dawn, or the crystal blue skies or boiling storm heads of the midday heat. Pulling up outside the single air terminal in lowland city of
Kutaisi, the driver leapt out, disgorged our 50kg of luggage, gripped our hands in turn in a strangely formal kind of ritual, looked as though he was going to hug us, thought better of it, then leapt back into the bus and floored the accelerator, the roadside coat hanger he’d used to hold the exhaust in place now barely keeping it from scraping the ground. And so ended our two weeks in Georgia. That was the good bus: privately run and twice as expensive
as the national network of ‘marshrutkas’, such as the one we’d considered abandoning halfway through our 90mph+-on- bald-tyres-while-overtaking-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road- for-four-hours-on-gorge-side-gravel-roads-and-we’re-certain- the-driver-is-drunk journey up to the beautiful town of Mestia. But, hey ho. This is the Caucasus and things are different here. The electricity and internet and plumbing and vehicles and buildings might not work quite as well as you’d reasonably expect them to, but there are more four and five thousand metre mountains than you could reasonably climb in a lifetime of visits and they’re almost entirely undeveloped, unspoiled and stunningly situated. We’d come with the intention of climbing Mt Kazbek (5,033m) and spending a week hiking around the Svaneti region, home to the soaring double-summited peak of Ushba (4,710m): the Matterhorn of the Caucasus. We’d mostly succeeded, but with poor acclimatisation and unforgiving weather keeping us off the summit of the former. All that was left was to negotiate the weird logistical Tango (or should that be Khevsuruli - the ‘dance with the swords’) involved in getting home. There being no direct flights to any Georgian city from the UK, you’re looking at minimum of seven hours of traveling
56 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
THERE ARE MORE FOUR AND FIVE THOUSAND METRE MOUNTAINS THAN YOU COULD REASONABLY CLIMB IN A LIFETIME OF VISITS.
– possibly up to 24 hours if you’re particularly masochistic. Our own trip involved sleeping in some Polish Silesian woodland and beneath the slanting windows of Kutaisi airport (cans of Georgian lager in hand – stylish) and stopping for a feast of local meats at Maciej’s Mum and Dad’s flat in the town of Auschwitz. But you’ll come up with your own way, I’m sure. That’s assuming that you want to visit Georgia, and it’s my job to convince you that you do. Luckily I’ve got a lot of ammunition to work with here. Think of the Caucasus, that strip of big mountains that sits just south of the Russian Federation and between the Black and Caspian Seas, and there might not be much that comes to mind. If anything surfaces, it’ll probably be an image of Elbrus (5,642m): that weather- beaten, dual-domed volcano. What’s strange, though, is that Elbrus is actually quite distinct from the Greater Caucasian range: it sits 20km separate from the main wall. And that wall is not just littered with the occasional big, volcanic peak, but also with hundreds of the kinds of spires and ridges that delight both the climber and the shutter release finger. You won’t find anything like the kind of infrastructure you might be used to in the alpine nations of France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, but you won’t find the crowds either. Today, most of the mountain visitors to the area are Polish. Having a shared history of miserable oppression under the governance of the USSR, there’s a cultural bond between the two countries that simply doesn’t exist in the UK. I’m sure that the direct flights and favourable exchange rates help too, of course. The next largest group, after the Polish and Georgians, is likely the Russians. In fact, in two weeks we met only a small handful of native English-speakers, consisting of a small party of London- based climbers on Kazbek, and a travel-writing American couple keen to apologise to
everyone they met for Donald Trump. Which is fair enough. It would be reasonable to describe this as an ‘alternative’ destination for UK mountaineers, despite the first recorded ascent of Kazbek being made by an 1868 British/French team and both England and Georgia sharing not only an almost identical flag but also a veneration of the same Palestine-born, Greek-speaking, Roman Christian martyred saint (history’s weird, isn’t it?). You’ll find a little more practical detail on the two main mountaineering regions in the columns to the side of this article, but to give you the clearest impression here’s a more poetic flavour of both of them. Kazbek is the more brutal. It sits a 150km and a 2.5hr drive
north of sprawling Tbilisi on the road to Russia via the Georgian Military Highway. The route winds gradually upward, past the expansive bluey-green waters of the Zhinvali reservoir, the feudal Ananuri fortress, the oddly ghost-town-like Gudauri ski resort and the queer, crumbling, rainbow-coloured Soviet-era Russia-Georgia Friendship Monument – perched, somewhat meaningfully, on the edge of a sheer cliff-edge amongst the vast green and rainswept foothills of the Caucasus. You’re passing by the breakaway, and now politically isolated,
region of South Ossetia here, and it’s not too far – on the northern side of the Caucasian mountain wall – to Chechnya, either. The human landscape here is far from the most stable.
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