Monday, April 24, 2017

You look like a fundamentalist

In the morning of our second day in Iran, we came across another challenge - to recognize what cars were actually cabs. Most of them are unmarked. There is no such rule as "don't try to hitchhike yellow cars with a big TAXI sign". It is more like "and old grey or white Peugeot or Saipa with just one guy inside is probably a taxi, but maybe not". (And it is further complicated by the fact that most cars in Iran in general are grey or white Peugeots or Saipas). 


If they knew they would kill me

Cars were stopping for us every two minutes - but most of them were cabs. Fortunately for us, the magical sign translated by Elham did the job to identify them. Unfortunately, it always took several minutes of confused stares and a lot of Farsi, and was preventing us from trying to hitch other cars.

Luckily, we rather quickly stopped somebody who was going up to Tabriz.

And he was speaking Farsi. I had already got used to understand every 10th or at least 20th word in Turkish, and not understanding at all was strangely annoying me. Vojta was better prepared. Before the trip, I had told him - as a joke at first - to learn Farsi because he would have to be the one to do the talking here. And he really did start learning. (It had surprised me quite a lot since on the last trip, he had just been nagging he was not talented enough for languages.)

So Vojta sometimes understood (or imagined) what the driver was saying, and answered something. More difficult part was to understand the driver's reply. When Vojta didn't know, I took out a phrasebook, also translated by Elham, and said something like "maezdjomhureeczechhastim" or "mamosaferhastim" and hoped it was what the driver wanted to know.


Mountains on the way to Tabriz

We landed around noon in the middle of Tabriz, still without any Iranian money. Our next big quest was to exchange some and to buy a data SIM card. It was not as easy as it might seem because I was totally illiterate and Vojta couldn't understand signs he managed to read because they were missing vowels. So we decided to just walk along the streets until we would bump into an exchange office.

Before that, we wanted to eat our bread in a park. We didn't have time to unpack food, though, because some workers invited us for tea. One of them spoke Turkish. I suddenly felt like at home again.

Other people kept showing up and saying hi. Eventually an elderly guy addressed us in a good English, shook hands with Vojta and apologized that he couldn't shake hands with me. We started talking about traveling and about Iran and he quite openly told us he was not happy with the current situation. He then offered us to show us around and to find all the things we needed with us.

I don't know what his plans originally had been but he didn't mind changing them for us even though we insisted we could find everything ourselves. And he didn't mind being very open even though he knew us just for half an hour.



First tea in Iran

We were staring at everything we saw since it was so new for us. When we were passing a mosque, Vojta asked if we were allowed to enter mosques in Iran.

"I don't know, I haven't been in a mosque for a long time," our new friend (let's call him Mohsen) answered.
"So you pray somewhere else?" I asked.
"I don't pray. I don't like all this. I'm an atheist."
"I see. Do you have any troubles because of that? I mean with cops and all..."
"They don't know. I just pretend I'm religious. Otherwise they would kill me."


Mohsen then helped us with all the things we needed, gave us some advice about hitchhiking (one of the most interesting things was to avoid old cars and just try hitching the new ones) and wished us good luck. We bought a Farsi-English dictionary (I feel like a Bedřich Hrozný every time I'm trying to read a word with it), 2 kilos of tangerines instead of 2 pieces (having money added another difficulty to our lives since figuring out the currency is an awful maths exercise) and walked out of the city to sleep in a park.


Hijab issues
In the morning, we continued hitchhiking to a city where our acquaintance was waiting for us (let's call him Amir). We were in the middle of the Tabriz bypass and it seemed to be the worst spot in the world. It was not because people would ignore us, though.

Cars kept stopping for us every minute, sometimes two or even more at once. Most of them were cabs or just were going back to Tabriz. It always took us ages to explain we really didn't want a taxi, we didn't want to go to the bus terminal, to the train station nor to a police station (no, really no, thank you very much). Vojta - who had to do most of the talking - began losing his temper. Sometimes neither the magical paper from Elham would help. (It said something like "we do not use buses, taxis or any paid transport" so I felt particularly hopeless when a person would finish reading and would immediately ask us "bus terminal"?) Also totally packed cars or motorbikes would stop to ask how we were, and a very insistent pedestrian was explaining to us for ten minutes that we really needed to go by bus.

When a driver finally agreed to take us out of the city, Vojta looked exhausted. We found out, though, that we had only been waiting for 40 minutes or so. Compared to European waiting times, it still was a paradise.

We quite easily made a distance we would normally dream about in Europe and we reached our friend's city one day earlier than expected. Our last truck driver even called Amir to agree where he should leave us. So we were waiting for Amir and I was pondering whether I could dare shaking hands with him. So far, shaking hands with the other sex had been something like a secret sign for telling apart religious people from the not-so-religious or more rebellious ones.

My thought were interrupted by Amir who jumped out of the car and gave us both a big hug. (So much for my handshaking question.) He drove us home and was making fun of us all the time in his perfect English. When we entered his place, he told me I could take off my scarf. ("We are not that much religious here.")

"Are you sure?" I asked with doubts. I was mentally prepared to wear the thing for the whole month.
"Absolutely. My mom doesn't wear one in here either."
I started unpinning my elaborate hijab made like the ones Turkish people wear.
"Why do you look so serious? You look like a fundamentalist!" Amir commented it.
"Because I have to".
"Oh my God, what's this?" he exclaimed when he noticed my "bone" cap under the scarf.
"I need it because otherwise the scarf would fall."
"So what."
"I would have to pay a fine and all."
"No, you wouldn't. You have it all wrong. I will teach you how to wear it."
He took my scarf, put it on my head without tying it whatsoever, and threw one end over my shoulder.
"That's it."
"What if it falls?"
"You just put it back on."


It seemed that most of my doubts were needless. So far, today's Iran seemed way different from the Iran we knew from novels set in the years just after the revolution.

First steps in Iran

Every time I hitchhike to a new country, I am a bit afraid. How is it going to work? Is it going to be safe? Are we going to have troubles with cops?

Iran, though, was something like a black hole.

I had no idea what to expect. The only thing I knew was that it was going to be very different from any other countries I knew. Tarof, the fake hospitality one is supposed to refuse, and language written without vowels was just the beginning. On the internet I had found stories about incredibly hospitable people, stories about perverts and stories about misunderstandings since hitchhiking was a largely unknown concept. Also, it seemed that foreigners were officially only allowed to stay in hotels, which we were not going to do because it would make our journey meaningless.


 

And then there was the patriarchal system in the country. Most of the nice stories about Iran had been written by guys. What if it is much less cool for girls? I was wondering whether I could get into troubles for talking to men - and how much they would be willing to talk with me. I was sure that if I couldn't speak with anybody who happens to be a guy, and if Vojta had to do all the talking, It would be very annoying.

Black hole


When we were approaching the border, I was full of worries. Vojta, though, was only focused on the stories about hospitable people and could not wait to be in Iran.

In Kars, the cold Turkish city, it was already spring (it means that it was warmer than -10°C at night). On a Turkish Facebook page for travellers, we found Deniz, a guy who was willing to lend us his flat in the last large city before the border. He had to be at work, didn't speak English and communicated with us through Google Translate, but invited us anyway. (Turkish hospitality surprised me again.) So when we met him, I had the most complex conversation in Turkish in my life.

When Deniz left for work, I learned how to pin my headscarf to the small cap Turkish muslims wear underneath. (It's called "bone" and buying it with a dictionary had been quite a challenge.) Even though I knew Iranian girls usually wore it very symbolically, I made sure to cover all my hair. I thought that the fewer hair I would show, the fewer cops and perverts I would attract.



I also wrote a general message - that we were going to Iran - on a hosting website. I had done the same in Turkey and in Georgia - in Turkey a couple of people had invited us to visit them and one of them really had been available when we accepted. In Georgia nobody had reacted.

I couldn't be more surprised this time. Within 2 hours, I received several invitations (very detailed and written in a very good English) from people all around the country.

The black hole wasn't that much black anymore.


Cabs and cookies


The next day, I had horrible cold, so I started travelling towards the Dogubayazit-Bazargan border crossing with a running nose. We easily hitched a ride to Dogubayazit and then we got stuck. Just a pedestrian - probably Iranian - was trying to persuade us he would pay for our taxi. After an hour or so, a minibus appeared (with the Iranian guy inside) and the driver convinced us to hop in for free ("We are Kurds!", he added).

We passed a long line of waiting trucks and the bus stopped at a crowded gate with armed soldiers. The place didn't look very friendly. I put my scarf on my head while a soldier with a gun was telling us something, and we passed through the gate. The soldiers made us open our bags and show them the apples and bread on the top.

At the passport control, the official asked us where we were from, stamped our passports, gave us a chocolate cookie and let us in Iran. So far so good.

In front of the exit, another official with papers said something to me, and as soon as he saw Vojta five steps behind me he started totally ignoring me and addressed him instead. I wasn't sure whether I should be angry, or happy that I didn't have to deal with more officials.

We left the customs and I remembered some of the tough experiences of hitchhikers I had heard of. A guy had been forced to take a taxi at the border and then another taxi driver had stolen his backpack. My cousin and his friend had been hitchhiking in front of some border guards at gunpoint...

We made our way through parked cabs and then walked to the town on the Iranian side.

That was it.

No taxi drivers shouting at us and no cops telling us we couldn't walk or hitchhike in there.


We are very happy at this intersection


In the border town of Bazargan (it sounds like a name of an orc city but it's quite a nice town), we met several guys who wanted to shake hands with Vojta. They were very curious where we were from and wanted to take selfies with us. (We didn't know yet that this was going to happen all over Iran.) We had to cross the whole town and start hitchhiking at the very end, in order to avoid cabs.

We were remembering all the things we had learned at Hitchwiki about Iran. We didn't have any sign with a name of a town (Hitchwiki says it is meaningless). We knew we should just wave at cars since the thumb sign, used in the west, is rude in here. We had read we should let Vojta do all the waving since I might be mistaken for a prostitute or inspire perverts to stop for us. We also knew we had to find whether the driver who would accept us wouldn't be just taroffing, agreeing just out of politeness. And we had a sheet with a short text explaining in Farsi what we wanted.

(At least we hoped so. Our friends let their friend translate something similar for them a couple of years ago, and their mischievous translator put the sentence "We are agents of Mosad" on their paper instead. So we hoped that our translator Elham, a friend's friend living in Czechia, had been more merciful to us.)

Our hitchhiking sheet (after more than a month of use and a driver putting a banana on it)

A car pulled over next to us before we even started hitchhiking.

There was a guy who could speak a bit English and a lady with a tattoo and a scarf covering way less hair than mine. They were wondering if we needed something and agreed to take us to the next town. The driver seemed pretty confused when we told him we were travelling without money. He kept telling us it was impossible and offering us to exchange Dollars. Explaining the concept of hitchhiking to him was rather fruitless. When the couple was leaving us in the middle of another town, the driver looked as confused as at the beginning.

We started walking to the end of the town again, and realized that rumors about Iranian traffic were true. It was even more chaotic than in Georgia. Cars were everywhere, ignoring all road signals, one-ways, lines on the road, pedestrians, traffic lights and the laws of physics. So we were trudging through the wet snow and mud next to the street because walking along the street seemed too suicidal.

In a couple of minutes, a guy with a freshly damaged car stopped and addressed us in a very good English with an American accent. (He then told us he had only learned it from movies and news.) We even managed to explain hitchhiking to him and he drove us to the end of the town.

So far, it seemed that we didn't even need to wave at cars in order to hitchhike in Iran. Walking along the road and looking strange was good enough.

The crew of our next car (we had actually waved at this one and we had stopped a couple of unmarked cabs before) could also speak English. It was getting dark and when we wanted to get off at a crossroads on a city bypass to camp near the road, they didn't really want to let us. First, they wanted to leave us at the Red Crescent office, then at a Police station and eventually they offered to drive me to hospital because of my running nose.

"It is very dangerous here! Come with us to the city center."
The mere idea of crossing yet another town on foot that day was making me sick.
"Why is it dangerous? Because of people, or because of dogs?"
"Because of...dogs."
"We are not afraid of dogs, no problem."
"But it is very dangerous here."


With a lot of effort, I eventually managed to persuade them that we would keep hitchhiking to Tabriz and if we wouldn't get a ride, we would walk to the Police station ourselves. Only when I told them "we are very happy to be at this intersection", they reluctantly agreed.

When they left, we ran away and hid our tent in the dark fields out of fear that they would come back to check if we found a ride.

After the first day, it seemed that the difficult thing about hitchhiking in Iran is not that drivers would not be helpful enough, but that they are sometimes even too helpful. And we had been speaking English the whole day. I was wond
ering how it would work when we would undergo all the negotiation in Farsi.

By the way, this is the text of our magical hitchhiking sheet. I'm leaving it here for the future generations, feel free to use it. (And I'm forever grateful to Elham, our savior.) Nobody has ever punched us after showing the paper to them, so I suppose the translation is good and there is nothing about Mosad agents written in there:


Hello,
we are travelling from Europe by hitchhiking only. We don't use any paid transport (we don't use buses or taxis). Would you please give us a ride a part of the way where you are going, even though we cannot pay you? If so, we would be grateful. If it doesn't suit you, it doesn't matter – we will find another car.
Thank you.

سلام،
ما از ازوپا به صورت رایگان در حال سفر هستیم. برای جا بجایی هزینه پرداخت نمی کنیم ( از اتوبوس و تاکسی استفاده نمی کنیم) . آیا شما می توانید ما را در مسیرتان تا جایی برسانید ؟ حتی اگر نتوانیم هزینه آن را پرداخت کنیم؟ اگر بله بسیار از شما ممنون خواهیم شد و اگر نه، مهم نیست ، وسیله دیگری را پیدا می کنیم.
ممنون از شما. 

First camp in Iranian fields

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Georgia: drunk and sober stories

For some reason, hitchhiking to Georgia had been my dream for many years. I'm not exactly sure why but maybe it had something to do with the fact that Georgian writing looks like Elvish from the Lord of the Rings. (Vojta's dream related to Georgia had been tasting the khinkali pasta dumplings. Most of Vojta's feelings are related to things he can eat so it's nothing surprising).

Also, for crossing to Iran from Turkey we had to cross Kars again - and at the beginning of February, the weather forecast was saying nice negative 25 at night. So even though Georgia was not exactly on our way, there were many reasons for us to go there. It took us exactly 2 and half weeks to fall in love with it and not to want to leave.



How to (not really) avoid drinking


Batumi looks like a huge Disneyland. It feels like a place where the craziest architects got all at once a lot of drugs and a chance to realize their weirdest dreams. Under a pillar designed by one of these architects, we met up with Cynthia and Niko, professional travellers who plan to hitchhike the whole world. They had been based in Georgia for the winter, earning money for their next travels. So they told us many things we had been to lazy to google about Georgia. One of them was that it was a land of wine and liquors and that surviving an invitation for a glass might not be that easy.



Cynthia and Niko, the Nomads

When we started travelling inland, David, our first Couchsurfing host told us the same. He knew a lot of foreign travellers, had heard their stories and even suggested us a trick how to avoid drinking when someone invites us. You must say you take antibiotics, otherwise you're doomed.

When we arrived to his place in Kutaisi, he bought us a bottle of Kozel, the Czech beer his company had recently gained license to brew. We were supposed to try it and tell whether it had the same taste as in Czechia. (I unwisely welcomed this task with enthusiasm.) It did.

After multiple repetitions of the experiment, David told us we absolutely needed to taste the home made wine, and asked us if we preferred the red one, or the white one. We chose the red one. It meant that we got the white one after 2 glasses of red. Then it was necessary to also taste chacha, the traditional liquor. I was already dizzy and Vojta was trying to say something about antibiotics. In vain.

So whereas David and his family were preparing for skiing the next morning, we were struggling to find our room and the entrance to our sleeping bags. As a practical introduction it had worked great.


Drinking lesson in Kutaisi


A haunted house on our way to Kutaisi. Vampires live there.



Dumplings with surprise


After getting drunk, our next step in getting to know Georga was to overeat with Khachapuri, the hot bread with cheese.

It happened just after leaving Kutaisi, when a colonel from the Georgian general staff gave us a ride and learned we had just been a couple of days in his country. He introduced several types of Khachapuri to us. Each of them was big enough for getting stuffed. You also can have different tings inside the "puri" (bread), such as potatoes or beans.

Khatchapuri with the Colonel

Another thing worth mentioning are Georgian lemonades. You can buy juices with tastes difficult to imagine, such as estragon or vanilla cream. Vojta immediately became fan of the strangest ones and every day, he wanted to try a new one. So every day, we were searching in shops for bottles we hadn't try yet. Eventually somebody told Vojta about a lemonade with chocolate taste, and he was hunting for it in different stores several days until he finally found it.


In Georgia we also realized that food doesn't really grow in supermarkets. People eat what grows at a specific season. And they make a lot of products at home, so if you pop up in Georgia in the middle of winter, you may have hard time to buy certain things. (We were lucky to eventually end up in our new friend Nina's family at the end of our stay, though. They kept making us stuffed with their delicious home-made food.)
From Kutaisi we continued to Tbilisi and met up with Dalibor, a Czech traveler and hitchhiker who was volunteering in a kindergarten. He showed us Tbilisi (it looks very poetic) and let us camp in his flat he was sharing with volunteers from Bahrain. He also told us where to buy Khinkali. Vojta could finally make his dream come true.

Khinkali are small pasta bags filled with something. A nice thing about Khinkali is that you can usually buy them per piece. If you can speak Georgian or Russian enough, you can even ask what is inside. If you don't, like us, you buy Khinkali with a surprise. My favorite surprise so far have been mushrooms.





Encounters with monks


In Georgia, there are dozens of monasteries. They look very romantic and are very photogenic. And there are monks inside. That's actually something that was for us, heathens, quite surprising.





We decided to go to one of these monasteries because it looked nice on pictures. Also, it was near Rustavi. And we just were in Rustavi, visiting another volunteers - Anika and Catalina from Germany who were teaching English at a local school.

Its name was David Gareji and it seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains on the border with Azerbaijan. On the map, though, there was a decent road going there. So after we said goodbye to our German friends, we crossed the whole town of Rustavi and started hitchhiking on a muddy road going to the fields.



How not to get lost in a frozen wasteland


While we were trying to convince a passer-by that we really didn't want to take a taxi, and he was trying to convince us that we would never get to the monastery, a truck driver stopped for us. He gave us a short ride and told us that we totally should get back before nightfall, otherwise we would be eaten by dogs, wolves and 1000 snakes. It then took us a couple of hours to make the next 30 kilometers and buy bread in the only little shop in the last village before the mountains. What looked like an ordinary country road in the map was in the real world a dirtroad (or mudroad) through deserted plains. And there were no cars whatsoever.

So we started walking and it was pretty sure that we would empirically test if there really were wolves, dogs and 1000 snakes. For several hours I felt as if we were the most abandoned creatures at the end of the world. Then we met an equally abandoned road signal in the middle of the plains. (Still no snakes, though.) Soon night fell and wind started blowing like crazy.

By the time we finally got to the monastery, abandoned like our road signal, it was almost 10 PM. The monastery wasn't closed, though, and we even saw light in one of the windows. For a while, we were thinking whether it would be impolite to put our tent up in a woodshed. Then we decided to be polite instead and to try asking.

So we knocked on the door. In a moment, a very tall, large, bearded person in a dark coat appeared. We were kind of surprised. Who would expect an abbot in a monastery!

He was surprised too. And he didn't allow us to camp in the woodshed since we happened to be at a male monastery and we weren't male enough. He asked us if we were hungry and then he told us to find a house under the monastery instead. I thought it was a polite version of telling us to get stuffed.

The wind was still blowing like crazy, though, so we looked around and really found a locked house that had a nice veranda with just a little wind.

Another large guy with a torch appeared (and didn't even look surprised), so we asked him if we could camp there. He gave it a deep thought, and told us that it was too cold and that we should go to a caravan instead. My heart jumped in the air with joy. The guy ushered us into the loveliest caravan in the world, and uttered simply:
"Yaytsa!" (eggs)


I tried to tell him we had supplies, but he insisted on us going to his house next to the caravan. He seated us at the oven. It was the best minute of my day. He told us his name was Zura and introduced us his roommate, a tiny man called Pekha. Then he poured us tea. This was the new best minute of my day.


Zura and Pekha's house and our caravan.


He opened something like 15 eggs, put them on a frying pan and made the biggest omelette I've ever seen. When I was enjoying the still new best minute of my day, we heard a sound of a car outside. Then the abbot entered the hut. We said "zdrastvuyte" and kept on eating eggs, whereas Pekha bowed almost to the ground and looked very honored.

Another monk entered. Many things in Georgian were said and then the abbot asked us in Russian if we were fine. We said that we were, and found out that Zura and Pekha - who were probably actually his employees - were installing heating in our caravan. We thanked the abbot 100 times (and I felt sorry for having thought he had told us to go away before) and when he left, we forbade our hosts installing the heating.

In the morning, the sky was completely blue and no wind was blowing anymore. We went back to the monastery and met another monk - he showed us a tiny path leading up the hill to fresco paintings and even lent us a walking stick.

Davit Gareji




Two or three days later, back in civilization again, we went to look at another monastery. We stepped in the church and found some people who were finishing a party in there. (Our friend Nina later told us that it had been a feast before the beginning of the fasting period.) Before our eyes became used to the obscurity of the place, the priest called us. And before we were even able to say hello and our names, our hands were full of khinkali, chacha and cookies. While the people were still packing, we were made very quickly swallow 2 shots of chacha each. Vojta was trying to tell he didn't want any more, and the merciful priest told him that we only needed to drink the third one, then. So we got the third one and Vojta received a huge bag with popcorn. By that time, the people had just finished their packing and left.

We stumbled out of the church, ten minutes after we had entered. We were both drunk and Vojta still had his arms full of the big bag with popcorn. All the other people were gone.



The importance of acknowledging your villains


It is said that the greatest achievement of the Austrian diplomacy has been making the world think that Hitler was German. Georgia could quite easily make the world think that Stalin was Russian. But for some reason, it is not doing so. In some towns and cities, there are Stalin streets and avenues, in Gori - his birthplace - there is his museum and in Tbilisi there are shops selling magnets with his portrait.


Our friends the Nomads (Cynthia and Niko from Batumi) also told us a story about two Polish travellers who had been kicked off the museum for taking pictures of themselves strangling the statue of Stalin.

So it could seem that in some strange way, Georgians are even proud of this mass murderer.

Except that nobody likes him.

We haven't been in Georgia long enough, but everybody we spoke with about Stalin in those three weeks told us negative things about him. One of them was that he had never done anything for Georgia.

I must confess that I too, though, have contributed by my 2 Lari to this strange popularity of this horrible guy. When we were in Tbilisi, I bought my first souvenir ever on this trip - a magnet with Stalin's face. (I just found these magnets so absurd that I couldn't help it and needed to have one. And yep, I was thinking about all those western tourists hanging around the streets of Prague with ushankas from tourist shops, with a sickle and hammer badge on their foreheads, looking like a parade of idiots.)

When I called the shopkeeper and showed him what I wanted to buy, he said: "Stalin!" with total contempt and spat on the ground, ignoring that it was actually him who was selling the magnet and getting my bloody 2 Lari for it.


I'm not sure whether this schizophrenia is a result of the mere effort to get money from something people actually hate, or acceptance of even the not so nice things of the country's history. But it is, in my view, a nice illustration of Georgia's approach to Stalin (from what I can try to say after a couple of weeks).




Learning how to summon daemons


Georgia is quite merciful to westerners - many signs are written not only in Georgian, but also in Latin alphabet, so one doesn't feel completely illiterate. However, I wanted to keep the promise to my 13-(or so)-years-old self, and to learn the Georgian script. Especially when I found out that it was an alphabet and under every sign, a "normal" letter was hidden.

For a week or so, I just knew P (it looks like ice-cream). Then I invested a lot of effort in my studies and learned how to read Khatchapuri and coffee. And then my learning capacity was overwhelmed for several days by memorizing hello, my very first real word in Georgian. (It's gamardjoba and yep, it sounds like something from Star Wars.)




While written Georgian looks like Elvish, to my Slavic ear, spoken Georgian sounds like something between Dothraki, the language of the aliens from District 9 and the sound of chewing pieces of glass. If daemons exist, they must speak Georgian.

It's the only language I know that has more complex consonant clusters than Czech. I love them. Our friend Nina then taught me how to count to ten, and I found my new favorite word. It's "tskhraaa". It sounds like a raven croaking over a corpse. (I bet that if Edgar Allan Poe knew Georgian, his poem would be 10 times better.) It means nine.

Later we went to theater to see a historical play with our friend. There, I added another item to my list of things I need to do before I die - to memorize a patriotic poem in Georgian. If I ever come to hell, I bet it will be handy.



Hitchhiking budget for civilized life. And our new home in Gori


Georgia has a lot of poetic places, especially in winter. Some of them are just reachable by a helicopter at that time, though, and in some of them the night temperature at the beginning of March is - 25°C. So we chickened out and decided to stay in the lowlands, and to come in summer next time.


In spite of this, there were still dozens of monasteries, churches, castles ,towns and abandoned houses to discover in the warmer areas of the eastern part of the country.

A church in Tbilisi

Sighnaghi




After that, we started returning back west and moved to Gori. Most foreigners go there because of Stalin. We came there because of Nina.


We had found her on the internet through our friends the Nomads. After a week of our gamardjoba and broken Russian we were looking forward to speaking English with somebody again. When we arrived, she was still at work. So we were sitting on the main square, eating smoked fish, enjoying the first spring sun and trying to contact Couchsurfers.

As for the last thing, we were failing epically. In Georgia, there seems to be just a few hosts, and a lot of couch-thirsty surfers from abroad. (David, our host from Kutaisi, had told us he was getting several requests every day.) And because Couchsurfers also have showers and we had no Couchsurfers, we had almost accepted the idea of crossing to Iran as messy vagabonds with smelly socks. We just still wanted to give it a try.

When we were finishing our smoked fish, a young guy who was jogging up and down the square approached us and started in English:
"Hi, how are you? Do you need help with something?"
"Hi, fine. We don't need anything, we are good, thanks."
"You look like travellers. You maybe don't have money for a hotel. So if you like, you can stay at my place."
"Errr, actually..."


And that's how we stayed in Gori. Orkhan, our miraculous host, came from Azerbaijan and was studying English in Gori. We turned to civilized beings at his place again, and he also showed us the Uplistikhe cave town near Gori. On the evening of the day we had met him, we had also met up with Nina. She was a traveller like us and a photographer and it became clear immediately that we had found another friend.


Uplistikhe cave town

After a couple of days, we moved to her place. We were staying with her family, eating her mom's dishes, searching for English translations of Georgian books, learning how to say "I eat little children" in Georgian, watching creepy Czech movies with her, we cooked a Slovak meal together, went to theater, hitchhiked to the Borjomi hot springs and it seemed that we would just never leave Georgia anymore.

Czech traditions in Georgia

We were also discussing all kinds of stuff about life in Georgia. For example, we
 could finally ask why there were so many European union flags everywhere. (There are way more EU flags than in Czechia even though Czechia actually is a EU member. I like the EU. Since in the EU it is trendy to hate it, I find it lovely that there still is a country in the world that still seems not to hate it.) Nina's answer actually was that the government just wanted to show like this that if the options are to be friends with Russia or to be friends with the European union, the EU is the more bearable option.

One of the strangest things was money. Unlike in the west where people are very mysterious about their salary, in Georgia they are quite willing to tell you about their income and ask you about yours after five minutes. That's how we learned that the average income was around 800 Lari, something like 300 Euro (the statistics office says 900 Lari). The best salary somebody we met told us about was around 2700 Lari per month (it was a manager of one of a company departments). The lowest salary (a shopkeeper) we heard about was something like 300 Lari per month, though.


After the deduction of loan repayments, taxes, money given to relatives etc., it shows that many people live on a similar budget as we do on our trip (around 100 Euros per month). Except that these people, contrarily to us, actually live in a house, take a shower regularly, have clean clothes, use cosmetics and in general live a civilized life. (And prices of food and other basic things are just not that low.) One of the biggest mysteries is how they manage to do that. I must admit we were in Georgia not long enough to find the answer.

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After almost a week in Gori we decided to finally leave and to cross Turkey towards Iran. After surviving almost a month with Georgian drivers (traffic in Georgia is even more chaotic than in Turkey, even though we hadn't met any drunk drivers which had surprised me in a positive way), we felt ready to go to the country with the biggest traffic death toll in the world. It was already spring and we were sorry we wouldn't go in the mountains and wouldn't stay with Nina forever. So we at least decided to come to Georgia again, at some point.

Street art Gori style