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.

-----------------

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