and i raise my weary head......I got an old coat for a pillow, and the earth was last night's bed........I don't know where i'm going, only God knows where i've been.......I'm a devil on the run, a six-gun lover, a candle in the wind..............Well, Bon, I don't usually consider you to be a lyrical master, but this time you may have just got it right.
The adventure all started with a tourist map, which layed claim to mountaintops stretching over 3000 metres, volcanic craters, a smattering of little mountain lakes, and a petrified forest. There are no "roads" entering or leaving, and seemingly no information about trekking. "Why the bloody hell not?" I mused. With such a tantalising set of clues in my clutches, I set about acquiring a topographic map left over from the Soviet days, and Set Forth.
....and in doing so I find myself in the neighbourhood to explore the cave-city of Vardzia. After King George III built a fortification at the site in the 12th century, his Daughter, Queen Tamara, established a monastery, which quickly grew into an enormous Holy City. It includied 13 floors, 25 wine cellars, and its own internal spring! Completely hidden from the outside world save for a secret entrance, and only exposedby an earthquake in 1283 that crumbled the outer walls of some caves. So I team up with a group of exhuberant Georgians for a bit of exploration, and hitch a ride with them onward to Upper Vardzia and it's 12th century church. Unexpectedly, there is marijuana growing wild in these parts! We leave the Gunja Nuns, and I disembark some turns of the axle down the road for more hitching onward to the End of The Road to make camp under a blackened sky. On the morn I plan to walk Eastward, hoping to bump into something recognisable from my Soviet map.....
The thunder, fire and brimstone from the previous evening's entertainment has abided by the sun's rise, and after some ambling I soon think I know where I am. I fill the morning making a circuit round the base of 3300m mount Didi Abuli in the hope of stumbling into my first mountain lake.....
Now, am I mistaken, or is there water, luscious grass, and spectacular minature lakes on the Moon? The landscape and topography here are sublime and surreal, and taken from a comic book adaptation of an Asimov novel. Ambling through grassy alpine, then negotiating boulder-fields onto and into cirques, tarns, and glorious calderas, with no track to follow this becomes a simply marvellous adventure. The topographic map is an abstract piece of art where a monkey with a nervous twitch has thrown spaghetti at a wall-hanging of an abstract piece of art.
The thunder starts it customary evening roll, but this time instead of looking up to see from whence the vibrations are titillating my follicles, I find myself looking right. Yikes. With the thunder at head-height, it's time to make for some place a little more sheltered, and a little less deafening.
I wake up in the morning, and raise my weary head to be greeted by a sparkling sky, glittering its merry way across the lake afore me. Strolling on I meet a few shepherds, and we customarily share some food. They unroll a plastic bag full of cold fried mutton, sheep cheese, and stale bread. Our conversation/signing revolves around where I'm from, where I'm going, how much a sheep costs in Australia, and whether I have a gun or knife in case I meet any of the wolves out here. hmmmmm, thanks for the heads-up lads....
I get the hang of the spaghetti-contours, and the theme of the day continues as alpine fields, snow-fed streams, cirque, tarn, boulder-fields, and then the Caldera to stop them all. I camp in this surreal landscape, in front of a conically moulded mountain, next to yet another Sci-Fi lake surrounded in a ridgeline ring bathed in a post-thunder sunset.
This make-it-up-as-you-go-along trekking ends as expected; I stumble off the Samsari ridge and into no-man's land. A day later after circumnavigating a lake, passing shepherds and their dogs, I hitch a ride in a bumbling van, a slow-speed roller-coaster ride down to the nearest village in search of more reliable transportation back to planet Earth.
hugs and love from Sakartvelo
Joe
