Ushguli - Roads, Mountains, Towers and Fame.

Our next destination was a smaller town in the Svaneti region - Ushguli. Yes, that's the place the film, Dede, was located in (see our previous post). Part of the attraction here was the drive - a mountainous road only partly paved. John loves these driving challenges so we set off.

We hadn't gone far before saw a sign pointing to the village of Adishi. When we saw the polyphonic singing group in Mestia, they mentioned having just come from a fantastically beautiful village and it sounded like he said Adishi. It wasn't too far to Adishi so we took the turn.

As usual, we had to dodge cows on the road.

I love the variation in the wildflowers in different areas.

We don't know if Adishi was the place we had heard about, however it was on a major hiking trail so there were a few simple cafes and guest houses here. It was very authentic, very ramshackle and totally atmospheric.

I don't know how much longer some of these old towers will last.

Looking through the bell tower at the church. Each church in this area has a bell tower beside it.

Many old houses had slate rooves but some were made from shingles.

Sleds are used here in winter but we also saw some used now. They adapted them by putting wheels on the back. They're pulled by horses.

We continued our road trip and arrived at Ushguli unscathed despite the damaged and washed away roads at times. This is an eroded concrete road viewed from the side as we approached it around a bend. 

Keep left, John!

It was a great trip!

We found our hotel and were shown to our room. Oh no! Our bed had what I call tablecloth sheets - a weird seersucker material that's terrible to sleep on and far more suited to being used as tablecloths than sheets. On closer inspection I found that not only were the sheets too small to tuck under the mattress (a common thing in Georgia and one of my pet hates) but they were so small that they barely covered the top of the mattress. The bathroom was tiny - about 1.5 metres square. To fit in a shower they simply added a European shower head beside the toilet. 

What really drove us crazy though was the fact that the bed creaked and groaned every time we made the slightest move on it - and even when we just walked near it! We kept getting woken multiple times a night just because we rolled over. As I lay there in the dark one night I could hear the people in the rooms on either side of us having the same problem.

As much as we didn't like the room, the views from the hotel and from our room were spectacular - we looked straight at Shkhara Mountain. Stunning! 

We had a lot of fun in Ushguli. We wandered around the ancient cluster of villages. It was like walking through history.

As usual, we shared the paths with all sorts of farm animals. Very few animals seem to be fenced in.

Again, we saw a sled. It would get really snowy here in winter.

The lady at our hotel had told us that they had been very busy as there was a festival on that weekend. We saw a crowd gathered at the local church and checked it out. From what we learned, families meet at the church and there are endless hours of toasts to all sorts of things. It seemed weird to see everyone drinking in the church grounds but we all have different cultural beliefs. We heard later that a cow was slaughtered and the meat was divided up between the families. A week or so later, as we drove through another village, we again saw a crowd in the church grounds and a sheep was being cut up on site.

We got chatting to some tourists one day as we were wandering around. The guy in his 20's was Russian and he had participated in a demonstration against Putin and was jailed for 5 days. That was enough for him. As soon as he could, he left the country. He made his way to Georgia where he now lives and works. He seemed quite proud to have been jailed but was keen to not have it happen again.

We found another house museum which was very similar to the last one. You can see the 'beds' on top of the animal stalls better here.

At one stage we walked past a building and some kids called out hello to us from the balcony above us. While we talking to them in broken English, we noticed the name of the building - Mose Guest House and a picture of the boy from the Dede movie, whose name was Mose. 

As we were talking to the boys we noticed that one of them looked a lot like Mose from the movie. I was trying to calculate if this could be the boy - he looked about 4 in the movie which would make him about 9 now. It turned out we were right! Once we realised, we didn't talk to him about it as it must be hard for him to hang out with his mates and be the 'star' so to speak. Mose's the one on the left with the blue t-shirt.

After that we saw Mose quite a lot as he was one of the key people who rode a horse around the town a lot. He wasn't hard to see as he wore that same blue t-shirt every day. Horses are a common way to get around here. Again, the horses are in really good condition. They are left to roam free then brought in when needed, which is mostly when they're rented out for tourists to ride. Foals learn the ropes early as they simply follow mum on the rides. As the foals get older they don't always follow though. One night we were sitting at an outside bar and heard a horse neigh far on our left. A foal near our right called back. They neighed to and fro until mum came cantering up the road to find her foal at the end of a day's work taking tourists out. We thought it was so sweet until she fed the foal for about two seconds then raced over to a nearby stallion to get served! She had a big day......

It was quite interesting to see horses used as everyday transport around the town. People would ride their horses to the shop at our hotel to buy things and people like Mose and his mates would tear up and down the roads seeing who can go the fastest. None of the people here were stylish riders by any stretch of the imagination but the horses were willing and honest.

The main walk here is to the bottom of a glacier and this was our aim. We set off early and cheated by driving the first leg along the flat valley. The advantage of this is that we got to the tongue of the glacier first and had it all to ourselves. The dogs around here are enormous but just as super-friendly as everywhere else in Georgia. This one greeted me so enthusiastically that I had trouble standing upright! Some of these dogs have heads the size of bears. They really are huge.

The walk up the valley was beautiful.

The tongue of the glacier was brownish. A river ran out of the bottom of it but the water was that grey colour and was silty.

John somehow convinced me that we should climb around the side of the glacier. It was really rocky and if the rocks slipped we could have been sent over the edge of the glacier. I had visions of our kids being orphaned but we made it safely.

On the way back down the valley, surrounded by wildflowers.

As we came down, others started to come up the valley and soon they were arriving in droves. About 30 people rode up in a group on local horses. There must be a lot of coordination between locals because I'm sure that nobody owns 30 horses on their own.

One afternoon a big storm came through. Thunder boomed overhead and the rain bucketed down! It was amazing! A few hours later, the skies were clear again.

We met a young German couple who were travelling in a campervan for 12 months. They camped in a spectacular spot with great views of the mountains. Their English was wonderful and we had a fun night with them at an outdoor bar.

We did all this with very little sleep because just after we went to bed the night before at about 10.30pm a group of motorbike riders turned up. They needed to be fed and guess where the restaurant was - yep, it was under our room. This is after we specifically asked for a quiet room. It was the final straw really. We had booked the room for 4 nights but we abandoned any thought of staying that long. It was too late to leave the town after our walk though so we stayed the second night begrudgingly. The owner was shocked that we wanted to leave early but still charged us for the full 4 nights. 

We spent our last afternoon making last minute changes to our plans as we suddenly had two extra days to spend somewhere. One thing we wanted to do was to head out of Ushguli and drive over the Zagar Pass. This road was supposed to be even more challenging than the road we drove in on.

We had another crap sleep then woke before dawn and decided to leave. I was a bit hesitant to tackle this road without light but it began to lighten not long after we started and it turned into another spectacular drive. We wound our way down and down, past more stunning mountains and beautiful wildflowers. It was another really special drive!

Thanks for joining us on our journey!

Heather and John