Georgia 2 (Sam)

Wow, we have spent a week exploring Georgia a bit more and all I can say is that the landscape is incredibly beautiful. We went from Tbilisi to Kazbegi and stayed in a great guesthouse (Emma's Guesthouse) for 4 nights. One day we walked up to a dramatically perched church on top of a hill overlooking the town. I was sick, with a cold and the runs so I went back with Mhari and my parents walked further uphill for another two hours or so. Our guesthouse served really good food and we went to a family dinner, my Dad wrote a good post about that one so just check his blog. We spent another day in a beat up Soviet Lada taxi driving to the Russian border and some waterfalls. At one point we were driving on a steep, rocky track and somehow that incredible car managed to make it up. We were unsure what to do on our last day in Kazbegi, but we found an English guy called John who wanted to share a taxi to go to Sno Valley for the day so we thought we would go along with him. We drove down a cliff-hugging road to the village of Juta, at the end of the valley. From Juta we walked all day up a nearby valley, to a glacier at the base of a large mountain. The walk was easy for the first half but once we crossed over the river it got very steep and we had to scramble over boulders. The views from the glacier were more than worth it though. We hung around a bit at the glacier, taking pictures and enjoying the snow until it started to rain. About halfway back to Juta, the rain stopped, so we decided to take a family photo. We had tried earlier with a plastic bag on the camera only to discover that this made our photos very blurry. We played around with the camera, taking photos of us jumping for a long time before we decided we couldn't waste any more time and went back to Juta.

We are now in Borjomi, a Soviet resort famed for it's salty, carbonated mineral water. We ate a large lunch/supper at a restaurant near the train station - good food, good prices. Today we went on a long hike through Borjomi National Park. We started by walking 1 km to the administration office to get a free permit to enter the park, then we took a taxi to the Ranger Station followed by a 2 km walk to the trail-head. The hike itself started with about 2 km of steep uphill switchbacks, we reached the top, exhausted, and continued on the flat ridge for about 1 more km. At this point the path went slowly uphill for a few km until we reached the top of the hill. We stopped at a bench on the summit and had fish, liverwurst, peanuts, bread, dried apricots and various other things for lunch. After lunch we had another few km of walking on the ridge, this part of the walk had the most spectacular views. The next 3 km were by far the hardest, steep downhill slopes with loose rocks and earth to slip on. We had another break at the bottom of the hill and then had about three km to walk to the road where we could catch a bus back to Borjomi. The walk was about 18 km total and boy did we sleep well.