21st September: Akhaltsikhe, Georgia

Our plan for today was to visit the caves and monasteries at Vardzia, as the weather forecast was better than for tomorrow. The helpful couple running the hotel had told us there was a marshrutka to Vardzia at 10:30, so we were having a slow morning doing washing when we had a knock on the door. Out of the blue, they’d made us breakfast!

Walking the short distance to the bus station, various taxi drivers told us there was no marshrutka but, of course, there was. The terrain southeast of Akhaltsikhe consisted of fairly barren, rocky hills and some larger mountains with more tree cover. A new dam was under construction on the otherwise wide, shallow, and fast flowing Mtkvari / Kura River. This river is actually quite interesting in that it counterintuitively flows eastwards all of the way from eastern Turkey through Georgia and Azerbaijan to empty into the Caspian. The entirety of Armenia is also within its watershed. Something which flows the other way along almost exactly the same route is up to 1 million barrels of oil per day along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. This is of course the main reason for the US, NATO, and EU overtures and empty promises towards Georgia. More on that in a future blog, I’m sure.

Eventually, the rocky hills gave way to cliffs. Suddenly, Vardzia was visible too. A much more sprawling cave complex and considerably higher up the cliffs than I had envisaged. I tend not to do any specific research on places after my initial sweep months before, as I like my reaction to be instinctive and without pre-conceptions. This place certainly gave me that unexpected feeling of awe.

We walked up the switchbacks and then stone cut steps to reach the first rooms cut into the cliff face. The views up and down the valley felt deeply calming and gave me an understanding of the spiritual nature of this site. It took us a good two hours to traverse most the rock-cut rooms. They often sat many storeys high, with rooms as diverse as a wine cellar, bread ovens, meeting rooms, and spectacularly an active church.

Behind the church, a network of small tunnels, through which I had to heavily stoop, twisted up, down, left, and right. I turned back before reaching wherever they were leading, the thought of earthquakes suddenly filling my over-active brain. Alongside the fresco-lined church were, extraordinarily, living quarters being used by monks and active members of the church.

Again, we’d somehow gotten lucky with the weather. On the marshrutka back we passed through a storm and there were towering cumulonimbus clouds in every direction from Akhaltsikhe, but our raincoats stayed resolutely in our bags. During our evening walk around town, rain was visibly falling on hills in at least 3 directions, but it never disturbed us or the wedding party parading in cars. It seems to be a thing in Georgia that wedding guests drive around after the ceremony in convoy, horns blaring and lights flashing. Local landmarks are ticked off one by one, in this case by multiple cars containing, among others, the bride and groom doing doughnuts around other guests in the fortress car park!