Arrived to Helsinki. Seems like my bag is not wet, it does not smell like wine and customs did not want to count my wine bottles. So, everything good so far. :)
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Finally arrived Kiev at night, only seven hours behind the schedule. It is freezing -20C currently in Kiev for the first time this year, and we were going to buy a new electric heater to replace a broken one upon arriving here. Thanks to the airline, all shops are closed already.. Well, seems like a gas stove works as an temporary apartment heater, and the Kiev central heating has been performing decently too. Yesterday everything seemed to go wrong. In addition to driving hundreds of if kilometers for no reason and the flight being late, all kinds of small things happened. My laptop was drop on the airport floor while charging, destroying one corner of the case, elevator to the ninth floor was naturally stuck, I started by dropping the kitchen curtains down.. And a million other things. Hope today is better..
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Nothing seems to go perfectly today. We woke up early in the morning and left Tbilisi in beautiful sunshine towards Gudauri. Two hours of driving and when approaching Gudauri we saw the mountain disappearing into a cloud. So, obviously the entire country is sunny and nice today, EXCEPT the ski resort of Gudauri. There was again basically zero visibility and most of the lifts were closed due to that, so just decided to drive back to Tbilisi. One company / flight club has been organizing sightseeing flights from Naktakhari airfield, which happened to be on our way back to Tbilisi. As we now had a couple of hours to spend and Tbilisi weather would be great for flying we stopped by the airfield for a while, but did not find anybody else than cats in there. And well, were too lazy to start calling them to ask, we were a bit short on time anyway.. After losing my nerves a couple of times with the horrible driving habits of Tbilisi taxi drivers in traffic we arrived to the airport, dropped off our rental car and.. Noticed that our flight to Kiev was delayed. And not just a bit delayed, at the moment they are expecting some six hours of delay. At least we got "generous" 25 GEL cafe vouchers for that.. Seriously, Ukraine International Airlines, 25 GEL? That's like less than 10€. By the way, the tire we destroyed earlier cost us 250 GEL then, about 90€. Not too happy of that, but it was still good price for such a tire. Could have been worse.
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Today was a bit different day than originally planned: We were thinking of doing a quick and easy visit to the David Gereja Monastery some 60 kilometers from Tbilisi. I was expecting it to have some kind of decent asphalt road all the way to the monastery.. Well, it was not the case. The last 30 kilometers we were driving on desert next to the Azerbaijan border. There was some kind of path visible most of the way, but most of the time it was at least partially covered by flying snow. In the worst places we had to cross half a meter deep snow or just leave the road and drive on terrain to get around the deepest piles of snow. The desert was cold, windy and the snow was flying everywhere blocking visibility. Finally we made it to the monastery, walked around a bit and left back to Tbilisi. The rest of the evening was spent in Eastside shopping mall, looking for a scarf and some other stuff, in addition to buying souvenir wines from a Carrefour shop. We are thinking of changing the plan for tomorrow too: Waking up very early and driving to Gudauri for a couple of hours of skiing before leaving Georgia in the late afternoon. The weather forecast is good for tomorrow, so visibility in Gudauri should be much better than last time. Although it will be -14C there... And -20C in Kiev.
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We are both having a bit of flu, so we didn't bother doing too much sightseeing on the New Year Eve in Tbilisi. Just a short walk around the city, a ropeway ride to the top of the mountain and a hot sulfur bath were enough to spend the day. In the evening there was a Couchsurfing home party in the old town, which we attended but already left to home a bit after midnight. Today has been an equally lazy day, just hunting for an open restauraunt and that's it.
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Today was probably the last driving day of this trip, as we returned to Tbilisi from Kazbegi. On the way we stopped to Gudauri ski resort, which today had much better weather and allowed us to do some skiing. Iryna got an ski lesson from an instructor on the kids slope and I visited the mountain top while waiting. The visibility on the top was again basically zero, so skiing there was not that much fun.. I guess we will return to Gudauri some day during the rest of the week, if the weather forecast says it will be a totally clear day there. In Tbilisi now, changed our car to an ugly but much cheaper Honda CRV as planned and next we are planning to go see the Star Wars in an IMAX theater. :)
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Today we moved back to the mountains, passing through the spectacular (well, it would be without the clouds) Georgian Military Highway mountain road. Our plan was to visit the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral next to our hotel in the morning, drive to Gudauri ski resort area for some downhill action and end up to Kazbegi in the evening. However, there was extremely thick fog and clouds in Kazbegi area which is high on the mountains, and we saw no point in trying to ski in zero visibility. The plan was modified a bit, and we drove to Kazbegi already in the afternoon and continued directly up the mountain, all the way to the beautiful Gergeti Trinity Church. The church, built in 13th century has somewhat become a symbol of Georgia, together with the nearby Kazbegi mountain peak. The church stands alone on a high mountain top, where a bad, iced and steep road leads from the village of Stepantsminda. While we were turning towards the church from the village, one of the local taxi drivers approached us to tell that the road is very bad and we should take a local transport there. That was one more reason for me to take the challenge and drive all the way up.. Which was actually surprisingly easy. Some Georgian guys ahead of us were not so successful, they had managed to get their 4x4 car pretty deeply stuck in snow and we tried to help them a bit. They only had a too weak rope with them that snapped every time we tried to pull the car out of the snow, so we had to leave them to search for other assistance. Half an hour later they managed to get up to the mountain too.. :) As a funny coincidence a couple came to ask us if they can ride back to the city with us, as they had walked all the way up to the hill already. Soon I noticed they were talking Finnish to each other.. So, more Finns here. :)
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Today was again mostly spent on the road. We visited Borjomi mineral water park in Borjomi first. The park consist of some tourist attractions built around the first bottling factory and natural spring of Borjomi mineral water. The water is my personal favorite and a well known brand all around the world, salty and good. Nowadays the water is bottled in modern plants around the area, but the original spring still exists near the old factory. We filled a couple of bottles with the water to be used during the next days. We had booked an apartment in Mtskheta, the old Georgian capital close to the current capital Tbilisi and conveniently located on our route for the next days. On the way to Mtskheta from Borjomi is Gori, city which is mostly famous as the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. There's a big museum built in the fifties next to the original house, which is also preserved under a memorial house. Unfortunately we were a bit short on time before sunset, so we just took a quick walk outside the museum, checked out the only remaining statues of Stalin, his armored train carriage and so on. Nearby Gori there was an another interesting historical site which we briefly visited, the cave city of Uplistsiche. It is supposed to be one of the oldest settlements in the Caucasus area, the oldest caves being built some 3000 years BC. By the way, I'm not completely sure if I want to see mandarins after this trip. As they grow locally in Georgia and are really good and fresh in here, we have been munching them on the road. Yesterday we bought a topped up 10l bucket of them, and the last one was eaten today..
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Arrived to the city of the best mineral water in the world. :) The day contained some small incidents, but finally we arrived here through the horrible Georgian traffic and some 400 kilometers. In the morning we visited the Svaneti museum, and on the museum parking place broke one of our car tires. The tire survived just fine all the mountain roads, and now broke on the flat surface in the city center.. Well, we managed to change it to a spare tire with the help of a local gas station guy. The rest of the day was pretty eventful, just stressful and slow traffic. At least here in Borjomi we have a warm apartment with warm bathroom. All the previous ones have been pretty cold, especially the guesthouse in Mestia where we had to leave water running so the pipes would not freeze. Wonder why didn't we get an idea of going to Caribbean or somewhere for the New Year.. :P
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Today was much more successful exploring day. The car rental guys brought our new Nissan Xterra in the morning, with proper winter tires. They still managed to fail with the chains though, they were thinking of using the same snow chains and naturally they did not fit this car either.. Well, that was not a big problem as the car was perfectly usable on the mountain roads with the winter tires. We started by climbing up the same route which we failed yesterday, to the ski result of Tetnuldi which is still under construction. There was a road to the top of the mountain used by the workers and occasional skiers, so.. Naturally we had to drive all the way to the top, to a bit over three kilometers altitude. After the scary descent from the Tetnuldi peak we headed to Ushguli road. The road was definitely the worst one I have droven, with 30 centimeters of snow on the road and high cliffs on both sides of the narrow road. An occasional lake or iced area on the road didn't make it much easier. After some two hours we had made our way up to Ushguli, the highest inhabited village in Europe. The village is also on the UNESCO world heritage list. We did not have that much time before sunset, so we just took a short walk around the village and started our scary but uneventful drive back to Mestia, where we arrived just on time as the sun set down. Some excellent Georgian wine, food and we are ready to bed now at 21 local time. Tomorrow to Borjomi..
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