"The Mountains Are Calling And I Must Go..."

...said John Muir, a particularly bearded nature lover whose facial hair was rivaled only by his adoration of scrounging around forests and mountains, and it was this quote that was rattling around in my brain when I randomly decided to go visit a particular stretch of mountainous land a few weeks back. 

While I normally hate the type of posts like the one I'm about to do (the ones where I just recount all the fun I had and bore you to death with some blow by blow recollection of how pretty it was while bombarding your bandwidth with a ton of pictures), I sort of don't care. Because the mountains are ridiculously pretty, and no amount of words I possess or pictures I take will begin to do them any sort of justice. But I'm only a human, and if I've learned anything from watching Doctor Who it's that we don't really give a shit about things being impossible, because we will try anyway just on the off chance that we're wrong. 

I realized the other day that I normally talk about places and don't give you a lick of perspective about where all they are. I suppose if you really cared you could Google it on your own, but I'm feeling particularly nice today, so here's a small map. As you can see, there isn't really a direct route up to Kazbegi/Stepantsminda. You have to duck down south to Tbilisi (which is right where the "Google" is in this map) and then catch a marshutka going north from there.

The climb into the mountains starts innocently enough. The sprawl of Tbilisi gives way pretty quickly to small villages and rugged farmland, but your first ascension into higher elevations is fairly sneaky. You don't realize how high up you are until you see these bad boys in front of you. 

And you still don't really feel like you're that high, until you see the semi trucks in front of you, and realize that the "small ravine" next to the road has now turned into a gigantic how-the-fuck-did-you-not-notice-it-before canyon. 

And up and up you go. The switchbacks are ridiculous, the climb is an incredibly steep one, and the whole time the driver, whose vehicle is naturally in questionable health because Georgia, is clipping along merrily at a way too fast pace. If you're in the very back of the van, like I was, you will get tossed around like a rag doll, and if you're insane like I am you'll be smiling the whole way while listening to some goofy ass music as the soundtrack to your trip. I highly suggest all of this, as it was probably the most fun I've had in a vehicle ever, and that's saying a lot.
 However, if you're a normal person who does not like being tossed around due to shitty quality of roads or if you are simply terrified of heights, do not ever, ever, in the history of ever, go up this road with a Georgian driver.

I suppose even above treeline there have to be strange abandoned buildings, and while I think this one is actually a proper monument, that doesn't mean there weren't at least a dozen abandoned houses, warehouses, or churches along the mountain ridge.

So up and up you go, until you're driving in a world that's only white and blue, and suddenly you're going down. The downward part is interrupted by a series of commie fun tubes that serve as tunnels. I call them commie fun tubes because they don't really go through the mountain like an actual tunnel would - instead they serve as a protected road so that, when the mountains inevitably destroy the parallel exposed one, trade won't come to a grinding halt.
My guess is that until the weather becomes better, the outer roads won't be opened for traffic, and when we were up there, these outer ones were still closed. However, that didn't deter our driver who, impatient for the semi trucks to creep through the tunnel, decided to say fuck that rope for telling him he couldn't go on that road, and onto the "seasonal" road we went.1
Whatever their name may be, and whatever purpose these tunnels or tubes serve, eventually they dump you into this high moraine valley.

When you're this high up, it's hard to remember that the bottom of the valley is still actually about 5,000 feet above sea level.

There are a ton of little villages sprinkled throughout the valley, although they're mainly on the side opposite the highway.2 There are remnants of cable cars across a few of the gorges, but I'd hazard that  they've been out of commission since before the fall of the Soviets based on their degradation. Otherwise, there are no roads proper over to these locations - just sketchtastic footbridges and footpaths up the little houses on the hills.   

And then the road drops down onto the grey granite floor of the valley and begins to climb upwards again, until this is what you see - Mount Kazbek, the Gergeti Trinity Church, and the tiny village of Stepantsminda (the town formerly known as Kazbegi). And yeah, that little smudge on the hill just to the left of Kazbek is the church.

I really do think that the sky is a different kind of blue in the mountains.

Kazbegi is the third highest mountain in Georgia, and reaches almost 17,000 feet. The fact that it's a dormant volcano just makes me love it even more.  

There's not a whole lot to do in Stepantsminda this time of year. Even getting up to Gergeti, one of the more famous churches in Georgia, is a hassle, and walking up is nearly impossible. The whole area is definitely a summertime paradise, I'm sure. There are all sorts of glaciers, waterfalls, alpine meadows, and birch forests to go crawling around in, either on foot, by horse, or by parasail. In mid March, however, it's fairly sleepy. You can take a stroll up to the Rooms Hotel, which lies at the topmost part of town, and get a ridiculously awesome view from their ridiculously awesome porch.

Also you will want to get a mug of their hot chocolate, because I'm pretty sure they literally just melt a bar of chocolate into a cup and call it good. So you get a warm and uber tasty drink, plus the view from above. Add in some awesome company, and who can't have a good time?
Buttmunches. That's who wouldn't have a good time. And since you, oh diligent reader, are not a buttmunch, I'm pretty sure that you'd have a fun time!

The Rooms Hotel is definitely a great little place, and quickly escalated as one of my favorites in this country. Their entire lower floor is a sitting area/coffee shop/restaurant/bar and they have a huge collection of books in multiple languages (Georgian, English and Russian of course), as well as excellent musical choices. I say this primarily because I heard several Beatles songs and none by Pink Floyd. Well done, Georgia! 

My friend and I could only spend the day up in the mountains, so we were not able to get up to the Gergeti church. Instead, we found a taxi driver who agreed to take us 10 km up the road to the Russian border and the monastery that sits next to it.
In case you had forgotten that this is a supremely Orthodox country, and you might have gone a whole ten minutes without seeing some kind of church or cathedral (blasphemy!!), there is, naturally, a little shrine along the way which our taxi driver was nice enough to stop at. 

Hello, Russia!
Well, actually, hello three miles of neutral zone and THEN Russia! I felt a little weird, being an American and taking obvious pictures of the Russian border crossing, hence why this is probably a little wonky of a shot.
Either way, the border crossing sits in an impressive gulch. 

The church, within spitting distance of the border, is for the Archangels Gabriel and Michael. It's also, strangely, made from a pink rock which isn't remotely native to the part of the mountains this was built in. It's one more time that the ancient world makes me go "Damn!"
It's also currently under heavy construction and refurbishment, like so many sacred sites here are. The narthex is done, however, so we were able to get inside.
I didn't spend that much time inside, mainly because it's all new and apparently I find new things uninteresting and bland (seriously, all the walls were white. No weird fucked up icons or anything! Why even bother going to church if you can't check out ancient paintings that have been defaced??), but also because the outside is, to quote John Muir again, "a cathedral of light." So what if he was talking about the Sierras half a world away with these words - it's applicable to the Caucus, dammit!

In summary, I hate the mountains, they're not that pretty, and I definitely won't be going back again.

1. Times like this make me remember that I've become so used to "rules" not really meaning anything. Crosswalks, "Do Not Enter" signs - they're all more suggestions instead of law. America is going to be rough.

2. It's called a highway, more specifically the Georgian Military Highway, and it's been around in some form or another since medieval times. Queen Tamar had a summer palace up in these mountains, and used this road as transportation. Nowadays, it's barely two lanes wide, and has numerous semi trucks that take their turns incredibly wide and creep up the mountain ridiculously slowly, which will infuriate your driver and make them pass trucks at really dangerous and inopportune times. Basically, what I'm saying is that "highway" is a really liberal term for the type of road that takes you up into the mountains.