Friday, August 4, 2017

medieval meanderings

After returning from Stepasminda to Tbilisi, we had a flight booked to Mestia in the North West.

We turned up at the airport for the flight (an 18 seater) to be told the weather at Mestia was too bad for the flight to go ahead. Oddly only 8 people turned up for the flight which made us wonder if the flight was really cancelled because it was uneconomical to fly less than half full.

This caused a minor drama as we had all of our accomodation booked for the next 4 nights.

Fortunately one of our fellow cancellees was a Georgian woman who took control of the situation and managed to organise seats for the 8 of us on a coach to a town called Zugdidi in the West of the country. Once there she then organised 2 cars to take us on the 4 hour drive to Mestia.

It was well after 9pm before we arrived and Paul and I then wandered around some unlit, unpaved and unsignposted streets in Mestia looking for our guesthouse.

In total we had 2 and a bit days to explore Mestia.





The town had an excellent museum with a really good collection of, amongst other things, old church icons.





A couple of hours drive above Mestia is a lovely spot with a few (tiny) lakes and some lovely views:



Later we organised a car to take us about 3 hours east on a very poor dirt road to the town of Ushguli.

A medieval town in every sense - if you took away the cars and power poles you would feel very much like you were in a 14th Century village - complete with mud and filth strewn streets with pigs and cows wandering around.

It was set in an extremely scenic environment. We spent a couple of days here before heading briefly back to Mestia for our return flight to Tbilisi (which was fortunately flying that day.) A less than one hour flight was infinitely preferable to the 10 hours it took by road.











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