June 28 2016   North east Georgia - rethink awesome!  

Mt Kazbegi

Breathtaking, stunning, astonishing, awe inspiring, extraordinary, incredible - merely words which can't possibly describe what we saw today. We really hit the awesome, the breathtaking, a place that almost convinced us to stay and become shepherds. Towering snow-covered mountains, steep slopes blanketed in vivid green and wild flowers that took my breath away - yellows, white, purples, blues, pinks. Colours in a myriad of shades, flowers in many shapes from the simple pea flower through bells, daisies to more intricate complexes designed to capture the meadow bees who hovered like wooly drones lazily buzzing from one flower to another. My little collection of petals is pressed in my diary and in my mind! 

Monks in rusty black, ancient carvings beside Soviet and ancient graffiti, beside pagan symbols - all clustered side by side in the walls of ancient churches perched precariously on lofty mountain peaks dwarfed even so by snow-encrusted rocky monsters like Mount Kazbegi. We clambered over the ruins of fortress walls still sheltering chapels, monuments and monasteries and ogled ranging ice-cold torrents barreling through valleys and deep mountain crevasses or spurted from beneath sheets of ice. Marvelled at bi-colored rivers, rivers that flowed so fast that the tributary waters couldn't mix - a grey churning flow beside a black roiling torrent, the confluence of mountain rivers reluctant to give up their own identities.

Gergeti church nestles neath Mt Kazbegi

We climbed through herbs and flowers as high has an elephants eye (almost!) to visit a family in the village of Juta at the end of Sno valley when the road, merely ruts much of the way, finally runs out. There we ate mountain honey and fresh made cheese with bread straight out of the oven. Juta is cut off from the world for 6 months of the year by snow. It can be a hard life but the simplicity is enticing. We watched eagles soar over high mountains pastures dotted with sheep and goats watched over by shepherds who camp out with their flocks in the summer months. Butterflies like handfuls of confetti scattered over paths and banks competed with wandering herds of cows along most roads. I so wish that I could paint!

Tomorrow promises more wonders as we travel westward to Svaneti, the region with some of the highest mountains and glaciers in the Caucasus but I have still to unwrap the whirlwind of days in the modern-ancient Armenia. So stories of Svaneti will have to await for another day.