Svaneti #1

Svaneti #1

The last thing I remembered before falling asleep was recognizing the triangular square below where the Stalin memorial is. I caught a glimpse of his childhood house, there preserved in the middle of the square under the plastic roof, grimy with years of industrial pollution, cars driving slowly on the roads around. Next to the city, a broad river thick with silt splayed back and forth across the valley, the patterns of the waterways making long, pointed teardrop shaped sand bars of tan sand streaked with black.

I woke up and we were in the mountains, the whir of the engines suddenly snapping into a tremendous roar as my ears popped. We were jostling through the mountains, our prop jet shadow sweeping up towards us then just as quickly dropping completely out of sight as the topography surged in an undulating tropical storm sea below us. We cleared a final ridge by countable meters, and stared in awe at the majestic peaks of Mount Ushba, directly through the cockpit window ahead. Everyone whispered excitedly, or rather yelled but it sounded like whispering, and we all craned to catch a glimpse of the famous double-peaked Matterhorm of the Caucasus. Only two weeks ago, two of the most famous Georgian alpinists, leading Dutch climbers up what would have been their third ascent, perished on Ushba in a fierce storm. This week, reports of a Canadian dying on the mountain had only just come in.

The sky was bright blue, the steep slopes covered in dark green forests except for the gray-brown of past landslides and precipices leaning over river gorges. The Svanetian highlands! Mestia, the capital city, came into view below, and our pilot took the opportunity to show off his skills in our little pea-jumper. Swooping from side to side, we glimpsed tin roofs side by side with medieval towers, poking through the melee of houses and gardens below. After a pass over the town, we banked sharply, turning one hundred eighty degrees, and plummeted to a grass runway without decreasing throttle. I gulped as I glanced out the window in time to see the grass rushing by us at impossible speeds. Shuddering ground contact... the moment before touchdown is endless as one realizes the fragility of the biological body when moving at high speeds; I watched as our pilot threw the throttle back, felt the sudden slam of wind on the wings as the flaps turned up, and we lurched against our seatbelts as the plane screamed to a taxi-trot, a cloud of dust catching up with us as we rolled in.

Luca squeeled, I clapped, and the Georgian parents with three kids next to me sighed with relief. We all helped each other pass down our luggage, and stepped into Svaneti, a voyage few people in history have ever taken so quickly. In the times of Georgian kings and major invasions every generation by Muslim neighbors, Svaneti was the last bastion of Georgian strength. The museum contains an incredible collection of 10th-12th century bibles, gold and silver wrought icon covers, wooden backed painted icons, and precious jewelry, all secreted away here over the centuries by lowland kings and monasteries under attack. What would have taken days if not weeks to travel, we jumped over in fifty minutes, it’s almost not right. How can one call this region remote if the journey takes such a short time? Of course, two days of airport frustration is a strong enough deterent that not many have been able to make the voyage so easily.

This must be the most beautiful airport in the world. There are two buildings near the runway, neither of which appear to have anything to do with airline facilities but were probably pre-runway structures. Otherwise there is a broad river full of chunking mountain boulders bouncing down from a gap in the green gorge upstream. Downstream one glimpses the signs of civilization in the forms of stone fortrees towers poking their wary eyes above the trees on the river plateau. Peaks in the distance are snow covered, the air is fresh and cool, the sun bright and hot on the skin. Our runway returns to grazing land as cows begin to migrate back into onto the closely cropped turf.

We pile into four wheel drive jeeps and squeal out of there down a gravel track towards the towers. Svaneti!