Gudauri

My friend Laura called last night and said, ‘I need to get out of the city! I’m thinking of going skiing in Gudauri tomorrow, do you want to come?!’ I said hell yes, canceled everything else planned for the morrow, and hit the road early!

Luarsab was over until half past midnight ranting and raving about all the details of turn of the century chant-related heads living in and around Tbilisi... but still I managed to get up at 7am and get my be-metroed butt over to the insanely chaotic bus station. Laura was lost, but miracle of science cell phones got us located and we piled in for the two hour ride to Gudauri ski resort in the North Caucasus.

To get there we went straight up the military highway that connects Russia with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and points further south. Amazing road, amazing views probably, but it was snowing and so fogged in we saw nothing. Instead I jabbered endlessly about Orthodoxy, Waldorf education, and favorite travels.... oh bore.

Laura is an ex-lawyer who decided to dedicate her life to Christian service. She was in Romania and now she is in Georgia, working with Internally Displaced kids (refugees from Abkhazia) and orphans. She also sings bass... in Carl’s foreigner’s choir Okros Stumrebi (Golden Guest). Somehow, she has a great ear for listening, and led me on and on story after story. I realized I’ve been somewhat starved of talking, as conversations I’m mostly engaging in here are of the lighter variety or are focused on particular Georgian chant subjects. With Wes gone, no more late night Wesleyan style conversations for me.

At one point, the marshutka came up behind a slow moving car. We stopped, and our handy bus driver helped them push the car up the incline and off to the side so that we could get past. Another time, before passing an ancient looking snowplow, the driver hopped out and manually lifted an enormous chunk of snow from the road, throwing it on a pile in front of the plow. He also ordered everyone to the back of the van to provide more weight to the back tires going up the icy-slushy cutbacks. I was glad I couldn’t see the frightening dropoffs that no doubt loomed over every corner of this crazy road.

We arrived. Nothing to see at all. Complete white-out. But two helpful girls led us for a half mile walk around some buildings and we eventually found the ski rental place. As I was putting on my boots, a Georgian snowboarder came in. I said, ‘hey, how is it up there?’ in a friendly voice. ‘Terrible, really bad...’ he said, ‘the snow is too deep,’ gesturing to indicate chest-deep snow. Great.

An older man came in from the hotel in some fancy gear. I said, ‘gamarjobat,’ which means ‘victory to you’ and is the typical Georgian greeting. He replied in Russian, and we established that he was actually an Austrian here on a guided skiing trip. I asked him about conditions on the mountain and confided I had not been skiing since I was about sixteen. He said, ‘if I were you, being a beginner, I would not go skiing today in these conditions. Very difficult conditions.’

But Laura and I shouldered our skiis and headed downhill to the lift-station. On the way, a man was just wading out of a snow drift. He had a blond mustache so I figured he was with the German-Austrian crew (wrong -he was Ukrainian), so I asked him about the slopes:

‘This is terrible skiing conditions up there now. To my mind, this is very bad situation. I made three runs today, very bad, very bad, no more for me... The second run I had problem with my glasses and I could see nothing, the third run I got stuck in deep snow. The fog is thick, to my mind nothing is possible to see. I have no technique for skiing deep snow, it is one meter, I ski normal surfaces. This is not skiing, this is... fight for survival.’

With this encouragement in mind, I sweet talked the lift operator out of buying lift tickets for the day, promising we would only be going up once (and with God’s help coming down too!). The lifts were pretty typical three-person benches, only one of three happened to be working today. The mountain was deserted.

On the way down, Laura proved to be even worse at skiing than I, and spent the majority of her time fishing skiis out of the snow drifts! We did see a most peculiar sight though: clustered around a newly piled ski-jump were about fifteen people in nice jackets and ski-helmets. About six people were standing shoulder to shoulder above the jump, side-stepping up the mountain in synchronized little steps, apparently to tamp down the approach run. There is something peculiar about this, I thought, and realized, these cannot be Georgians! No group of Georgians can be organized enough to stand in a sideways queue, tamp-tamping uphill in unified steps! Sure enough, we came closer and heard German being yelled back and forth.

After our one hour run, with Laura recording more time on her butt than on her skiis, but bravely continuing downhill, we made it to the restaurant for a hardy pasta, soup, and salad meal.

The place was pretty nice, with a bunch of foreigner’s in there, and just a few Georgians. When leaving, we spotted six Germans getting towed out of the parking lot behind a snow tractor -they were heading for the top of the mountain holding onto little pieces of plastic and rope! We said to hell with these crazies, we’re outta here.

The marshutka took us home, and a beer in Tbilisi finished off a great day!