Moving slowly through the Caucasus

Moving slowly through the Caucasus
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Recently, an overly optimistic GPS device and the Deepwater Horizon of rental cars left me and a friend broken down on a rocky path in the Lower Caucasus Mountains. We had been heading for the resort town of Mestia, reputedly gorgeous, high in the imposing mountains that are Georgia’s natural border with Russia to the north.

Where were we? On a green hillside at the head of a gorgeous valley, a lake filling the bottom. More broadly, a 12-day trip around Georgia and Armenia, two countries off the tourist beaten path, constituting what my friend calls “hard touring.” Our rental car had been organized by our Tbilisi hotel, 35 Euros per day, cash, with no questions, credit card, driver’s license nor ID needing to be shown.

The Russians fought long wars in the 19th century to subjugate the Caucasus. Tolstoy, Lermontov and other artists romanticized dissolute cads escaping with their regiments from Moscow’s gambling debts and mistresses to the simple, stern mountain people singing their simple, stern folk music, where they (in modern parlance) “find themselves”. The villages are still there, for example along the Georgian Military Road, built during Tsarist times as a path through the mountains. And Georgia is still an itch the Russians feel needs scratching. These days resort towns along the Road feature young hipsters scrambling north from Tbilisi, looking for work and dreaming of emigrating. At Kazbegi near the border, under the gaze of the must-see 14th century hilltop church called Tsminda Sameba, a young mixologist stirred my Moscow Mule while remarking: “I want to move to Canada. Nothing ever happens there.”

He wore a fashionably scraggly beard -- with the exception of his puffy coat and smartphone looking appropriately (for the setting) like a religious ascetic. If you want to fit in as a man in the Caucasus, it is best to start growing a beard. Men and women alike also boast Frida-like eyebrows. In extreme cases, beards and eyebrows link up to form a circle.

If GPS devices are capable of adopting national traits and mannerisms, then that explains why our bandy-legged, independent-minded device rebelled and sent our ill-tempered Volkswagen Bora with 180,000 km on it down a boulder-strewn dirt road. Steam was escaping from under the car’s hood; red warning lights pinged across the dashboard, leaving us feeling like fighter pilots with a swarm of MiGs on our tail. A half-mile down the deserted track, all the oil emptied out of the car and it wheezed to a halt. The GPS deployed the whip hand, insisting the car move, but it was deceased.

Early on in the trip, the cheap prices (hotels on average $50 per night), potable wines, architecture, youthful buzz, reminded us of some other time and place. Finally, in Yerevan, Armenia, my friend put his finger on it, breathing in reverent tones: “This must be what it Prague was like, right after The Wall fell.”

The scenery is spectacular, tourist-free museums, churches, castles and snow-capped mountains, rushing streams and rivers, excellent food prepared with fresh local ingredients, sloping fields of wildflowers, grass meadows that would be the envy of a PGA greens keeper.

If you have problems placing the Caucasus countries, you’re not alone: they have the same issues. Anatolia in Asia Minor is to the west of Georgia, yet the latter fly EU flags at the slightest provocation. Yerevan is a café culture, unshaven men playing backgammon in establishments lining leafy boulevards and city parks, as if in a provincial French capital (or a Tampa Au Bon Pain). Even the normally decisive Wikipedia hedges its bets, including Armenia under entries for both Europe and Asia.

The Georgians meanwhile are more patriotically American and Christian than South Carolina. Perhaps because of this, I found myself slow to deny strangers’ assumptions I was American (I’m from Canada). In Georgia a tamada is the toastmaster, nominated for the evening. One evening in Tbilisi, we were invited to a gathering of a half-dozen young men. Our tamada was an internal affairs officer with the Tbilisi police. Within five minutes of meeting, he was passionately toasting my dead ancestors (something a repressed Anglo-Saxon might never do in a lifetime) with shots of a grape-based vodka, chacha. He subsequently spoke with feeling of national poets and the epic poems they had wrought and, pivoting abruptly, I felt, his love for George W. Bush. Later we were photobombed by an elderly couple who had been having dinner nearby and wanted in on the action.

The South Caucasus countries, including Azerbaijan, are caulked into a tube of land between regional powers, and the Black and Caspian seas. Conflicts simmer all around: South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Chechnya, the lead-weight legacy of Georgia’s war with Russia in 2008. Armenia’s borders to the west (Turkey) and east (Azerbaijan) are currently closed. Mount Ararat is Armenia’s national symbol but infuriatingly is in eastern Turkey, teasingly just out of reach to the citizens of Yerevan. One tragedy that looms is more than one hundred years old but still making news: the Armenian genocide. (Or non-genocide, depending on your point of view). This past spring the German parliament voted to label the killings as genocide, prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador, and for death threats to be sent to German MPs.

Outside Yerevan’s city center is the stunning Armenian genocide museum, sweeping granite-gray lines set on a hilltop. Worth spending a half-day at, it tells the story of the Medz Yeghern, documenting the killing of up to 1.5 million people, with April 24 being a national day of remembrance.

If you romanticize smoke-filled dive bars and you’re not already dead from lung disease, these are countries for you. Both Tbilisi and Yerevan have scores of cool bars and restaurants, many of which are located in basements where young and old chain-smoke, the atmosphere being like inside a ship’s funnel. (Among men, Armenia has second-highest rate of lung cancer anywhere in the world, trailing only the black-lunged Hungarians. http://www.wcrf.org/int/cancer-facts-figures/data-specific-cancers/lung-cancer-statistics.)

Thankfully, I did not see a single example of Armenia’s most famous export. French writer Guy de Maupassant supposedly said that he ate dinner in the Eiffel Tower restaurant every night "because it's the only place in Paris from where you can't see the Eiffel Tower." In my case, “I go to Armenia, because it is the only place on the globe where I do not have to keep up with the Kardashians.” The famous Armenian-Americans were nowhere in sight, despite/because it being their homeland.

Many of the tourist highlights we took in are tinged with tragedy – cave monasteries used by fleeing Christians escaping Roman persecution, or the surreal Stalin museum in Gori, Georgia, his hometown, which focuses on the devoted smiling patriarch while steadfastly ignoring the gulags, famines, purges and terrors. There is even a supermarket in town emblazoned with his photo above the door.

Ten days in each country allows you to capture the highlights. If you have time on your hands, as we did, one way to travel between the two is by overnight train. Forty dollars will get you a first-class berth in the sleeper carriage on the overnight "bullet" train from Tbilisi to Yerevan. At Tbilisi two Soviet-era babushkas issued us bedding and a small blue towel. (Sheets: low thread count, not Egyptian cotton). Despite the presence of a dining car, authorities warned us that there is no food or drink sold on the train, so my friend and I loaded up on a selection of Georgian wines and hunkered down in our compartment.

The train left on time, and meandered through the fading light. At the border it stopped at a small station. Under a full moon, and with a swift-moving river audible somewhere nearby, agents walked the tracks, looking under the train with flashlights. A stray dog on the platform barked at the carriage door, daring someone to step off. This animal seemed to be an unofficial employee, auditioning for a position with the border guards, who largely ignored him.

The guards then hopped on the train and walked up and down the passageway. An Armenian customs agent knocked and entered our compartment, then sat on my bed with his laptop to enter my passport details. At one point he looked up and stared at me. “Are you going to Azerbaijan?" I said I didn't even know what that meant.

Once we cleared customs, around 1 a.m., the female train staff felt confident enough in our moral fortitude to hand out pillows. The issuing of pillows seemed significant, and I felt gratitude. A few short hours later, in the early morning, the door swung open and the same pillow, as well as sheets, were ripped out from under me.

Before that, we were stuck I n the mountains with our expired car. Luckily, passing farmers called the local police, who rolled up in a Toyota Hilux pickup truck. Language is a problem: few people over the age of 30 in either country speak English. The police officer was Georgian-Belarussian who also spoke German. We had English, French and Spanish on our side. But several quarts of 10W40 blotting the natural beauty testified to our predicament, and the officer made a few calls. I was fortunate that my traveling partner is patient, good-humored, and enjoys adventure – he had once sailed a dugout canoe down the Congo River.

Our stopping place had at first seemed a lonely spot, but a steady stream of vehicles processed by. Few could resist disembarking from ageless Kamaz trucks and Georgian-packed Lada cars, inter-generational families taking their turn to get underneath our car and confirming that, yes, all the oil had indeed drained out. For some reason these inspections left me feeling mildly violated.

Throughout the Georgian countryside and even in city suburbs, cows wander freely, secure in Hindu-levels of tolerance among the population. So in addition to people, we had several of the ruminants wander over, replicating the human behavior, except they didn't check our fluid levels – they could plainly see the oil all over the path.

By the time a tow-truck arrived three hours later, there were 10 or so people spectating. Knots of men stood under trees smoking or urinating. Others sat on logs. As we left, the police officer who had stood by us refused our offer of 20 Lari. He also didn't take our names, or fill out a report. He was unarmed, had no radio, no handcuffs, nothing except the blue khakis and embroidered golf shirt he stood in.

At a scrapyard in Kutaisi, a city to the south, our car was offloaded and a stranger handed over the keys to a Mazda with even more mileage on it. As we left, he was under the hood working on our car – doubtless he got it working.

A day late, we made it to Mestia, spectacular as billed. Though I would advise anyone visiting either of these countries – which are well worth it -- to choose a travel partner who takes minor disasters in stride – in fact welcomes them. And rent an SUV or 4 x 4 from a reputable company.

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