Stranded in a Georgian guesthouse: My fidgets in the Caucasus
It was a sheer drop off the cliff face the whole way. Wherever we went, pot-holed shite roads snaked along sure-death drops. The driver, bent over the steering wheel and narrowly missing collisions with all upcoming traffic (including stray cows), was transfixed on the road ahead and getting us to Khulo as quickly and (un)safely as possible. Of course, he allowed time for his several cigarette breaks, and to pick up a wooden milking stool for a standing passenger.
We’re in a marshrutka, heading to the Adjarian mountain town of Khulo for a theoretically restful weekend. Angie and I were coming from a few days enjoying the grey, pebbly beaches of Batumi along the Black Sea, a relaxing scene only interrupted by the odd vendor flogging fruit pastries or khachapuri from large grey totes and a stray dog hunting a gormless pidgeon. After a minor loss in one of the many smokey casinos where Ang was the only lady not working, it was time to freshen up and feel whole again away from sin. And thus, and so, we somehow arrive (un)safely to mountainous Khulo, and start traipsing vertically up the steep hill of the town to hunt down our guesthouse.
20 minutes gone and still no closer to it, we ask a local guy for some help. He makes a quick call, and tells us (in Russian) to wait on the nearest stone wall and look out for “Nissan”. It’s fuckin boiling. Our legs are toast. Nissan, whether indeed a Nissan or the nickname for a local, sounds good.
Sure enough, a few minutes later an X-Trail rolls past in the dusty, stony “road” (this is 100% 4X4 territory, unlike Marylebone High Street), and a John C. Reilly-faced man leans out. We nod at each other, he with a Georgian nod, my British nod in response, Angie’s warm smile to accompany it all, and we pile in with our must-have-to-be-a-real-traveler collection of Osprey backpacks.
Amongst more (I think) Russian words, he does mention “Booking.com”, and with this plus his familiar and nice John C. Reilly face I feel a smidgen of confidence that this is a good guy who could be our host, even as we drive further and further away from the town on dirt roads not found on Google Maps…
Let it be known that I am a city boy, concrete jungle aficionado, fan of pollution and smelly underground seats. When I think of remote areas, I think of chopped up city boys in deep chest freezers, next to some McCain oven chips, a half-finished chicken pie, and some money in tin foil that toothless rural man that has gleefully killed said city boys is trying to hide from Inland Revenue. Needless to say, as the dust continued to shroud the Nissan and we moved further from any semblance of a 7-Eleven or a McFlurry, I was unsure of how proceedings would, proceed.
After a much longer than expected drive we reach our guesthouse to be welcomed with open arms. Mama Iya serves us tea in the guests’ upstairs sitting room, and chats with us while her hubby tootles off in the Nissan. She tells us she’s a local civil servant, while her husband the driver, is a detective. Initially, I think that the husband’s job as a detective should add another layer of legitimacy (atop his John C Reilly face). But then I’m wondering, while eating an underripe peach and chuckling along with Iya to a joke I didn’t get, that as a detective he’s probably very adept at covering up a double homicide. Especially if he gets his wife, kids and in-laws (who are all in the same house in a remote hamlet perfect for a Dr Zhivago remake) in on it as well.
While some fears linger on, Iya shows us her veggie patch, which along with a dazzle of ugly fuckin’ chickens is besieging her house from three sides. It soon becomes abundantly clear that Iya is, in fact, infectiously delightful and a world champion of a human. Clad in a dress with Norma Jean on the front, she picks carrots, sour crab apples, green beans, potatoes and other stuff, eager for us to try all that she’s cultivating. All the while her delightful little daughter, who from certain angles looks like a sweeter John C Reilly, follows on.
I begin to feel much more at ease. After taking a turn round the hamlet and being offered some more tart fruit, this time by a local Georgian Mother Theresa-type (read big smile, long black skirt, and a scattering of whiskers), Iya serves up a feast. A feast that we would soon see as typical of an evening under her roof. Delicious plates of homemade khachapuri, kebabs, aubergines with walnuts, and much more. All washed down with funky, cider-y, homemade wine. Despite the seemingly impenetrable language barrier between Iya’s Georgian and our Engish/American, we manage as a group to banter along, translating the odd word in our phones. Toward the end of dinner while watering her geraniums, Iya taps away on google translate and flashes up her phone:
“So you are both 30. Do you have children?”
“No” [we reply, flashing up my phone]
“So are you lazy or unemployed?,” Iya’s phone reads, and she continues to chuckle away and tend to her fauna.
The next morning, we wake up to a table full to the edges of with breakfast, again mostly from Iya’s garden and all from her kitchen — sweet sweet plum juice, fibrous raspberry jam, very salty local cheese, and “boreki”, washed down with black tea and coffee. Today’s plan is to take a Soviet-era cable car across the valley below to reach a village on the other side. Enjoy the vistas, stroll about a bit, then return. However I soon begin to question whether we’d survive the cable car trip, and when I clap eyes on the rusty, red box arrive rammed with people creaking toward us, my decision is made for me. I wish Angie bon voyage as she piles on choc-full of gumption, and I take a few hours to stroll around Khulo while she risks death there and back.
While all the buildings I pass are defiantly square-concrete-ugly, the town feels welcoming thanks to the locals smiling peacefully from their shop stoops and the odd cow ambling about, mistaking a thistle for premium fodder. Despite Google’s generous attempts to list cafes dotted around the town, they turn out to mostly be one-chair beauty “saloons”. Yes, saloons, with posters of stars from about 15 years ago like Orlando Bloom. In the end, I give up and head into one of the many little minimarts to continue testing my resolve for the local tarragon soft drink, which I really want to like and hope by the end of the trip I do. I’m pleasantly surprised that I’m happy walking around, not finding a cafe, and watching the bees besiege an opened watermelon at a fruit stall. Once Angie gets back safely from her death box we make our way back to the house of love.
Later back at the guesthouse, Iya invites us to make khachapuri. As her black-clad-mother-in-law watches on from a sturdy bench in the corner of the tight kitchen, we roll out the dough into large discs and dump truckloads of salty, funky cheese in the middle. Then, its folded over and laid out in a cast iron pan to cook away on the stove, while Iya’s children switch between YouTube videos of Georgian folk songs and Putin’s face flickers on the TV. In wrapping up our cooking and sitting around the kitchen table, an old man comes in and drops off eggs as I think “could this get more alien to me yet so fuckin’ welcoming at the same time?!”. We turn to tuck into what readily becomes a full banquet of breads, melons, jams, and more, all washed down with thick, sedimentary Turkish coffee.
Continuing the cross-cultural banter via google translate, Iya asks us to connect on social media. She seems a little bewildered by Angie’s profile pic of her hugging a baby goat, and compares it to her more conventional profile pic, smiling away with her husband. “Your goat has changed,” she writes, chuckling and pointing at my face and then the goat pic, surely implying that far from just hugging the baby goat, Ang was in fact married to it before I came along. We laugh in unison, surrounded by the breads and under the watchful eyes of Iya’s mother-in-law, still benched for now, and Putin.
Soon it’s time to wrap up for the night, and the next morning we head out from our peaceful stay in the mountains, fit to burst from bread and jams. As we drive away, passing the local shop where I’d bought a Georgian-brand cola that tasted of leaking gas, it’s hard to quantify how welcoming Iya and her family have been, putting fussy ol’Rupes at ease plus managing some banterous exchanges despite no common language. I feel guilty for my initial misgivings about John C Reilly face and his wilderness abode, and recall that I never even set eyes on a deep-chest freezer during our peaceful retreat. Always trust a bloke in a stray Nissan, I guess.