Branching Out: Svaneti

Afew weeks ago I was in the tourism information center on Seti Square in Mestia. This is an understaffed place of hard-working people who struggle to help the many foreigners who come to Svaneti, especially during the busy summer season. A surprising number of free takeaways are available, including the new maps of most of Georgia's regions and some nicely detailed local hiking maps. And, now, a book bringing together a good set of services from villages all over the Mestia region: places to stay, horse owners, drivers, pilgrimages, trails, eateries and guides. It's even trilingual, in Georgian, English and Russian together, and I was gratified to find my guest house listed, too.

Now, with our new 2008 Toyota 4Runner in action, we can also offer driving, anything from pickups off the main road 1 km away to trips as far as the client is willing to pay, on most if not all of the roads that Svaneti challenges one with. (Well, the one from Mestia up to the cross and Koruldi Lakes was quite hair-raising for me a couple of years ago, with its deep, wide gully running along the center and meandering maliciously here and there. I might not be willing to do that again- I’d rather pay someone who actually enjoys that kind of driving!)

A current guest and his specific wishes also allowed me to test how else we can help. A German based in the USA, where he works for national parks, he managed to do some guidebook and internet research and come up with a few places of interest to him of which I had not even heard, including a monastery among Latali's many churches. But he desperately wants to avoid areas and routes already overrun with tourists; anything as wide as a logging trail is anathema. Solitude and quite if demanding walks, please!

The first walk was rather a disaster, due to changing expectations and realities, guides unknown to me hitherto, and not having a native English speaker on the tour. Neither he nor the local guides, who I think were not ready for the requirements of such a foreigner (nor he for theirs, to be fair), came away satisfied. Rinse, repeat, as they say.

Now he's off on horseback, a new thing for him, with two of my village friends to an abandoned village called Usgviri, where he has asked them to leave him for about two weeks (all his responsibility), then come and get him again for the journey back to my house. This is an example of trickle-down economic benefits of a guest house into the whole village, and I'm keen to see how it plays out. The men have impressed him so far with their questions and professionalism, so I have high hopes that this will go much better.

He has his own tent, food, ice ax, camera equipment and all else needed, and apparently will enjoy the solitude, exploring here and there and resting in between expeditions. No stranger to this: he had to bang a black bear on the nose with that ax when it poked its head into his tent in Alaska, then it waited outside and in a tree above his tent for more than an hour before giving up in disgust. He has no cell phone; not that it would do him any good anyway where he'll be, as there is neither coverage nor electricity there. Just houses falling back into the wildness of encroaching nature, and tower stumps.

One of the guides was just there a few days prior, which allows important fresh news of how the trail is on foot and for horses. This information is crucial to success or failure here. They set off in the early evening, crossing the Enguri to overnight in another village, on the edge of being abandoned itself, so as to give them a whole day to cross the mountain wall south of us and continue as long as daylight allows.

I crossed that wall myself, also on horseback, in 2005 with a local friend. Just a little way over the other side, to where other villagers were pasturing their cows for the summer, sending the cheese back home once a week. But that relatively near location gave spectacular enough views of the Caucasus to the north of us. All the peaks were cloud-hidden: except the one which must not be, Ushba, magnificently rearing up above it all.

If this test run goes well, connecting guides and visitors will become another item in our portfolio, along with the driving. We'll know soon, after a report from the returning men.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1300 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Tony Hanmer