Living in the South Caucasus it would be impossible not to have any problems and they all started even before we left Baku. Well, apparentely the Baku-Tbilisi night train was not an option for us since there is a gender segregation and we'd be all spread around the train. That's why we had to take a bus, which was in fact cheaper (12 AZN) but not as convenient. We left slightly after 11PM to get to Tbilisi around 10AM. From there we immediately took a matrioshka (a name we now use for a marshrutka since some people can never learn new words!) to another part of the city from where we took a taxi straight to Kazbegi, a village up in the northern part of Georgia, very close to the Russia border (and South Osethia...). The mountaious view was incredible!
It was also our first opportunity to try chaczapuri and chinkali - two most popular Georgian dishes and as we soon found out, our daily meals! It was also a beginning of our obsession with the socks they were selling over there. Sock and 3kg of tangerines - what else a tourist might need?
Our trip was quite intense, we wanted to see as much as we could during the week of our stay in Georgia and for that reason next morning we took a marshrutka back to Tbilisi to change to another one that would take us to Akhaltsikhe, the town 20km away from, this time, Turkish border. From there we needed to get to Sabara's monastery and here we realized how popular Georgia is for Polish people. They were everywhere! As soon as we got out of a marshrutka a taxi driver came up to us offering his ride. How excited he got when he found out there're 2 Polish girls in our group! Nodari had a lot of stories to tell on the way to the monastery: mostly about tourists from Poland. As many stories as our stron fear of falling from the snow caped montanious road! Luckily we had to push the car only once, and we fell on ice only to land on our feet :)
Later Nodari showed us a good place to eat, and again we stuffed ourselves with chaczapuri, chinkali, kebab and his homemade wine that he gave us as a present! If you heard about Azerbaijani hispitality, forget about it! Georgians really know how to do it!! After an amazing meal we visited a castle in the center of Akhaltsikhe from which we had an incredible view on the whole town.
We finished our trip with Nodari at his house where he wanted to share with us some more wine - of course in a Georgian style!
From Akhaltsikhe we took a taxi to see Vardzia. On the way we stopped to visit some more castles and monasteries only to get to our final destination when it was already getting dark. We decided it's best to find our guest house and start sight seeing the next morning. What happened was, it turned out the guest house we read about in our travel book was working only during the season, in the summer. They wouldn't even host us because there was no hot water in the place. That's when we had some troubles with the taxi driver who turned out to be a great philosopher saying we shoul've have listened to him before and trow our book away since a book from 2012 (!) is apparently too old and wrong. Well, eventually he helped us find another place to sleep for which we were very thankful because it was freezing cold outside!!
In the morning we wanted to get a marshrutka to Vardzia, the place we wanted to see before. Well, we should've known that if a bus is scheduled for 10AM it will be there no sooner than 1030AM... For a solid half an hour we were trying to warm ourselves by dancing on the street. At least the sheep had fun - we were freezing! It was worth it though, Vardzia - a city in the mountain, was incredible!
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