Day 5: Gergeti

It was a beautiful sunny day in the mountains when we woke up this morning and stepped out onto the hotel balcony.

The plan for today was to visit Gergeti church, a small church perched on a hill above the village of Stepantsminda. There are two different ways to get to the church: either by hiking or by taxi. Helen and I decided we were going to try the former method, while Mom and Dad opted for the second method.

After breakfast in the hotel, Helen and I set off on our hike. Almost as soon as we left the hotel and started walking downhill towards the centre of the village, we had an amazing view of the snow-capped Mount Kazbek in the distance. If you look carefully at the top of the smaller hill covered in dark trees, then you'll just be able to make out the church on top.

Some helpful signs informed us that we were quite a long way both from London and Beijing, but comparatively close to Beirut.

The church is probably a bit clearer in this picture below; as we got further down the hill towards the village it was silhouetted against the snow of the bigger mountains behind.

When we got down to the village, we found it was rather chaotic. Crossing the road was a challenge and there were multiple stray dogs, who seemed to show more interest in us than we expected. One of them started to follow us, which was rather disconcerting.

We turned off on a road towards the village of Gergeti, which began to slope uphill. It was steep, but fairly easy to walk on.

And the views really were amazing.

We soon reached some signs, which informed us of various routes we could take...

...and the church itself became a bit more visible above us.

As we began to emerge out of the far side of Gergeti village we passed a field with a horse and what looked like a very young foal.

There isn't very much in the village of Gergeti.

This part of Georgia is beautiful, but still a little rough around the edges and not quite cleaned up for tourism, as this random pile of tyres perhaps illustrates.

The tower in the distance is the remains of the Gergeti fortress, and that meant we were on the right track.

The path began to lead uphill but was easy to follow and fairly straightforward.

Soon, however, we ended up on a path that was less enjoyable! We were trying to follow some instructions we'd read online, which recommended keeping left and sticking alongside the stream. That led to us ending up on a rather sketchy path down by the water, below the much better path from where I took this photo afterwards.

It was very narrow and difficult and made worse by the fact that our canine follower decided to come up behind me and nudge me with his nose; presumably this was supposed to be encouraging, but let's just say it didn't feel very encouraging at the time.

You can perhaps see a bit more clearly in the below photo where we'd come from: the trail just below the one I'm standing on.

Here's a selfie we took to celebrate surviving the experience and being on a bigger path again

This path really was much better.

As we walked along it we began to pass some really lovely Alpine flowers.

As we got higher, the path began to get a bit rockier.

We realised we hadn't quite ended up on the right path from the instructions we were trying to follow; we should have been somewhere down there by the cows.

Never mind. There were plenty of other people going this way and it was clearly leading to the church.

Our faithful follower was sometimes behind us...

...and sometimes in front of us having a rest when we were too slow. There was another lady ahead of us being accompanied by a different stray dog, so this was obviously a thing.

Meanwhile the views continued to be fantastic...

...and we continued to pass some interesting flowers.

A sign informed us we were making good progress...

...and soon we could indeed see the church appearing on the horizon.

That was good news because it was starting to feel like quite a tiring climb.

I guess the altitude didn't help; we were really quite close to the beginning of the snow now.

Mom and Dad had messaged by this point to say that they had made it to the top in their taxi now. We were hoping to meet them at the top, but we still had a way to do. We rejected the very steep and direct path to the church which you can see leading upwards in the photo below...

...and instead decided to try a gentler route across a meadow.

The wildflowers here really were spectacular.

I particularly loved these dark blue ones; we think maybe they are gentians.

The church was starting to look a lot closer now.

We took a selfie with it

We passed horses...

...more flowers...

....and eventually the church appeared to be more or less on the same level as us.

Here it was!

A sign informed us that we were now at about 2,100 metres, having climbed about 300 metres to get to this point.

As we completed the final walk up to the church, Mom and Dad were on the way down in their taxi. We'd just missed them - never mind!

Finally - we made it to the top!

The church itself was very beautiful.

We put our headscarves on to look inside.

The views from up here were incredible too.

We could see all the way down to the village, including to our hotel which is the big long building above the village in the background.

And, of course, we could see lots of mountains.

We'd temporarily lost our follower partway up, but as we stopped and had a rest outside the church we saw him appearing!

He came over, put his head on my knee, licked my hand and then wandered off.

We decided to locate the toilets - so I could wash my hand if nothing else - and we found them in this very scenic location.

Unfortunately, they weren't quite so nice on the inside; squat toilets!

Now it was time to start our descent.

We thought that, rather than retracing our steps, we'd try to go back down via the path along the stream that we'd originally seen recommended on the internet. The first step was a nice stroll across this meadow.

We'd soon made a fair amount of progress and come down a reasonable distance from the church.

Unfortunately, after this point the path became incredibly difficult to find. We could see where it was supposed to be on the map, but that didn't often correspond to anything that visibly looked like a path on the ground.

Helen led us and it felt like we were succeeding at getting down closer towards the stream...

...until we came to this:

A landslide had washed away part of the path and left a hole in the landscape, which was bigger and deeper than it looks in the picture above. We eventually managed to clamber over the rocks and up the other side, but we were not impressed!

After that there was a clearer path, though it still required concentration to negotiate.

We passed some horses...

...and before too long we were almost down at the level of the stream.

Our next obstacle was cows!

Luckily they seemed quite placid and didn't completely block the path. The path was better in places now...

...though still a bit challenging in the odd spot.

We were extremely happy when we realised we'd made it down far enough to be able to see the tower of the Gergeti fortress again.

Here is our celebration selfie!

By this point we were almost back. We took a slightly different path down to the one we'd come up on this morning, which resulted in a final scree slope to negotiate.

Then we were back down at road level. Phew!

Walking along the road into Stepantsminda was a joy compared to some of the paths we'd been on. Now we could see the church high above us in the distance again.