Syria

I feel a lot better when waking up in Batumi, Georgia, my guts just about holding themselves together. We get ready to check out, gearing up to make the 1200+ overland journey to into Syria. Whilst walking to the bathroom, my guts prolapse. Then they repeat the process five times in quick succession, with increasing violence. I can't even arch my spine forward to zip up my fucking money belt without darting my panicked eyes up at Christina, as she either registers a false alarm or gives her snout a pre-emptive pinch. It seems unlikely we'll make this journey without a very public outrage. On the previous days train journey from Tbilisi, I desecrated the water closet with such unfathomable inhumanity that when Christina tried to use it later on, the guard simply wagged her finger and said, "No! Too dirty!"

For once, I'll spare the details. I resort to punching both feet through a plastic carrier bag, thus forming some sort of PVC diaper, crossing off two sexual peccadilloes at once.
 

 

Giving them a trial potter about the room, I sound like a box of Christmas decorations being brought down from the loft, crinkling, rustling and causing me to sweat profusely. Enraged, I rip them off like some bizarre and infantile Incredible Hulk.

Once we cross the border back into Turkey I borrow one of Christina's sanitary towels, in order to soak up the worst damage in a worst case scenario. I must have been a woman in the last past-life I inhabited, as I end up placing the towel exactly where my non-existent clunge is, and not where my by now decimated ring-piece is.  


(We have no photos from Syria. All our photos were lost. Consequently, all accompanying images here are borrowed. If anyone has a problem with me using their photos, contact me and I will be happy to remove...) 


Ar Raqqah 
The border at Akçakale led us through to customs and into a town which I believe is called Tell Abvad. What followed was one of those rare special moments that you mistakenly believe all travelling will be prior to setting off and before it dawns on you that ‘intrepid world travel’ basically amounts to filthy keyboards, long and tedious phone calls to Natwest, and billboards featuring Frank fucking Lampard. 

In Tel Abyad, a tiny dessert road made up of one long strip of shops, tattoo-faced Bedouin women stop to stare. A group of children spot us and run over, escorting us down the road jumping up and down with wide eyes. Men stop working in garages to come out into the street. We have no idea where we were heading. Our introduction to the jaw-dropping hospitality and kindness of the wonderful Syrian people came when a mechanic who looked like he didn't have much of a pot to piss in, insisted on driving us to a bus stop and going on to pay for us to get to Ar Raqqah. 

© Alen Ištoković

Once at the bus depot in Raqqah, the police assigned a tattooed 11 year old boy to make sure we got on the bus soundly. Again, we were gawped at by everyone, many coming close up for a decent stare. The police began clobbering some very small kids with a truncheon after they begged us for money. Registering Christina's horror, the cops started telling us that they were just playing and the penniless kids enjoy the 'game', regardless of the tears and terror in their eyes as they fled. We met an old dishevelled bloke who looked just like Karl Lagerfeld. He told us he is an American from New Jersey who was trained at Christian Dior in Paris until he came to Syria. He whispers comments about the Syrian leaders, which sound like gentle grumbling, though he looks around nervously before making them. 

A group of headscarved teen girls sit on a bench looking at us giggling. Their tittering morphs into expressions of shock as we walk closer to them. It's been 33 hours since we set off from Batumi and we are beyond shattered. I’m too exhausted to pay any mind to the tickle bothering my thigh. Only the girls’ contorting smiles and south-shifting glances cause me to look down, just in time to see the (pointlessly unsoiled) jam-rag roll down my thigh, exit my shorts, and land close to their feet. They are dumbfounded. The rare sight of a western male and he happens to have a monthly menstruation. I stare at the floor, mouthing "Oh God, Oh God...", for the eternal forty five minutes it takes for the bus to arrive.

Aleppo 
In Aleppo we are not allowed to use the internet without temporarily handing over our passports first. It's one thing banning Facebook, but do they fear that we have a USB teleportation device that will enable us to leave the stinking internet café and the country with secrets of national security? In the internet place, I'm joined by a young Syrian entrepreneur. He attempts to enlist my help in locating slaughter houses in Britain and Ireland in order for him to procure “…animal waste products for the manufacture of Syrian foods.” One can only fucking imagine. His descriptions lead to my gut-malady suddenly worsening. Fed-up with having spent our only full day in a dingy, smoke-filled hovel, sorting out boring shit we’d rather ignore, we try to make the most of the remains of it. We head to the souq, a huge labyrinth of stalls and shops. As it's a Friday, the holy day in Islam, almost all of them are closed and walking around is both eerie and fascinating. At one stall that is open, two Arabs manage to flog me a Bedouin headscarf, using such a succinct and well-rehearsed technique of hoodwinkery, that I walk away drunk with both awe and bewilderment. We exit the souq with the huge citadel in front of us. 

Citadel at Aleppo © Guillermo Guerini

Christina goes for a body scrub at a famed hamam. She enters through the saloon doors and is immediately confronted by a room full of naked Muslim women. Assuming that there would be an initial reception desk, followed by changing room before the nudity started, I follow her in before she spins around and stops me in my tracks. It could so easily have been me that entered first. As she gets pampered, I walk around the streets cursing my bad luck. She later tells me that the body scrubber sat eating bread in-between scrubbing her down and intermittently picking dead skin off of her own feet.

Library picture: What I believed I would have seen in the female hamam

   

The next day, we visit the Souq again, now operational and a different world. Syrian people are the friendliest I have ever met. We are constantly stopped and asked where we were from. The typical response being, “You are welcome in Syria!” bellowed from a huge smiling mouth. On the way to the souq, we pass a long queue outside a bread stall. One elderly gent is served his loaf, turns away from the counter, clocks us and immediately shoves his new loaf at us, imploring us to take it. At times the open-armed welcome became a trial. Just after the bread bloke, one chap stopped us, made us welcome in Syria, and implored us to come to his house for tea. Not waiting to get stuck for too long, we chug the brew standing outside his house, whilst he unfurls map after map, pointing obscure places we should visit, while I grit my teeth like a right twat.

Dead Cities/Apamea

From Hamma, a driver by the name of Faisel took us around the dead cities and the Roman ruins of Apamea. Apamea features the original Roman paving slabs which still have the imprints of the chariot wheels.

Our solitude is obliterated by a huge double-coach party of pensioners. Luckily, they have a guide who is leading them down the street at a snail’s pace as his lecture bores them to death and the sun incinerates them. We move quickly ahead.

Faisel then drops us at some ancient citadel or other and waits for us for in the furnace of his taxi. Bored before we’d even having paid and entered, instead of just heading straight back to the car and putting our driver out of his misery by telling him we are not interested, and ashamed of being seen as the philistines we are, we hide in an alcove throwing small pebbles at each other for twenty minutes before heading back.

Dead City of Sarjilla - © http://iguide.travel/Dead_Cities

Apamea - courtesy Taras Kalapun - CC-BY http://www.flickr.com/people/xslim/

Krak des Chevaliers

Faisel also nips us over to Krak des Chavaliers, considered to be one of the finest and most well preserved fortified castles in the world. It’s right top an’all
 

http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/1381ba/  © Jak BB

Faisel finally drops us of at Homs to get a coach to Palmyra. When you enter a bus station in Syria, loads of touts mob you, fighting for your custom. One such tout in Homs is a kid of about 12, but well over five and a half foot tall. His pants pulled right up to his chest, his face is stuck in an expression of permanent surprise. He has the closest thing to a real-life cartoon face I’ve ever seen. He looks like Alice the Goon’s son. He also has a perfectly round, squash ball-sized shiny lump sat under his left eye. Regardless of all this, there is something ‘cute’ about him. I shudder every time we lock eyes. When we get our tickets, I turn to Christina and say,

“That boy was...” and she cut me off immediately with,

“Yeah Ben, I know...”

My mum cut me off in exactly the same fashion in Blackpool about 23 years ago, when I first clasped eyes on a kid with Down’s syndrome and wanted answers. It was as if us seeing such a sight was some haunting, inexplicable happening that could never be spoken of again.

Alice the Goons kid, that is… Not the kid with Down’s at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Palmyra

We were fairly warned about Palmyra and how the locals deviate wildly from the customary kindness and hospitality one can be accustomed to in Syria. Palmyra really is a wretched fucking place. Once checked into a hotel, I venture out to get the sparse, grey fluff that grows about 200 miles away from my eyebrows shaved off. I leave Christina chatting to the kindly Bedouin hotel manager on the porch. Leaving them together sends a disconcerted wave through me, though I brush it off. When I return, she has locked herself in the room and is really freaked. It soon prevails that as soon as my back was turned the crafty fucker had suggested that they go to our room where he could help her relax with a ‘special Bedouin acupressure massage’, the most vowel-littered pretext to what would probably resulted in a rape/cheeky knee-trembler. Although I am fuming, she quickly makes me see that going down and slapping chops with some twat out in a Middle Eastern desert, isn’t going to result in me swaggering into the local saloon and having a whiskey chaser sent over to me by the townsfolk. We just move hotel.

A nasty, threatening vibe pervades throughout Palmyra. The kids fight with a ferocity rarely seen outside of a northern branch of Wetherspoons. Sat sipping tea on the main drag one balmy evening, two kids aged about nine, batter the dying fuck out of each other. A rock is found and is aimed at another face. One eventually proves himself the hardest by holding his subject tight around the throat with one hand, whilst taking off his leather belt with the other. When I enquire with a waiter if someone should perhaps intervene, he tells me,

“Oh don’t worry. They are brothers. This is Palmyra Street Academy…”

The ruins themselves are great but unless you have anything less than an amoebic interest in history that goes that far back, they are just nice to look at and potter about around. We happen by a stuffy old English archaeologist who’s taking his mates around the place. We follow them discreetly, eavesdropping and his expertise gives the place some context. He also moans that the site should have a £100 entrance fee and be reserved only for ‘the elite’, whoever the fuck they are. 
 

Palmyra © Manfred Schweda courtesy of http://www.thisfabtrek.com/journey/asia/syria/20091119-palmyra.php

The next morning, I insist we rise at 5am in order to walk up to the citadel to watch the sunrise over the ancient city. Christina is beastly from the moment the alarm goes off, bitching and sniping all the way there. Her misgivings are proved when we get up to the top of the hill. The view is shite and the sunrise about as spectacular as one you would expect in Hull on any day of the year. She’s fuming that I got her out of her kip.

Palmyra with citadel in background © Aleksandra Borzecka http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo225010.htm

Unable to be fucked with the long walk back, she insists we scale the rocks back down, cutting the time in half. We while away the awkward descent bickering, arguing the nutritional value of the English chip butty versus the Canadian Kraft Dinner. She’s mortified that we English encase our favorite heart-threatening carbohydrate in another carbohydrate. I’m just horrified by Kraft Dinner. 
 

        Vs 

All the talk of food leads us to some hovel for breakfast. When Christina goes to the toilet, an English couple sat at the table next us seem to be having a similar morning and the exact same relationship gripes:

HIM: (consulting a map) “I think first we should go and see the roman theatre…”

HER: “Well it won’t be a theatre will it… just some old rocks and pillars lay about…”

HIM: Well, try not to be so rude. There’s a lot to see here and it’s all interesting.

(Long tense pause, whilst staring at him enraged)

HER: Oh Shut up… And stop shoving food into your face!

I hide behind my menu, convulsing, until Christina comes back and picks up where the other girl left off.

Speaking of dictatorships, well-read non-Syrians seem to speak fairly kindly of the Syrian President, noting he’s trying hard regardless of the mongering his old fella got up to and his 99.9% share of every election. He got on my fucking nerves though, his dial plastered all over the place. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/83093440@N00/266402966

In this poster he’s got a wee smile on the go, though usually it’s a firm stare, giving the impression he’s watching everyone. One poster outside Palmyra even had his eyes enlarged behind the head, taking up the rest of the billboard. Sound as he’s said to be, what sort of a twat likes the idea of countless pictures of themselves all over the place? Can he not just join Facebook like every other vain fucker..? 

Damascus

‘As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

My own ‘Road to Damascus’ moment involves persecution from nothing with such biblical magnitude, just the Arctic air-conditioner and a deafening film playing on the TV. As I ignore the temperature plummeting, I cannot prevent the shocking aural violence interrupting Emmylou Harris’s dulcet tones. I look up at the TV just once and witness a scene where an elderly man stops the flailing fists of a young fat girl by catching her by both wrists and slamming his nut right into her face. 

I’ve been separated from Christina in what feels like a deliberate move by the coach driver and his lackey to have her at the front near them. After the other nights events I nervously crane my neck into the aisle at precise 30 second intervals for the duration of the journey. 

We visit the beautiful Umayad Mosque. Sitting in the huge courtyard, a local family comes over and sits with us and just staring, smiling, and taking countless photos of their kids sat with us. In terms of personal information, they just want to know where we are from and if we’re married, which of course in the Middle East, is always ‘yes’. When inside the mosque, close to the casket that is said to hold the chopped-off napper of Saint. John the Baptist, an old Muslim chap stares at me smiling, seemingly moved to tears just by witnessing a westerner in his mosque. It’s a great experience and one that the former Bush administration would be keen to keep out of the minds of Americans, Bush’s UN Ambassador John R. Bolton throwing Syria and its people onto his churlish "Beyond the Axis of Evil".

http://www.damascusroom.com/damascus.html

The Al-Hamidiyya Souq is huge, shafts of sunlight beaming in from the bullet holes in the roof, made from the machine guns of French fighter planes back in 1925.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/lXPZ7hwboOlP5SjTTlidcQ

We also visit the Sayidda Ruqayya mosque, a site visited by throngs of Iranian pilgrims. The mosque holds the remains of a four year old girl made famous in a decent Quranic yarn that can be read on-line. The upshot is that the room that only women can enter is full of hysterical Muslim pilgrims, wailing with grief. I only get to hear them, yet its Christina’s pale face when she emerges that tells the full story.

 

© http://sheikyermami.com/2010/11/02/no-sharia-here-look-away-nothing-to-see/

It takes a good few hours, and doesn’t have the friendlier vibe that Aleppo does, but Damascus is a great, great city and Syria just amazing. Now fuck off away from this blog, you useless twat...

Georgia

Shortly after departing Goreme, Turkey, my guts collapsed. The chances to use a toilet, or even an array of toilets, had been ample but ten minutes later, not a light on the horizon. I calmly ask the male trolley-dolly when we shall be stopping and he informs me that it'll be ten minutes. He must register the panic in my face as he gets the driver to stop the bus, but no. I may be desperate, I may otherwise be a disgusting fucker, but I am English. And squat down by the side of a bus in front of an audience, I shall not. I am English and I shall fucking shit myself if need be. 10 minutes turned to 15 then twenty, my stomach sending increasingly violent flares up. Christina alternated between concerned tenderness, active panic and hearty amusement. Mainly amusement. Finally arriving, I run like the wind, my tea-towel holder heating up with every pounding step and I safely reach the squat pot. I don't know what it is about squat toilets. I think you are required to hover one small anal-shaped hole over the centre of a large toilet-shaped hole. There's just something in that complex formula that is alien to me. Relieving myself, I was then horrified to turn and see that I had completely missed and deposited evidence of Satan just behind the porcelain. I did what I could to clean up, sloshing water from a bucket around but I vacated that conveniance, leaving the impression that I had been potty trained by Pat McGeown. If being sat on the edge of the seat in a vehicle, terrified and doing everything in my power to keep the contents of my stomach from the inside of my pants, started my time in Georgia, it went on to set the tone. Arriving the next day with a bloodstream full of Otilonium Bromide, we disembarked at Hopa, Turkey and crossed the border into Georgia on foot. No visa costs, no bag searches just a quick look at my passport, a loud, "MANCHESTER UNITED!", and a more subdued, "Welcome to Georgia..."

Tblisi
From Batumi, it was a six hour minibus ride to Tblisi. The bus station in Batumi is madness. Loads of filthy kids begging, including one woman with Downs Syndrome which was especially uncomfortable. Stood by a huge Soviet hammer and sickle monument, a bloke in a Russian tracksuit hugged and kissed his girlfriend who was dressed like a ballerina. The bus was very cramped and had that constant pong you often get when you walk past a group of homeless people. Four hours into the journey, we stopped at a roadside hovel constituted the services. The carpets were so filthy that your feet clung to it as you tried to move across, much like the toilets in a student discotheque. . Not knowing what to order, we gave the huge old waitress an emphatic shrug and after slapping me on the back, returned with two ancient, chipped bowels of delicious unidentifiable meat stew. We slurped away whilst watching a South American soap in which all the characters voices were dubbed into Georgian in one monotone female voice. Waking on my first morning in Tblisi, I heard someone walk by my dormitory bed then stop and could feel them staring at me. For a bit of sport I pretended to be asleep then blasted my lamps wide open at him. This beardy bloke leapt out of his skin, nearly falling backwards before running off. There's a great market in Tblisi where ceremonial daggers are placed next to hardcore porn DVDs and envelopes stuffed with photos of anonymous Russian families are flogged not far from the skins of tigers, complete with bullet holes in their necks and backs.

We visited the popular Orbeliani bath house where I opted for a full body scrub. The man elected to do it was a huge bear of a chap, clad in nothing but old, emaciated underpants, with a Santa Claus beard. He barked a weight of instructions at me in Georgian, and I wilted and wanted to cry until a nice Georgian fella came to my aid. I was directed to lay on a bed shaped slab where he battered me for a while before scrubbing my body away. He even put his fingers deep into my ears and cleaned them out. At the end, all the animosity vanished as he extended his soapy hand and offered me and big bear-like smile.

Davit Gareja
The following day we headed off to the Davit Gareja monastery on the border of Azerbaijan. The views were sublime, as the walk actually entered Azerbaijan.


The caves on the mountainside were used by the Russian army as they geared up for their ill-fated adventures in Afghanistan. When they weren't taking practice shots on parts of the old monastery buildings, they whiled the hours away scratching the faces off of the painted angels and saints. On the way back from the Monastery, three busty peasant teens sat next to me on the public bus. I waited a good ten minutes before shifting my gaze from the guide book I was pretending to read and quickly yet discreetly, into the ample cleavage sat beside me. Just once. For no more than three seconds. Not long after alighting, Christina turned me after some bollocking or other and said, "Oh, and don't think I didn't catch your crafty glance down that young girls top..." As I stumbled and stuttered for an outraged riposte, she came in quick with an emphatic, "...Pathetic!"


Signahi
The following day we set off for the town of Signagh. The driving on the way was more of the shocking same we would never grow used to, yet far far from the worst. On the two hour drive there was a moment when three vehicles shared the exact thin two lane width of country road. There wasn't much to do in Signahi, save for fart around with two five-year old sisters, Kato and Kato, the two siblings phonetically differentiated by nothing more than a long and a short 'a' vowel sound. The town has been designated a 'Tourist Town', which means they have ripped down the town center's antique buildings and rebuilt them brand new for the tourists sake. It hasn't worked. The highlight of Signahi was drinking on the roof of the guest house, observing the family over the road. The man of the house would stagger up to the woman's quarter around 8pm and bark incensed orders at them until three generations of the families women folk brought him plate after plate of food, quickly removing themselves from his drunken presence. Through the meal he would scream at them through a gob stuffed with stodge. When he'd finished the last bit, he swaggered down the stairs, leaving the woman to clean up and evidently slag him to high heaven.

On the morning of leaving our hostess took us through the morning toast ritual. Having only just woken, a double shot of the vile firewater, Chacha was presented before each of us. We were informed that the first shot was ironically, for our own health. We were to follow this up quickly with one to the woman of the house, then the man of the house. I begged for reprieve after two, feeling instantly sloshed and unable to move. Apparently there are up to seven toasts of Chacha. For breakfast. Everyday. It's hard when your country has produced just one character of global fame, a man who you see as having roused the the Soviet Union into crushing the Nazis during WW2, yet the rest of the world only focuses on the naughty things he did. Like being directly responsible for a possible 60 million deaths. So it's with reluctance that Georgians readdress their view of Joseph Stalin as a hero to a heathen and there are plenty of statues, plaques and golden busts of the mustachioed swine all over the country. And until Katie fucking Melua leaves Beijing bicyclists to the Chinese and takes on or Putin single-handedly, this is unlikely to change.



Telavi
Telavi is a fucking dump and we had no idea why were were there. It's one of those places that's just miserable, like the German towns in school text books printed in the 70's. We took a bus out to the Alaverdi Cathedral. Shorts are considered terribly uncouth in Georgia and entrance is to historic buildings and churches is forbidden for men wearing them. For the third time I had worn them and was barred entry to the fucking place, so had wasted an hours journey and had to wait for Christina whilst being tutted at by bearded monks. Our guest house for the night was a cosy place, housed inside what looked like a bombsite, ran by a lonely old lady who cried when Christina asked who the pretty young girl was in the photographs. Her kitchen was from 1890 and we sat chewing in her kitchen whilst she sat in the lounge watching her black and white TV. We went to bed very depressed, wondering what we were doing in Georgia. On the bus the next morning, we saw a middle-aged woman take a sly whiff of her left armpit before rubbing her fingers into it. She gave them a sniff before shrugging forlornly to herself.

Kazbegi
Kazbegi was just superb, some of the finest scenery I have ever clasped eyes from. It's best to let pictures do any talking when it comes to this area of the country. One day, our host Vasili wrested the cars keys back from his 11 year-old son and drove us to see the Russian border.


On the way back, we saw various families gathered around the spots where male loved ones met their makers in brutal speeding accidents, probably whilst drunk. The families marked the occasion by drinking in-between sobs, before driving home. Gravestones have elaborate portraits of the departed etched into the slab, usually young lads with slicked back hair looking cool as fuck. We walked up to the Sameba Church, the most iconic image of Georgia but the weather was awful so we didn't even see the church till we bumped into it, let alone the mountains back-dropping it.


The next day, we went for a great walk up towards Chauki mountain though yet again, the views were obscured by the fog that descended on the area. We came across two lads sat smoking outside their tent with a huge riffle sat across. We approached them and asked for directions. They said they needed the gun as there were plenty of bears around. They were helpful but kept laughing and speaking in Georgian to each other. As we strode away, I braced myself for the first shot lancing the top of my ear off before turning, screaming, and getting the head shot.


That night we got utterly Blitzkrieged with a bunch of Germans and Georgians. There was a sad moment when Vasili interrupted us to introduce Christina to his cousin, a young man with calloused hands and a hard Russian face who longed to live and work in Canada. Vasili thought Christina may know someone who could give him a job in some archaic form of stone-masonry. The bloke seemed to think that his skills were enough to gain entry, once a job could be offered. Neither of them seemed even vaguely away of visas, a language barrier, Medicare, or electoral roles. He left looking hopeful but sobered and it was sad knowing that, no matter steps of advice we gave, he would probably never set foot in North America. The next day, with a hangover so formidable that even I was shocked, we hired a taxi to drive us up to the Trinity Chruch in Sameba for the view we missed when climbing up a few days back. It was well worth the extortionate charge.



When walking to the town square to get a Marhrutka (minibus) back to Tblisi, a car pulled up and the driver offered us the same journey for the same price, without the hassle and miserable conditions that cannot be ignored journeying in a Marshrutka. Saying yes meant we both endured the most harrowing journey of our lives. With his thirteen year old daughter in the passenger seat and a few drips of gas left in his tank, our driver floored it down the mountain roads of Kazbegi with a determination that could only be read as suicidal. Blind corners were taken a 100 km per hour, sometimes on the wrong side of the road. Cars were overtaken with seconds to spare before the truck coming in the opposite direction wanted the same stretch of tarmac. Skidding became customary. All this soundtracked by pounding Russian trance. Both of us were convinced we were genuinely going to die that sunny afternoon. And I realised that if we left the road and went hundreds of feet down a cliff, the discordant din of a Russian trance version of 'My Heart Will Go On', it would be infallible in those last few seconds that God fucking hated what I had done on this earth. If a stranger came up to me in the street and flicked my ear, I'd probably get angry. So when our mobility, face and existence was put in jeopardy, did I get vocal with the driver? No, I sat there clinging on to another human, sweating and slamming one foot into an imaginary brake, whilst easing the other of a non-existent accelerator. The average journey time from Kazbegi to Tblisi is three hours. Our guy got us there in one hour and forty eight minutes.

Svaneti
We took a sleeper train through the night to reach Zugdidi where a marshrutka took us through what is considered the most dangerous road in Georgia. There's loads of us crammed into the fucking thing as it wheezes it's way up mountains and chugs along the sides of terrifying drops, monstrous boulders from rock-slides littering the pothole ridden excuse for a road. For breakfast, we stopped at a cabin high in the hills. Whilst sat chomping on some past- encased cholesterol product, our driver walked past us with a bottle of vodka, four shot glasses and a bottle of champagne. He sneaked into a side room and drew a curtain, partitioning himself off from the passengers, along with numerous other drivers. An incredulous Israeli girl, deciding to say something, storms into their haven and is confronted by a female Georgian passenger who backslides the Israeli out. The Georgian girl then denigrates our concerns, proclaiming ALL the booze to be hers. She continues, "...anyway, these drivers know the roads so well you don't need worry. Last week I had a driver who was so drunk that he couldn't even stand, but he was such an excellent driver..." She may have had a salient point as we discovered just a few minutes from our destination. Workmen were busy tarmacking the road. With a chasm just a few feet behind the back bumper, the wheels began spinning in wet cement as we rolled slowly backwards. Then the engine cut. An deafening silence erupted in the vehicle, a silent terror as everyone telepathically beamed driving instructions into the back of the shitfaced drivers witless fucking skull. Suddenly the car started, the front wheels prevailed over a sloppy lump of wet gravel and we were in our way again. The passengers applauded wildly, commending the driver on his inebriated command of the rusty lump of burdensome shite.

Mestia
Svaneti is a place that our guide book, printed as recently as 2006, warns travelers against visiting without a trusted guide. Svaneti is a place where some men still tote Klashnikov riffles as a kind of accesory. The menfolk of Svaneti were men who, "...like to quarrel", I was informed. In the past, if a traveller needed a bed to sleep in, a Svanetian would often donate the man a bed for the night and have a young female of the house sleep in the bed with the guest as a sign of trust. If the guest touched the girl, they would be killed. All heresay, some scant fact perhaps but we went to Svaneti hoping to encounter none of this and instead see, what is described as some of the finest countryside in the world. Mestia is the main town in the Svaneti region and is currently completely being redeveloped to accommodate the thousands of Israelis who are presently descending on the country. Since May this year, when Israeli soldiers equipped with simple harmless water-pistols (and real guns) boarded a Turkish flotilla and shot nine Turkish peace activists/ arms suppliers / terrorists, sentiment between the two countries hit an all time low, so young Israelis have turned their attentions and pocket-money towards Georgia for a quick local getaway. The government men of Georgia are in overdrive to turn this one-horse-town into a bustling alpine mountain resort. The whole place looks like the assembly of an enormous movie set and not one building isn't adorned with wooden scaffolding. With our nerves shattered and in need of some booze, we headed straight for the local watering hole. The sight inside was fucking staggering. An old saloon, slap-bang out of the old Wild West. Tables of obliterated builders stopped to gawp at us for a second, before the racket continued, cement-caked. builders, smashing huge beer galsses together, hugging each other and downing full ales in one gulp, before ordering a tray or two more (Sadly their wasn't a honky-tonk pianist to continue playing.) The whole sorry scene was presided over by a punctilious sour-faced old bar wench, arms folded and scolding them inbetween considerations of whether to take my order of not. All of a sudden, they all downed the last few of their pints and staggered, some of them literally falling about the place, to the swinging doors at once. Lunch break was over. The place was suddenly empty apart from the two of us, a table of local women and the moody curmudgeon behind the antiquated pump. Within a few moments, the town outside came alive with sound of drills, hammering and old walls tumbling as the work continued. We did a good few walks in Mestia and in Usguli which is a few hours away by 4X4. Usguli is considered the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Europe. Whilst walking through the pastures to the blinding white of the Shkhara Glacier, we were accosted by two soldiers who wanted to see our passports. They looked drunk but then again, every male we had encountered in Georgia by that point usually was, so it was a fair assumption. Something about the situation was unsettling. They seemed to say that we could go on to the glacier but we had to come back straight afterward. Seeming as though to contravene their orders would mean scaling a glacier an entering an angry Russia illegally, their concerns seemed a little fanciful. The views in Ushguli were the finest the pair of us have ever seen. I'd like the photos to do it justice but sadly the memory card was lost, an incident that took some considerable days to come to terms with for both of us. I've tried to find photos on Google that do just an amoebic scrap of justice to the sights seen in Ushguli and this is the only thing that comes close:

A thirteen hour marshrutka ride with no leg room later and we were back in Tblisi. I promptly came down with food poisoning. I spent the night shitting and vomiting. The vomiting in particular was frightening, a ferocity that had me sounding a bit like the girl in the Exorcist around the point where she informs the priest that his old dear performs fellatio in Hades. We checked into a posh hotel for the night so I could shit and spew in peace, though I had to climb into three different beds and suffer two of Christina's hysterical tantrums before she was satisfied with the room. In order to leave Georgia we took a train back to Batumi. On the TV they showed old Georgian films from the late 1970's at ear-splitting volume. All the movies had at least one scene where an impoverished fool would be screaming incandescently at a photo of a family member on the wall. Batumi really is the worst place on earth. The Georgians view it as their Riviera. In an internet cafe, the bloke on one side was flicking between tabs of porn and Russian bride order forms. The young boy on the other side was looking at a close-up photo of a vagina. The only other thing to do in Batumi is try and keep the contents of your guts out of you trousers and watch homeless Indian kids throw bottles at jelly fish.
It was high time to leave Georgia.