After our crowded but good sleep in the one room, we packed up our sleeping gear and got ready for breakfast. Once breakfast is over, the truck is loaded up and we say thank you to the kind people who let us use their place before we are off on our way. Today we are making our way up to Shovi in the mountains right near the Russian border.
But we have a few stops along the way. The first one is in the small town of Nikortsminda where we visit the St. Nicholas Church which was built in the 11th century. It is a small church, but it has some of the prettiest and best preserved frescoes in Georgia. And they are wonderful. We lean back in the church and stare up at the walls and ceilings taking them in.
This is a simple small town and other than the main road that passes through, the rest of the lanes are all dirt. Back at the truck we notice a huge group of people waiting, all dressed up in their Sunday finest and many carrying flowers. We discover that today is the birthday or death day of a famous poet and they are waiting for some important dignitaries to drive through town on their way to a ceremony further up the road. We make eye contact and then go and mingle for a while before we head on. One of the girls gives her bouquet of flowers to one of the guys on our truck - love at first sight.
Our next stop is at Ambrolauri. We stop here to visit the market so that the cook groups can do some shopping. For those of us who have no food shopping to do, we just wander around through the market. It turns out to be a great visit. The locals are very interested in us and they love to say hello and have their picture taken.
There is one, colorful old man selling fruit that invites us into his stall to sample his cha cha - local moonshine. It is powerful, but surprisingly smooth. We take a Polaroid picture of him and give it to him as a gift. He gives us a melon (in fact, he gives about four people from our group melons). They are wonderfully friendly.
After completing the cook group shopping, we take a short drive outside town where we find a pleasant spot near the river amongst green fields for lunch. There are mountains rising all around us with wisps of clouds covering them here and there.
While eating (our huge sandwiches), a few locals come up to us to chat. It turns out that the run-down buildings near us are schools.
After lunch we head back into town and go to the local winery. We want to pick up some wine for our stay in the mountains. It seems like a pretty basic place - more of a factory - but so long as the wine is good. They take us off on a bit of a tour, but that is pretty boring. It only starts to get interesting when they take us into the wine storage area. This is not your typical wine tasting. The old man that is giving us the tour unscrews the top off of a big barrel, sticks a hoes in the small opening and then sucks on it to get the wine to flow. He pours a bit into a glass and then hands it around for us to taste.
The red wine is not too bad. He heads over to the white wine stainless steel barrel and repeats the hose sucking maneuver until he gets the wine to flow. We taste the white wine - not very good. We have an unanimous decision to go for the red wine. We hand over the two small jerry cans that we purchased earlier in the day and asked him to fill them us. Back in goes the hose and out comes the red wine and fills up our containers.
What is the price? - it is all negotiable. It does not appear to be an official sale.
Then back in the truck for a couple more hours of driving up the valley to the resort town of Shovi. What a place. we are staying in this huge hotel complex that must have over 150 rooms, if not over 200 rooms. But over half of them are not habitable, and ours are barely habitable. One whole building, we are told, is under renovation. It looks like it has been through a war and has not been touched for a long time.
Our rooms are fairly large, but basic. Simple beds with clean sheets and most importantly, plenty of warm blankets. This is important - at least one pane of glass in each room is broken. We are up in the mountains and it is starting to get cold as the sun goes down. The balcony is nice and provides us with an excellent view of the surrounding mountains. But the bathrooms. They must have been built about forty years ago and have not been updated since. Hot water is provided by an electrical heater with the wires, some exposed, running up the wall and around the bathroom to somewhere outside. Our shower head is on a long pole and is leaning away from the wall worse than the tower in Pisa. We make the mistake of touching it to try to adjust it - it turns out that is the only position where it will not fall down. We carefully try the electric water heater - surprise, surprise - it does not work. Maybe just as well, we do not want to be electrocuted. The only problem is that we only have cold water and this is damn cold. Oh well, a quick body splash accompanied by some blood curdling yells.
After that "refreshing" shower, we head down to dinner. We have decided that we are going to have a funny hat party tonight, so everyone has to wear a hat they bought on this trip to dinner and drinks afterwards. It is a good thing that we have the large dining room to ourselves, otherwise it would have been a bit embarrassing. Every country we have been to is represented and we even get some cross dressing between the men and the women. Some men did not have a hat, so we could only lend them what we had available.....
Dinner is simple, but filling (especially if you ate lots of bread). The best part of the dinner is the red wine that we bought earlier. At one end of the table, we pretty much finished off one container. Once we have our fill and have polished off the available food, we adjourn to the party room. A couple of guys got a "suite" with an extra room, so we all head there.
We quickly work our way through the rest of the red wine and then the white wine that we have left over from before. Then out comes the vodka. We have a great time.
We play a number of drinking games and then the highlight is when Lotta shows us a leg spreading competition (not as bad as it sounds). You have to pick up an object off the floor with your mouth without touching the ground. It was amazing how flexible some people where - and how inflexible others were.
Things carried on until about midnight when the booze started to run out. In any case, we had an earlier start in the morning, so we headed off to bed. Was it cold that night. Luckily we had found some extra blankets, so we were plenty warm.