The ride to cross the mountains took 3.5 hours. As when we arrived, it involved going up to a peak and all the way down. 72 km in total. Lovely views, narrow road, and driving in daylight without mist significantly reduced the chance of becoming a newspaper headline..
In Telavi we went to Yulia and Eli's hostel to drop our packs while going to Schuchman's Winery. It should be mentioned that both Yulia and Eli are of Russian decent ("Yulia", who would have guessed? Da!) and have been of tremendous help when it came to communicating with locals.
When we left for the winery (12:45), we parted ways with Yulia and Eli. The winery was quite interesting, even for the likes of me who don't fancy wine. At 14:30 the taxi driver came back to the winery to drive us to Telavi's Marshrutkas station. The driver brought us loads of grapes and a mellon from his own garden (which was on the way to the winery). I suspect he did so in order to be paid more. It worked.
At 15:15 we hopped on the one and only Marshrutka to Signaghi (read: "sirnari", 1.5 hour drive) - an old European style town that's on a hill/mountain with lovely views. This town is unlike anything we've seen in Georgia thus far. It is clean, well maintained, and has really special atmosphere.
We stayed at the Memphis Palace. This ain't no palace for sure. But it is extremely spacious, with an empty common area on the third floor that has a great view. We bumped into an Israeli couple: Valeria and Nadav. Valeria is of Russian descent and speaks the language, which came in handy.
In the evening we went to a pretty good restaurant by the name of Nikala, as was recommended by another restaurant (recommended too) that ran out of food… We will check it tomorrow. Among the stuff we had, there were Khachapuri (cheese sticks) that reminded me of those fabulous Good Time Charley's pepperoni sticks… Oh, and the place had the nicest cleanest bullseye toilet I have ever seen (even better than the one in Muktinath, Nepal)..
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