2013_09_26 Thursday: Tbilisi - Kazbegi

We left Tbilisi at 10:00 toward Stepantsminda(formerly known as Kazbegi), which is some 150km up north near the Russian border. This area is known for its mountains and valleys. As usual, we got a taxi driver with a Mercedes. It's quite funny that one gets long distance rides with the same taxi drivers that do city driving. 

Nice set of wheels

The driver was an older guy, who was nice at first, but less so after we had a longer than expected lunch break. The drive to Kazbegi can be broken into two parts:

1. The first, and less interesting part, runs until a place called Ananuri (about half the distance). Ananuri itself is real nice as it has a church that overlooks a beautiful lake in the form of two fingers.

Nice lake

Overlooking church

2. The second is a truly beautiful drive that has vistas of snowy mountains and valleys. It's all quite grand. 

Occasional cows as usual

Steak up close

We arrived at  Kazebgi at 14:00, to a hotel called Rooms, located in the upper part of town. It's a new hotel that has great views. We got lucky that we managed to get a room with a view to the mountains (the other side has no view), as we had been told there were none available. The strange thing about this hotel is that they provide no soap/shampoo for standard rooms, unless you ask them. We did and still got none...

Lobby

Lobby

from lobby balcony

from lobby balcony

At 15:30 or so we headed out with a jeep driver to do two things:

1. Go up to the famous Tsimnda Samba Church - a14th century church, second most important one in the country. It is situated at 2200m (the town is at 1800m), with fantastic views. These guys have a talent for placing churches in the oddest of places. Normally, we would have hiked this up (about 1.5 hours), but in light of time constraints and upcoming additional hikes, we drove up (hence the jeep).

Tsimnda Samba Church

from church area

2. Headed to the Russian border point. The main attraction here is the drive itself, which is quite nice and not long (15km). We did not cross the border… 

We returned to town at 18:30 or so. Stopped to buy a couple of things and Sharon stepped on some freshly made cow shit. Unfortunately, I wasn't quick enough with the camera :(