A Day of Ups and Downs, Literally!

 Friday, July 29, 2022

We received a text last night saying that pick-up would be at 7:45 this morning.  Imagine our surprise when there was a flurry of texts around 6:45 asking where the heck we are;  our driver is out front waiting for us!! I, of course, wrote back with a screen shot of their message and got an apology and a plea to be as fast as possible!  But no one told the driver that it wasn't our fault and he doesn't speak English.  But you could sure tell what he was saying!!  And it wasn't very nice!  I wrote Anna in the office and asked her to call off her dog!! Then it got better and he even drove us to McDonald's for breakfast, which we didn't want;  but coffee never goes a miss!

Then we drove to pick up a Russian family who was going with us and they were delightful.  They used to vacation in Ukraine and hate what's going on there! We stop for snacks and a potty break and there's a lady selling what I guess is toilet paper but she says I can use the one she points to and it has paper in it.  That's true and it also reeks and is a squat toilet.  Good thing I do yoga!!  The stop wasn't the driver's choice, so we can't hold him responsible.  But the katchapuri were delicious.

We shouldn't have been surprised!

We got to Kutaisi and transferred to a twenty-one seater bus for the actual tour with an English-speaking little girl guide.  Okay, maybe she's twenty-two.  Later in the day I asked her what she does for fun and she said she has everything she needs at home, including her own disco ball and lights!  She sets them up in her backyard for her friends to party all night long.  She even said that she never goes anywhere without her disco ball!

Our first stop is the Prometheus Cave, a huge underground series of interconnected rooms and passages that actually goes nearly across the country.  We don't go that far! Think Mammoth Cave.  They changed the name from that of it's discoverer to Prometheus because it was easier for tourists to pronounce and remember!!

We have to go down to get to the entrance.

Am I the only one who sees the face??

Don't look up!!

It's a choose-your-own adventure!!

This man, Giorgi Tkabladze, was a local resident who protected the cave from destruction all
by himself for years!  The sculpture is by Davit Monaverdisashvili.

From here we board the bus and go to the Okatse Canyon.  First you have to ride in a four-wheel drive vehicle down aa steep and rocky slope.  The radio is loud so that we can't hear ourselves scream!  Or at least that's what I think!  My assumption was that this would be the hard part of the trip.  So wrong!  We have to descend another 120 meters via about a million metal stairs.  And of course you go down a bunch, hen over, then up a bit and over and down and down and down and over...anyway you get the idea!  There are lots of trees and glimpses of the canyon walls and just as you think here is no reason to bere.  You come to the view.  It's a long way down, but you can see a part of the river with a little waterfall into a lovely turquoise pool and then it continues downstream. Okay.  Now you have to climb back up out of the canyon.  There is a second canyon coming later and another lady and I agree that if it's like this we're just going to sit it out with Ammar.  His back to too bad for this stuff and he was probably the lucky one, although by the end of the day my health app says that I climbed 108 flights of stairs and walked over 14,000 steps for 5.6 miles, so I can feel pretty virtuous.

This is just the very beginning!  It goes on and on and on!

Here's the big payoff!

Piggies!!  So far we've seen three only!

She's the black one on the ground.  No, I didn't get off the bus.

At least someone cared.

We are back on the bus and recovering from our exertions when there is a thump!  A young cow was in the road and when she saw the bus she veered into the opposite lane where a car couldn't help but hit her.  And toss her into the side of the bus!  We stopped.  The other driver stopped.  Some witnesses stopped.  And all the neighbors came out.  But no one went to the cow, except an older cow who might have been her mother?  Hours later when we were heading home, Ammar noticed that they had put her out of her misery.

Back to the bus for lunch at the entrance to the last canyon, Martivili Canyon, part of the Abasha River canyon system. Lunch is at a little restaurant for the tourists.  We have bar-b-que chicken, which is just five large chunks of white meat that's been roasted.  it's nice but not BBQ! The Georgian salad is fabulous though, perhaps the best yet. We buy our tickets and see that you can hike, take a boat ride, or zip line!  Although most of our tour mates are young, no one wants to zip line!!  Everyone opts for the boat ride on the little inflatable boats and we don our life vests and clamber into the boats.  We go far enough to see the little waterfall, which takes about five or ten minutes and we return to our starting place.  This isn't quite what I expected from the tour photos.  

She's from the Netherlands and has been to Jordan!

But there is a hike!  More accurately there is a walk along a kind of flagstone path.  It ha some stairs and some really slick places, but there is always a handrail to hang on to.  And a real waterfall!  This is the way to finish a tour!!

We go back to Kutaisi and everyone heads out, except for us!  We wait for our driver to take us back to Batumi.  In the interim Ammar buys me a package of Dunkin' munchkins for the trip home and we run into our Russian friends!  They've been on the Wine and Dine tour that we have scheduled in a few days, and they rave about it, which is good to hear.  We describe our day, because they have that to look forward to, probably without the cow!

It's really, really late when we get home and I WhatsApp Beqa that tomorrow is probably better for everyone and he agrees.  We see the brief fireworks show and head for bed.  We can sleep as long as we want because he's coming at noon and that's our only scheduled activity!!  YAY!!!