It was time to leave Svaneti and head back to Tbilisi, along with the remaining team of seven young volunteers who had been with me there for a couple of weeks. (Our two Dutch couples had left a few days earlier). We had experienced the Svan festival of Lamproba together, and also been involved in cutting people’s firewood and shoveling snow off a roof; but the vast bulk of the month’s snow was due to arrive as we wrapped up.
I had warned the team to expect power outages in snowfalls, and indeed our last two days proved this accurate. We doubled down on burning time in the big wood stove, as well as blankets on beds in now unheated rooms, also sharing power banks to charge our phones. The snow fell in buckets for our last three days, although the temperature warmed up to just around freezing, even at night. The flakes were impossibly soft and light, not at all like the heavy wet stuff at our October departure, which had threatened to break the branches of our fruit trees unless I knocked it off. The half-snowless landscape quickly transformed into pure white.
We now had to clean the house in daylight (about 9am to 6:30pm); but there were many of us, so this was not a problem. Pack, carefully, not forgetting anything. Re-order the separate cafe building we had also been using for kids’ clubs: foozeball table back from there to the house, long dining table from house back to cafe.
Important was the re-winterizing of the house’s water system, so it would not freeze: shutting off water to the house, draining as much interior water as possible from faucets and toilets so these could not freeze and crack at the approaching -20 degrees.
I also had to get in a few half-hour outdoor photo shoots of the new snow, which had radically changed the appearance of everything, silently and completely. It really was now a winter wonderland; though few villagers could appreciate it the way I always do. For virtually all of the adults, this amount of new snow simply means extra work shoveling; for the children and young people, true, the joy of extended winter sports, at which most of them excel. But for me, beauty, beauty, everywhere.
We had a neighbor’s 8am Delica minivan arranged for six of the team, while another had driven up his own Toyota Rav4 and would now take me back to Tbilisi in it. We took all the extra food they had bought, made sure the freezer was plugged in to await power coming back on, locked the main door, packed the two vehicles, and were off. Our trip down the first few tens of kilometers to a breakfast stop would be in convoy, just in case either of us got stuck and needed help. We had a shovel, winter tires and chains ready if required too.
Our Delica guy actually did need a shoveling out and pushing once. He swerved to miss a low-hanging power line across the road, and even in such a good car couldn’t get out alone. We soon set him right and continued.
My driver had never driven in such deep slow, but he handled it very well, being over-careful instead of cavalier. But there were a number of road closures between us and breakfast, which soon became brunch, then lunch.
The first barrier was a high-up tree which had fallen onto the road from its shallow roots and the extra sudden snow burden, with rocks and snow added. Its trunk had broken into several pieces from the huge impact. We called a tractor driver, who was apparently half an hour away, and hunkered down for his arrival and an expected hour or more of road clearing. But two Slovenians in another car, satisfied with their Svaneti skiing holiday, now had a plane to catch from Kutaisi. So they borrowed our shovel, enlisted another for the tree pieces, and had us all snaking through the mess before the tractor even appeared. I shot what video and photos I could.
There were four other closures, all avalanches, needing only time and shovel work to get us through them. Then lunch in Barjashi (a kubdari pie each, coffee or tea), and back on our way. A final stop at my favorite waterfall on the way down, then after Zugdidi our two vehicles were able to find their own speed onwards to Tbilisi.
It ended up being a 12-hour journey, lengthened mostly because of the slowness of those first 100 km of the 450 or so total; but uneventful, despite being the most snowed-in and avalanched trip I have ever made in Svaneti. I reminded myself to be glad for us being prepared with equipment for the exigencies which did arise, and thankful for a journey which was, for me, long but not terrifying. Just as well my wife was not with us: she had been urging us to turn back having seen my posted videos in Facebook! She is not a fan of winter travel in Svaneti. I, however, had had my winter batteries recharged, and now the snow is following us east to Tbilisi and beyond as I write this…
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
