As is the case all over Georgia’s mountains, our Hanmer Guest House is now open again for the summer and autumn; as of mid-May, actually. We have the largest number of advance bookings ever this year, carefully marked on the calendar, which is a good start. Yesterday, the Barents tour company from Poland, our most regular client, sent us 14 of its citizens, with another 6-8 such groups to follow. We were ready, my wife and I, despite the current absence of regular local help in the house. Lower down in Georgia, where it stays warmer, or in the big ski resort towns, of course, the hospitality industry might stay open year round.
One issue which we have worked hard to get on top of is water. How many times, over the years, have we known that a large group would come in the evening, only to have the water off or gurgling air the whole day! If that doesn’t cause blood pressure and stress to rise, little will.
So, some handymen friends of ours came up from Tbilisi to improve the system last month, as I wrote recently. The combination of a 1000L tank and an electric pump is a vast improvement. Just as well, as yesterday and today there’s more air than water in our and our neighbors’ pipes, though we were still able to satisfy everyone’s liquid needs. But the cafe building, where they eat, is not served by the new system. So in the end I gave up trying to wash dishes there and took them all over to the house. This morning, we have all 14 sets of laundry to wash and hang on the lines: sheet, duvet cover, towel, pillowcase and bathroom hand towels. Without that tank and pump, we’d be lost.
The whole neighborhood is complaining about the gurgling, spitting air-in-water mix, more air than water. Some people, though, are on the old water system instead of, or as well as, the new; unlike us. We’re now contemplating running a separate 32mm pipe from the nearest “well” (more a local water branching system) straight to the house and cafe. First, run and connect the line to test it. Then have someone with a machine dig it at least half a meter into the ground, against frost. It should then free us of the above problems, which can be solved for one branch only at the expense of worsening them for other branches simply by turning a wheel at that point, changing flow ratios between the branch pipes. Anyone is free to do this. Recipe for conflict if I ever saw one. It needs to be set and fixed (if such a thing is even possible), so no one can change these ratios.
We’ve had several pumps fail over the years, due to bad electricity; we hope this one will last us through until our departure in mid-October. We’re planning to use it only when we have guests or urgent need, such as after their departure. Ideally, the water system should be free of local electrical vagaries, or even free of electricity in general, which means gravity-fed. It pays to think of the strengths and weaknesses of the whole thing and its parts, and of how to eliminate weak points instead of making them dependent on each other: a process which can take at least a year of living with it, tinkering, monitoring. You have to get it right eventually, or suffer potentially catastrophic consequences.
Easy to say: we’re open again. Behind those three words is a lifetime of interconnected events. But here we are.
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
