Adigeni

There’s really not much to recount about Akhaltsikhe.  In fact, the best thing I ever did was leave the place. Not because it’s particularly awful—far from it, it’s quite lovely and I’d like to go back to stay at the old Soviet hotel here in the centre, and tour the old, restored fortress—but because I was in for such a whirlwind of a day that waking up in a clean bed and being served breakfast was merely the low point of my day. (the low point of this low point was actually not being able to shower because there was no hot water.  I suspect this was a slight on behalf of the proprietress who did not want to budge on the price until her husband stepped in and agreed to 20 lari.  Two can play at this game so in honour of Canada Week I passive-aggressively made the bed and left the place spotless)

I'm going to neither of these places so don't even try to tempt me, loud Georgian road sign with a weak grasp on how we pronounce Xs in English.

Do you know what a highway is? I thought I did.  I thought I was very good at reading maps.  I took cartography and everything, so you’d think I’d be pretty good.  So when I’m handed a map and am able to discern what the varying degrees of thickness and colour for roads correspond to in real life, I expect real life to follow suit.  I mean, aren’t all maps really the blueprints for human geography and not the other way around?

Sorry, what I am trying to get at is that the thick yellow line demarcating a secondary road took the word “secondary” to new and comically euphemistic heights.  I’ve seen secondary roads.  Usually they are paved.  Almost always they contain discernible characteristics of an actual road.  I guess this was just one of those times.

Okay, I really need to focus and actually articulate that happened to me on this day.  I left Akhaltsikhe fairly early in the AM and headed due west.  I had covered enough ground to decide that yes, this place did look like that area around Christina Lake where it’s really dry and there are lots of pine trees and beds of needles on the sand and you can actually smell the pine (you know), and that I had had enough and was ready to get picked up. 

I immediately turned around and flashed my goods, which at this point really only consisted of a drawn-out look of forlornness and which, at 9am, was too much forlornness for this young Georgian professional on his way to a spa to bear.  He picked me up immediately and drive me to the turnoff to the spa he was attending, all the while telling me how he just needed to relax for the weekend and this was literally the only place in Georgia one could do that.  Next time, I guess.

So I continued westward along one of the nicest valleys that I can remember seeing on my entire trip.  It was so fertile, so peaceful, and so far from Russian tanks.  So I decided to walk a bit further without asking for a ride, which gave me a chance to buy a couple ice creams, and then get picked up by a cement truck driver who took me to the nearest town where his services were clearly needed: we had reached the end of the road.

If you’ve ever been to Adigeni, you’ll know that the town centre consists of a big open gravel pit and a general store where you can indeed get cold coffee with milk to go.  From here, I set off along the very dusty trail knowing full well this was going to be a terrible, terrible idea.