We left our wonderful
host, Nazi, in Kazbegi to head back towards Gudauri.
It was (again…)
pissing rain!
The new rain added on
an already loaded snowpack triggered some avalanche that closes the road across
Jvari pass and back to Gudauri. We were stuck in Kobi for about an hour before
then open back the road.
We’ve been told that
in springtime, they usually close the road from noon until 18h00 to let the
natural avalanche cycle go. This time, it seems that they weren’t really
worried for the cars safety since they open it straight after they were done
cleaning the debris.
When they finally open
the road; people went crazy. It was the car equivalent of a Chinese downhill
where cars were driving on both side of the road in both directions and passing
others by honking their way around!
Surprisingly, we
‘’won’’ the race as we made it to Gudauri ahead of everyone in our Lada Niva
which our driver was handling like a pro passing multiple huge Mercedes and
Lexus SUV in 15in deep water puddles!
It wasn’t really
snowing in Gudauri though…. Even after gaining about 1500m from Kobi, the
precipitation was still in its wet form….
We had dinner
overlooking the depressing weather….but….
Yep! It happened!
Rain turned into snow
at night and was falling at a surprisingly high rate!
We rushed the
following morning to catch some freshies, but the visibility rather sucked…. We
were also quite worry to ski some kind of dust on crust.
The least I can say is
that it was quite a weird day. First, it wasn’t some dust-on-crust conditions.
The snow was certainly wet and , but what lay underneath was really even and
nice. At every turn, it looked like a water geyser could come out of our tracks
since the deeper we went, the wetter it was!
It was some kind of
blind and mellow skiing were we just had to believe that the conditions at
every turns would be good!
And they were!
I’ve skied in whiteout
conditions but certainly never had such a great day for this kind of
visibility!
Stoked to have the
winter back on our side, we skied non-stop from 10h00 (usual opening hour for
Gudauri ski resort…) to 16h00.
We were really looking
forward for the following day as they were forecasting some sunny windless day!
And the best part is that they never open the top lifts on our blind-ski day,
which offers the best terrain.
We had some debates
about how the conditions were going to be with the temperature cooling the
occurred overnight.
One thing we all
agreed was that wherever it was tracked from the previous day, it was going to
be horrible since all the exposed water would have freeze overnight. We were
just hoping that the snow would have dryed out during the night to leave us a
nice top-down snow.
We head straight to
the top lift to get inline for some fresh turns. We managed to get on the 3rd
chair with only 4 slowboarders in the first 2 chairs.
As we got out of the
chairlift, they were still busy strapping…. I rushed down and carved the very
first tracks of the day straight under the chairlift. There was probably about
6-8in of nicely settled snow. The snow was nice and steady and I made some nice
high-speed turns getting as much pow as I was able to!!
That was, for me, one
of the best run of the trip!!
The best part was that
our day of work was just starting!! We had a few good laps on this chair before
moving to the highest chairlift that usually open shortly after the one we were
riding.
As we were going up,
some fellows were skiing the groomed run as everything was totally untracked!!!
There was some clouds hanging around and spotted a really nice 700m long run
lookers left of the chairlift.
I guess a bunch of the
skiers were worried about the avy conditions since they always left the
untouched slopes untracked but were eagerly jumping on those same slopes once
there were tracks!
I was then our
pleasure to show them the stability of the various slopes that were available,
as we almost never skied across other skier’s track for the rest of the day!
As the day went on,
there weren’t many good possibilities to ride some untracked slopes. We then
made the short 20minutes hike up Mt Chrdili to get another lap of fresh
untracked run!
Actually, the run was
so good that we lapped it once more just as the lift were closing. We
eventually rolled back to our hotel around 17h15 after a great 7 hours of
non-stop skiing. That was the best day we had during our trip in Gudauri.
With the weather
warming up, we figured our best shot would be to drop on the slackcountry of
the resort, which is north facing. With a transfer back to Tbilissi in the
afternoon, we didn’t waste much time around and went straight to the top to get
a last slackcountry run.
As expected, the snow
was really nice.
I’m pretty sure that
if someone gets lucky with a ride back to the resort it’s quite possible to do
two of those 1300-1500m vertical run!
So that was it for the
skiing part of this Georgian odyssey. Since the weather was supposed to warmed
up, we figure we could use the 2 days we had left in Georgia to a different use
than making right-left-right-left turns.
Since Georgia claimed
to have invented the wine about 7000 years ago to taste for ourselves if that
pretention can be true. After a quick stop in Tbilissi, we made the move
towards the town of Telavi, which was supposed to make a really good base for
exploring the nearby vineyards.
We lost no time and
after dropping our gear to head straight to the small town of Tsinandali. To
make a long story short, the wine tasting that is offered is not that extensive
and left both vineyards we visited pretty disappointed.
As we were walking
back to our guesthouse in Telavi bitching about the cost/amount of wine we got
served, a group of older dude that were sitting in a park waved us to come
talked to them.
There were 6 of them.
We quickly realized that they were speaking only Russian and Georgian but the
fact that we weren’t speaking any of those languages didn’t made a difference
for them.
Some chitchatting went
on between all of them and 4 of them left in various direction.
One quickly came back
with a table a few more chairs, and another one with 2.5liters of red wine and
a few glasses. We then thought that would compensate for the lack of wine we
had in the afternoon.
V 
Things got even better
when another one showed up with some pickles, one with some bread and deli and
the last one with what should be a gallon of white wine!
With some help from
our Georgian/English dictionary, we were able to fairly understand each other but,
as usual, getting closer to the bottom of the jugs, we got much more
understandable to each others!
Things get a bit
blurred near the end of the evening… but since they only made us drink good
home-made wine made naturally from years long tradition, the hangover was
livable…
We went back to the
local market and catch a bumpy marshtruka run back to Tbilissi for Babiche last
night in Georgia.
Still a bit bummed
from the past night, we played it gently since Babiche ride out of the country
was at 3h45.
We didn’t really woke
up to tell him goodbye and woke up late in the morning to go hang around town.
We found, near the
main train station, a really big market where you can buy all the necessary
requirement for the daily life.
As we were walking back to hour guesthouse, we
were able to get a taste of what Tbilissi new town is heading to.
If all the changes the
city is overgoing happen in the past 8 years, there is certainly a great future
for this booming city!
The trip out of should
have been story less since we had 3 flights/2 connections to make it back to
Canada.
But after we got to
the airport, something was missing on the boarding board: our flight! A major
snow in Kiev (our first connection) had our all trip fucked up…
Since about only 20
flights left the country that day (there isn’t that many flights out), we
weren’t able to leave anywhere…
After spending 7 hours
trying to get another trip back to Canada with the really unhelpful staff from
Ukrainian Airlines (our cancelling fly operator), we headed back to Tbilissi
since the only thing they were able to do to help us was to give us the address
of their main office and go there following day…
That sounds like an
horrible plan and just a perfect way to spend more time in Georgia. Instead, we
headed back to the guesthouse, Meidan Guesthouse, we had stayed for all our
stayed in Tbilissi to first find a place to stayed since it looked like we had
to spend more time in Georgia than expected…
It is the least to say
that Ekaterina, our host from Meidani Guesthouse was really surprised when she saw us back. Even if she
didn’t had a room for us, she welcomed us back and greated us as we were
family.
After she found for me
the phone number I should call and another hour or so on the phone, we were
finally set to leave the following day! Instead of the impossible trip
Tbilissi-Kiev-Amsterdam-Montréal, we were now set for
Tbilissi-Istanbul-Geneva-Montreal leaving the following morning!
Once that was set, she
offered us dinner, tea, cha-cha, organized a taxi and a set up a bed inside her
own office to help us crash overnight (or until 3AM when we had to leave).
I am now seated in my
last connection landing in Montreal in a few hours after what had been one of
my best ski-traveling experience of the past years.
After those 3 weeks, I
can only highly recommend to visit this country. Any of the following reason
are by themselves a reason good enough to visit the country. Add them together
and you can only wonder why this is not your next destination: friendly people
with a real true full warm welcomed, the ease to travel, cheap cost of living,
drinking and skiing, the close distance of Gudauri from the capital (with
enhanced the ski-time), the simply awesome skiing with terrific backcountry, stable
snowpack, great weather, the safeness of the country despite the disputed area
of South Ossetia and Abkazia, the nice capital in which one can visit a bit and
have a bit of the Near East taste.
All in all, you’ll
probably spend less by going for Georgia for a ski trip than for visiting any
ski resorts on a ski trip of a few weeks.
Hope you liked following
this too much under destination and wished I made you wished you were skiing in
Georgia!
…. Not back to the
cubicle….
