Operation Bootylicious

Our host in Adishi, Tamara, was not your average sheepherding village grandma. An eloquent, well educated woman who also happened to be a political journalist on a radio show, she provided a generous breakfast along with a less than generous indictment of the Georgian state of affairs. As we chomped through lashings of improvised cake, and pastries stuffed with mystery meats, she poured the tea, both literally and figuratively, letting us in on the true feelings of the Georgian people when it comes to Russia, the government, and whether the prime minister is actually just three goats in a trenchcoat.

Tamara had filled us with enough hard truths and carbohydrates to fuel a minor revolution, but rather than storming parliament, we set off to confront a different kind of turbulence, the gushing meltwaters of a glacial river as we traced the valley up to Chkhunderi Pass.

The photos you see of Thomas traversing the strong currents on horseback are straight out of a Putin-themed calendar beloved by babushkas (turn to the next month and it's Thomas bare-chested fighting a bear.) Unfortunately, no photos of me on my steed but it's probably for the best, as I'm sure you'd have fainted from the sheer overload of bravado and concentrated testosterone.

At the top of the pass, the mountains were, like, wowzers! Big yikes, just look at the pictures. I mean, have you not had enough imagery on this trip yet!? They were, wait for it... Retina slappingly gorgeous, moustache twirlingly phwoar, and face meltingly scenic. I've exhausted the thesaurus, ok. The only words I've yet to use in this blog are 'locksmith', 'kerfuffle' and 'bootylicious'. I've used enough literary devices this trip to make an English teacher pregnant (although I've never actually met one that wasn't.)

So yes, the mountains were pretty epic. And while gazing out upon Europe's mightiest, we lunched on a nectarine, an apricot and other out of date delights, all washed down with disease water / sewage water (depending on your preferred flavour of liquid cholera of course.)

We descended into Khalde past trickling streams and rolling hills that made me feel like a termite on the side of a slazenger tennis ball. In the evening, I then set a new high score on subway surfers (kind of a big deal 😏😏), while Thomas made a friend and might have been recruited into the Israeli Defence Force (idk I had headphones in.)

Can you tell I'm going slightly delirious? I've just tried to butter my water bottle.

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