The Downside of an Ushguli Winter

March 12, 2008

We interrupt our regular programming to bring you this special report.

Having heard that last week, within hours of the caterpillar coming at last to clear our road of snow and restore Ushguli to Planet Earth, avalanches had followed it and closed the road again, I determined to walk down and see the damage for myself. We have now been roadless since February 15 - we won't count the caterpillar's work because it arrived in the evening and that same night the road was re-closed by snow and rock falling.

Here, from today, are my cellphone shots of the successive avalanches, each 3-4 m in height.

Last week, a friend on the phone from Tbilisi asked me what we're eating, in this isolated condition. "Each other," I replied, to great amusement. Not true yet - we have plenty of stored food and livestock, and then there are always shoes to boil, and bark off the trees. Plenty of snow for water.

Seriously, Ushguli does feel the strain of being cut off from the world every winter for weeks or months. A university student here during a 6-week break had to cross that nightmare on horseback to return to Mestia for his transport back to Tbilisi. An elderly lady here, one of my colleagues in the school, lost her sister and brother-in-law in another part of Georgia last week. She must get to the funeral. The school badly needs firewood; the classrooms are much too cold, and children are more susceptible to flu and other common diseases of winter. These are all minor worries, however, compared to what will happen if there's a medical emergency now - someone could easily die.

So GIVE US OUR ROAD! FOR KEEPS!

Etseri, late Jan-early Feb. 2008

It's about time!

Yes indeed, it's taken me a long time to get back online for long enough to post some more images to the old blog. Here are some from Etseri, as promised. Bottom to top:

Sergo's little helper on the hay-round

A local friend after an hour's walk through a showfall

Shorts of wood

Etseri winter scenery

Valya the Valiant, Etseri and region's unsung heroine, medicine woman, on her rounds. The intravenous drip, hanging from a clothes-horse (is that what you call it?) saved the man's life: he was severely dehydrated after the runs, and we rode on horseback 2 hours to reach him.

The shortest watchtower in Svaneti, near Pari, and only a few km from the tallest, which is in Etseri and on this blog already.

... So I went down to the village of Etseri at the end of January for the funeral of a lady I'd known there. She was 85 and had been bedridden for more than 10 years, with 3 unmarried children looking after her. I expected to be away a week, but my free ride back up to Ushguli took over 2 weeks. Thus the delay in new posts to the blog...

Here are some pictures from just before I left for Etseri, to be followed soon by some from Etseri itself.

Bottom - General shot of Ushguli with cool clouds over Mt Shkhara.

Snow has TEXTURE! (Well, especially if it's old.)

Snow has FORM! (Well, if the things under it do.)

Top - Tony on Skis! I went down one slope in deep powder, once, and fell over halfway down. But it's a start.

More from New Year's Day (Old), Jan. 14, as well as the next few days afterwards, from the bottom up:

Lile with part of the feast in the morning light, including (left of centre) the remains of my massive birthday cake

Me in traditional Svan costume

Football in a spectacular setting, with cows for an audience

Beauty and the beast: young lady with roast piglet's head

A visiting heliskiing team of 14 from Germany... paying $2700 per hour total for the machine, 3 pilots, a guard, a fuel truck, etc. They had a great morning on our virgin slopes.

Happy Old New Year from Ushguli! More on this important holiday soon.
Back online after a long delay. I lost internet capability after Jan. 1, and it's taken me this long to get through to the Magti mobile offices during the very busy and often closed Orthodox holiday season...

Here are a few shots from Ushguli of late:

Mt. Shkhara at sunset (above) and dawn (bottom), both from Lamaria Church. It was nearly -20 C with a light wind blowing when I trudged up to the church for these photos, but the view makes it worth it every time.

View of Ushguli from Lamaria Church's watchtower window (top) - it's been clear and cold for weeks now, down to as much as -22 C at night, really beautiful each day. School is off until Jan. 22, so I have time off from English teaching for photographs, video, writing, etc. More posting soon...

Happy New Year from the top of Europe!!! What a privilege to celebrate it here with close friends. We've finished watching the finale of Geostar, the local version of American Idol, on TV - Ani Kekua, you deserved it and I saw you win from miles away, weeks ago.

The Georgian New Year tradition calls for a feast at midnight, with much visiting going on all through the night and the whole of the following week. If there was ever an excess of food by extravagant Georgian standards, it's on this occasion, and all of it marvellous. Centrepiece is a roast piglet; I'm contributing mulled spiced white wine, thanks to my large store of exotic whole spices. I have taken a whole series of cellphone photos of the table being laid, starting with an empty tablecloth and ending with hardly any free space on the entire surface. And that's BEFORE the piglet comes out of the oven...

Greetings to the first viewers from 4 new countries, all from recent weeks in December '07: Thailand, Indonesia, Jamaica and Egypt! - all suitably exotic to me.

Some recent Ushguli photos, bottom to top:

Washing and watchtower, from our house.
L to R: Me, the gamgebeli (governor) of the Mestia region of Svaneti, Nino Japaridze; the lady in charge of our province's education, Sveta Niguriani; and the gamgebeli of Ushguli village, Aster Chelidze. After a Dec. 21 pre-presidential election political meeting in the village school where I teach English (which is behind us).

One of a series of attempts at odd cellphone self-portraits in pursuit of an author photo for my book on Svaneti, for the writing of which I'm taking advantage of this reasonably quiet winter season in Ushguli.

Sunset gilding Shkhara. I discovered this on the way to the outhouse; it was occupied and, turning, I was stunned by the colours. Run in to get my camera, then off to find a location for some photos, noting the time so I could do it again from a different location. It was magnificent, and I was just in time. That was yesterday evening, and I went out tonight, despite the -20 C or so temperatures, for an hour or so. Glorious.
I live one house to the left of this view.

Merry Christmas! Even though today was a regular work day in the Orthodox world, and Orthodox Christmas will be on January 7, wherever else it is celebrated, today's the day.

We waited until 15:35 before the electricity - off for nearly 4 days now - came back on, enabling me to connect to the internet and the blog again just in time for this special day. Another timely thing was the arrival of some more books - chiefly on teaching English, plus Roger Penrose's hefty 1100-page physics magnum opus, The Road to Reality. These, plus some fabulously unavailable fresh root ginger, were all the gift of a recent new American friend whom I had introduced to Ushguli and Svaneti while he was working on his Georgian-based doctoral thesis. TG and your wife, thank you so much for the gifts - perfect timing that they arrived on Christmas evening!

Some more cellphone photos:

Bottom, the view from my bedroom window west.

Middle, one of my three school-age English classes. (Not all the rooms have electricity, but several that do have radiators as of September. Others have wood stoves.)

Finally, top, some crazily tilting icicles, sent off on wild angles by the shifting snow above them on the roofs.

the W()RD: in lieu of pictures

I had 30 MB of free internet access from Magti when I first signed up for 3G service months ago. It certainly didn't take me long to blaze through that, and into my phone's credit, at the rate of 1 lari (c. 65 cents US) per MB of download. With careful, frugal use, I can achieve costs of about 2-4 lari per day - no more always-on internet like it was in Tbilisi, at 45 lari per month! The other complication is that the Mono cards by which one updates one's cellphone credit cost 1 lari extra in Svaneti... and some bright entrepreneur has decided to import only the 5-lari version into Ushguli, meaning that those of us who need cellphone credit will pay 20% extra for it. I'm protesting this robbery by getting my Mono cards, the 10- or preferably 20-lari versions, in Mestia. I'll be there next on Monday the 18th, it seems. So all of this is to say, blog updating will be a bit sparse until then, when I can a) get to my bank, b) buy more credit, and c) jump back online.

Until then, here are a few notes, 1000 words being worth a picture:

1) The most popular export to Ushguli from Latin America is... soap. Lots of it, many flavours, all of similar quality. I mean TV soap operas, or serials, as they're locally known. Some members of my host family, including 16-year-old Anzor, Dato & Nanuli's son, are wildly into these deeply meaningful, highly educational, throughly realistic cinematic portrayals of the lives of genuine people. Now that the Imedi ("Hope") TV channel is back after being closed down on Nov. 7 during the riots which briefly gripped Tbilisi, there are more serials than ever on offer. (Imedi, incidentally, is milking those bad times of its closure, damage and subsequent reopening as of last night for all they're worth. This morning a music video appeared, featuring clips from the riots and chaos of Nov. 7 in a sour-and-sugary context. Have the Georgian media made a cynic of me? Not hardly. Imedi knows that a bit of suffering can be whipped up into all SORTS of righteous indignation.) Back to serials... I'm thinking of taking on a new secret identity: serial killer. By which I mean, of course, not the usual meaning of "a person who murders many victims" but, in a play on words, "one who kills soap operas".

2) Cow manure, when it freezes, is by virtue of its organic bonds harder to break than ice and some kinds of rock, all of which are more brittle. Try it with a pickaxe sometime! Dare to compare!

3) This winter in Ushguli will be the season in which weather has the greatest effect of any season in my life, ever, anywhere. Not necessarily a bad thing, merely an observation. I'm not uncomfortable at all, in my 3 pairs of socks and trousers, with up to 7 layers on my upper half, wearing a hat indoors and two outside. I will never have lived through as snow-filled a winter as this one, even in 15 years in Canada.

4) White actually has an infinite variety of shades. Just ask any interior decorator how many names of white paint there ever have been, are and will be. Or ask a foreigner recently moved to Ushguli for a winter in up to 2 or more m of snow.

5) Having one's electricity fail at unspecified intervals is much harder psychologically than knowing when it will fail based on a schedule of power cuts. This feels like a time warp to my early months in Tbilisi 8 years ago: in Ushguli those bad old times are still here.

6) I'm actually loving it here, despite some of the above ranting. Wouldn't leave for the world. (As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, the best critic of something is one who loves it and is frustrated by its faults, not some one who hates it.) Ushguli is always amazing, and in the winter, with much less going on than the frenzy of spring through fall farming and tourism, I'm learning a lot about the village and its people. This is a PRIVELEGE - I don't need convincing of that.

More to come soon...

Ushguli, December 11, 2007

More straight from this morning!

Me at work on top of the haystack, and at my computer in my room.

Ushguli, Svaneti, December 11, 2007

Good morning from Ushguli! Temperature -2 C, medium to heavy fall of snow happening as I write.

Introducing some members of my host family, whom I have been friends with - and stayed with many times - since my first visit to Ushguli in 2004. These pictures are from this morning, so hot off the press they're practically steaming.

Bottom - Anzor Ratiani, soon to be 17. He and I are two members of the morning and evening animals' work crew. We help look after what goes into the cows - hay - and what comes out of them - chiefly manure. Twice a month we'll move about 3 tonnes of the stuff via ox-drawn sled to a field, where in the spring it'll feed the potato crop - which in turn will feed US. Talk about a recursive food chain.

Top - Bebia (Granny) Tsiala. She also helps with the above duties, as well as milking. Does a lot of cooking and cleaning at home as well. A real sweetheart.

Ushguli, December 4, 2007

I spoke too soon. Uploading pictures is not so bad, after all - doable, at least.

These photos are both from my cellphone camera (the only way you're going to get pictures from me in reasonable time for the next few months, as film developing and my scanner are a long way away now), from a jaunt I made up to a favourite spot for viewing Ushguli. Jaunt? The snow was up to 2 1/2 feet deep and I was wearing rubber boots, plus 7 layers on my upper body. But I got there and shot the photos and some video too. Going back down took about 10 minutes as opposed to about an hour. This was because "up" needed me to tack (zigzag) up the relatively steep hillside in that deep snow; whereas "down" was straight, buoyed up by all the same snow. Wonderful! The bottom shot is towards Mts Shkhara (left) and Lamaria (right) and the upper parts of the village, where I live; the top shot is of the lower part of the village, the angle I trudged up to get.

Pictures are slow.

Tried to upload a medium-size one (less than 600 kb) and it wouldn't go. Will keep on trying tomorrow. Hey, it's better than nothing; at least I'm back online, even if it is rather slow and buggy.

Greetings straight from Ushguli...

Yes, it's true. I'm back online after nearly 3 weeks. Arrived in Ushguli on November 23, and have been trying to get onto the internet from then until now. 5 days without electricity; numerous other power failures; several calls to and from Magti, my cellphone service provider. The last little thing needing correcting we sorted out a few minutes ago. Needless to say, I'm delighted. Don't know how much this will cost; do know that it's a bit buggy and slow; but the main thing is, I'm up and running again.
It's been as cold as -16 C; and we have about 1 metre of snow. I'm teaching 8 English classes per week, from grade 1 through adult, all from zero knowledge (by the students, that is! Although it's the first time I'm teaching my native tongue to those who know nothing of it, as well). And helping my host family with farming things - looking after the cows, mostly. Learning much about this amazing village at the top of Europe.
Stay tuned, viewers. More to follow, as close to live as it gets.

Ushguli, early November 2007

What a dramatic difference overnight in the mountains can make. A night of snowfall transformed the world; it continued the next day, giving my group of 11 Bulgarians and a Georgian some apprehension about the trip home. My writing this from Tbilisi means that we accomplished it - with a layover in Mestia to break up the long trip. We seemed cursed, however, to arrive only in darkness while travelling to, in or from Svaneti, as happened in all 3 cases.

This week my total blog viewer population passed 3000; that as recorded by country (which tool I had added later) passed 2500; and today the USA viewer count reached 666...

My next post, tomorrow evening Georgian time, hopefully will be from Ushguli by what I call MMM - Magti mobile modem. Tomorrow I travel there, and by evening I hope to have things up and running to continue posting as though there were no difference. Stay tuned!

Ushguli, late October-early November 2007

Top: Vittorio Sella's late 19th century picture of this hill from the other side shows four of Tamar's towers; now, about 120 years later, one is complete at right, and another ruined at left. I was told there were nine in the Middle Ages.

Second down: the carved wooden door of the church second from the top in the village.

Bottom two: a view of Mt Shkhara through autumn leaves, the day before our great snowfall, as seen in the final shot for today.

Greetings Vietnam - 64th country to view the blog! Yesterday, under "Viewers by country" I added:
- a del.icio.us button for those who wish to rave about the blog;
- a world map showing where it's day and night;
- a weather report for Mestia, Svaneti, which is as close as I could get to Ushguli, some 44 km away. Now you can get an instant, daily idea of what the climate is like not far from where I'll be spending this winter.

Ushguli, late October 2007

Here we are again, looking down on the village from in and near Queen Tamar's fortress (1st and 3rd shots) as well as just marvelling in general at its towers and Mt Shkhara (middle shot). These are all among my "classic" views to which I will always return seeking new ways of capturing them.

Central Svaneti, late October 2007

Another trip! It's been a busy year for me in the mountains, at least one visit per month on average from May.

This was with a group of 11 from Bulgaria and 1 from Georgia, with me as tour guide. Our own marshroutka (minivan) to Ushguli, 9 days there, then back, both ways via Mestia. We cooked, cleaned, gathered and cut our own firewood, in order to make it cheaper.

The way up offered the best autumn scenes I've yet seen in Svaneti, such a range of colours in the trees. Timing is everything! As usual I was somewhat constrained in stops for photographic opportunities as we travelled, and also as usual I made the most of what time allowed. Ushba remained stubbornly invisible behind clouds - but what was on display more than made up for that caprice.

Upper Svaneti, September 2007

It was only a weekend, but I did my best to make it count. Just a few locations for the photographs, as I was travelling with friends; but fortunately they were indulgent, perhaps aware that they would not regret stopping here and there for these images.

Greetings to the first viewer from Montenegro! That makes 63 countries stopping by, something I'm quite pleased about.