Təzə Bazar

Beluga! the taller man said to us with a proud smile. He linked arms with his friend and implored us to take their picture, making the universal shutter click hand gesture. We'd just walked into the fish section of the Təzə Bazar, past a row of hanging dried river fish. Gold and silver skinned, they reminded me of watches in a pawn shop. After he was done posing, the man wrote his name on a piece of paper and handed it to us with his grin still in place. Facebook, he requested.
Təzə Bazar is, without a doubt, one of our favorite marketplaces of the trip. Located on an uprooted construction zone of a street, in a concrete block building with adjacent sheds and tarps, it looked stark. Inside, though, it was warm and welcoming. We were invited to take portraits, to sample the dried fruit and pistachios. We were invited to have some tea.
We were able to walk around slowly, taking it all in. There were no demands for our attention or aggressive salesmanship. We were implored only to look and appreciate, not to buy buy buy. The market was quiet with more vendors than shoppers, which added to the relaxed atmosphere. We felt safe, like guests. This display of jarred vegetables was amazing. Other stands specialized in pickled grape leaves for dolma. Some marinated in recycled coke bottles.
The man behind this stand plucked a sugar-coated dried persimmon off from a bunch and tore it in half with his thumbs. A walnut was pressed into the flesh of each and handed to us. We chewed on the delicious snack and he smiled with full understanding. It was a little bit of perfection. Azerbaijan, he said, referencing the origin of both ingredients and welcoming us to his country. At least that's how it felt.
These young men also provided us with an email address and mentioned, more then thrice, that they had some caviar for sale. Apparently, the roe dealing at the bazaar used to be much... well... fishier - with men inviting you down into the lower level to peruse their illegal stash. Now, it's legal and far more expensive.
That downstairs room in the main bi-level building is now the meat market. There are slabs hanging from hooks upstairs, but here it gets to the nitty gritty of it all. Huge meat lockers buzzed and the shiny metal tables gave an instant sense of sanitation at the bottom of the blood specked staircase. This woman sold the full works, tongues, trotters, et al. She put her hand to her chest to confirm our assumption that the large organs in the front were hearts. Then, of course, she welcomed us to take a picture.
Azerbaijan is famous for its fruit and while the full gambit was run, you could easily tell which season it was. They tried as best they could to get these squash into a neat pyramid like all the other produce. But its shape just makes things too tricky. The colors were extraordinary and most everything was polished to a sheen. Off to the side, there was a cafe and we sat for some tea. Waiting for boiling water to cool off really gives you a moment to take things in.
Word got around about us and we were greeted into rooms with our new nickname: Americas. It became a smiling contest of sorts. Merlin and I have rather big ones and people put up their best fight trying to out grin us. We walked around in a sort of happy stupor, pointing at all the gastronomic treasures. There were rices and dried herbs and vegetables and beans. Lambskin sacks kept dairy products cool and wheels of cheese added a saltiness to the air.
Food is just a part of what Təzə Bazar encompasses. There is a whole section, just as large, with hardware, home appliances and lighting fixtures. This area had more customers while we were there. Men tried out power tools and examined lawn mowers. Everything was kept neatly - the most orderly store of its kind I've ever seen. As we left, a man pulled a wagon loaded with fresh cheese through the extension cord department. We took more pictures and he even stopped a little to make sure we got a good one.

Baku's Destruction/Construction

In 1850, Baku - the capital of Azerbaijan - was little more than a sleepy, stone village on the Caspian sea. By 1900, it was producing twenty percent of the world's oil, and the population had boomed. In the last hundred and fifty years, Baku's population has grown from seven thousand to nearly two million people. A lot of buildings were put up very fast - now, they're being town down.

We arrived here in a period of mist and chill, to find a city on the cusp of becoming something entirely different from what it has been.
Baku is a city on the line between sea and desert, full of dust, mostly new. Near the water, large steel and glass towers erupt from the ground, standing near neglected oil-boom mansions and obliterating the older, lower houses. The european gilded age was once the style here. Now, it is being transformed into a city of blank lines and large-windowed boutiques. Walking down the main avenues, there is little evidence of place - it could be any wealthy, bland city. The houses that have been left standing are being furiously retrofitted and carved up.
Walking in the northern part of the capital, further away from the old town and the Caspian promenade, there are huge swaths of torn-up earth and knocked-down buildings. One can still see a few graceful rooflines and elaborate mouldings, though the structures are hollow and filled with rubble.

Partly, these blocks were leveled because the buildings there were deemed unsafe or unfit to live in. Skeptics aren't so sure - there are people who believe the government has been leveling houses to provide inexpensive land for development and to help keep the housing market from collapsing.
The housing market, unlike in other places, has been very strong (it grew 7.9% in 2011). Azerbaijan is becoming wealthier - at least on paper - and real estate prices have been going up. Sadly, there isn't a great deal of parity, and most of the people who have been displaced from their homes aren't able to afford the new apartments.

It's common to walk next to glittering, new apartments on sidewalks of earth and debris. Little has been done to help the cities infrastructure. Manhole covers are often missing. Electric lines sag. And row after row of houses have been left to decay and fill with trash, their front walls ripped out, their floors torn through. It's unlikely that they would have become like this on their own, though that's what the government claims. They sit, waiting to be bulldozed.

The modern construction standards aren't necessarily very good, either. Despite claims that the new towers are being built to improve the quality of life and safety of Baku's citizens, that's hard to verify. In 2007, a prominent fourteen-story building project collapsed, killing five construction workers. Look at the state of this scaffolding.
Baku is a place that won't have much of anything old. There wasn't much here to begin with, there will be less soon. In the old town - a potentially delightful warren of small streets and creaky buildings - they are ripping out the cobbles as I write this, to be replaced with more "modern" paving. The old houses have been bought up; oil-company logos grace the plaques on the doors. One corner of the town's wall was leveled to make room for a hotel.

Georgia on the Vine

Georgia was destined for wine making. Their summers are warm, their winters are moderate with barely any frost and there are natural springs all over the place. The Black Sea keeps the air moist and the Caucusus drain mineral rich water into the valley. The Kakheti region is primo wine country and driving through brings you views of vineyards for as far as the eye can see. It is the proven site of wine making as far back as 9000 BC - making Georgia one of the oldest wine producing regions in the world. Some people say the oldest. It all started when grape juice was stored under the earth for the winter and turned up in spring as wine. People began to ferment juice in big clay pots, burying them in the ground for seasons or years. Shards of kveris, some from the 3rd millennium BC, fill Georgian ethnographic and history museums. Whole ones are on almost every front lawn or public park. Most "house wine," found on tap or served in recycled soda bottles in restaurants, is still made this way. I had heard a lot about Georgian wine and had been disappointed at how, well, awful I thought it was. It turns out, I just don't like homemade "black wine" (also known as "orange wine" outside of Georgia), which is made from white grapes, but fermented with the skins still in the mix.
While most families make their own wine, professional production is a large and growing field. There are about 400 different grapes in Georgia, around 38 of which are cultivated for wine. While the growing is still almost exclusively a small farmer affair, commercial wineries (who buy from those private vineyards) have popped up to deal with the production. We visited Teliani Valley, one of the biggest and most modern wineries. These barrels from the 90s were some of the first used, but shiny temperature-control stainless steel ones in the next room did most of the work nowadays.
They opened in 1997, just around a decade after Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign had destroyed 3/4 of all the vineyards in Georgia. They boomed for about ten years, before the 2006 Russian embargo on Georgian wine was put in place. Business is bouncing back steadily, though. An I Love Lucy-esque assembly line worked on bottling, corking (with only the finest Portuguese cork, something dear to my heart), labeling and boxing the bottles. Around 3 million are produced per year, including some special French/Georgian grape blends that are big in Austria.
Our tour guide had studied wine tourism in Seattle, Washington and the Tacoma Valley. Georgia (like the other leader in former Soviet wine production, Moldova) is hoping to excite visitors with winery visits and harvest-time festivities. While Teliani Valley may not have been the underground wine cave of Milestii-Mici, they are clearly on the right track. It was fun to visit, we were given delicious tastings and Nino even helped point us in the direction of our next sight-seeing venture.
Yes, our guide's name was Nino. Half the women we meet here are named after the saint who converted Georgia to Christianity - and is buried at recently visited Bodbe Monastery. She is also intertwined with the sacredness of wine in Georgia, conducting her missions with a cross wrapped up in grape vines. Anyway, Nino -guide not saint - advised us to wave down a marshrutka outside the winery and ask the driver to take us to the Aleksandre Chavchavadze House Museum in Tsinsandali.
There, we visited one of the biggest wine cellars in Khaketi (and had another "tasting" a.k.a. glass of Tsinindali wine). We weren't allowed to take photos inside, but the room of shelves filled with thousands of dusty, unlabelled bottles was awesome. At least 500 of them were from the 19th century. The old woman who had opened the cellar door for us laughed when we asked if she'd sampled any. "Vinegar," she responded and scrunched her face. So, it sounds like she had...?

A New Type Of Travel

We traveled by car for the first fifteen months of the trip. Now, the car is back in America. A lot has changed in the way we get around. Above, the Tbilisi train station at dusk.
The biggest difference is the amount we are able to carry with us. We used to have a tent and folding table, a gas stove, pots and pans, spatulas and cheese grater, sleeping bags and wine glasses. We had to leave behind our tripod, our bags of books, our bigger bags of clothes, our thermoses and CD's. We used to feel as though there was a complete home in our car, ready to be unfolded at a campsite or rented room. One bag was called "the kitchen," another "the library," our tent was the bedroom, put in next to "our closets." There were times when we contemplated buying houseplants (or, car-plants?).

Now, everything we carry must really be carried.

Above, an uncrowded moment on the Tbilisi subway, which is actually quite convenient, fast and clean.
Another difference - we now have to know more precisely where the next destination will be, and how we are going to get there. With a car, it's easy to pull over for the night at some roadhouse or inn. We could wander at our own pace. There were no prescribed routes - we could take a back road or continue beyond where the busses ran. Now, we are at the mercy of our drivers, conductors and pilots, whose job is to go from one point to another.

We took a plane from Tbilisi to Mestia, which we never would have done before. On our flight there, we were the only two people aboard (there were sixteen seats, supposedly - I counted fifteen). On our flight back, the plane was full of Svans journeying to the capital for Christmas - it seemed most of them had never flown before.

Of course, in this part of the world, people travel by marshrutka, and so we have too. We'd been on them before, of course (our most memorable ride being into Transnistria), but not as often as most travelers in Eastern Europe.

Marshrutkas are, essentially, private busses - usually vans, actually - that run along predetermined routes and pick up or drop off passengers as they go. Sometimes they are quite pleasant. Sometimes, they are over-packed and uncomfortable.
We took a slow sleeper train from Tbilisi to Baku in Azerbaijan. It was, at one time, probably very luxurious, but was now tattered and faded. We felt that the journey - especially in between dreams, waking to darkness and clanging - was decades-old. The curtain rod was rusty, the fabrics musty. The porters had raucous laughs and a tiny room where they drank tea. They spoke Azeri to each other, hard-edged Russian to us. Outside, only occasional lights in the desert. We felt, for many hours, the slow tilt of the land downward to the caspian sea.

It was wonderful to drift in this relic of empire and Brezhnev, letting the miles pass unnoticed. We could read and play cards, drink Georgian brandy and use the bathroom. We miss our car very much - but this kind of travel isn't so bad.

Puri, Khachapuri, Lobiani and Kubdari

It was our first, jet-lagged morning in Georgia, at the table of a Tbilisi hostel. A man named Benji, who was about to make us pankcakes, put a few flat loaves on the table with jam. They were rounded and puffy, with two points sticking out at each end. I asked if they were the pancakes and he laughed. “No,” he said. “This is puri, Georgian bread.”

Thus began a small love affair. Puri (პური in Georgian), in all its myriad forms, is delicious and different, a fluffy, cheesy, buttery, salty welcome to the region.

(As you can see, I can be forgiven for thinking that it was some kind of pancake. One point got ripped off this example before we had a chance to take a picture.)

Puri is often confused with the Indian bread of the same name, but there are real differences in the way the two loaves are cooked. While Indian puri (also spelled "poori") is deep-fried in oil, Georgian puri is baked in a traditional, vertical oven called a tone (seen at right in the picture - they're squat, primitive looking things).

Though electric tones exist, the traditional oven is heated by wood. A fire is lit at the bottom of the well-like, clay oven in the evening and left to burn all night. In the morning, the walls of the tone have absorbed enough heat to bake bread until about noon. Loaves are stuck to the inside walls for a few minutes, then removed with a long, hook-and-pole thing. Some tones are as deep as six feet, while others are only a slight recess.

The version of puri that is most famous, and perhaps the least likely to be forgotten, is khachapuri or, ხაჭაპური. Qacha means cheese; this is simply stuffed bread. It’s often served in lieu of plain bread, and many regions have their own styles.

In the mountains of the Svaneti region, our host mother was especially proud of her kubdari, the national dish of the Svaneti people. Kubdari is similar to khachapuri, but also filled with ground beef and herbs. While delicious, it really should have been considered a meal in itself – but it was served alongside our plate, like an extravagant dinner roll.

Above, a more sedate, normal khachapuri, snipped into quarters with long shears.

Bakery-cafes are probably the most popular eating spots in Georgia, especially in Tbilisi. Alongside sweets and little cakes, one is likely to find a wide array of savory baked goods - from regular breads to khachapuri to the indulgent adjaruli khachapuri, a dish-shaped loaf, the hollow of which is filled with a raw egg and melted butter in addition to cheese.

One of our favorite Georgian breads is called lobiani, which derives its name from lobio, or "beans." It's a wafer-thin pastry with a dry, bean and garlic paste baked inside. Delicious, and way less guilt inducing than some of the other options.
Georgian script is very tough to read without practice, and it's difficult to find a shop that's selling what you're looking for. Luckily, a lot of businesses will hang examples of their wares outside their door. We laughed the first time we saw a loaf on a string, but then found that it's common.
On feast days, like New Year's, bread plays an important role in the festivities, especially the traditional, cheese-less loaves. We actually had difficulty buying bread on New Years Eve - all the bakeries were packed, with lines out the door. This little girl had just secured her families supply, and was literally running home with it.
For some reason, most Georgian bakeries tend to be below street level. We were able to find this semi-subterranean (though the light from the window might suggest otherwise) place in Signaghi using our noses.

It seemed to be some kind of secret bread club - plenty of old women were buying bread at the counter, but we were initially turned away. It wasn't until one of the other customers admonished the baker that she went into the back room and emerged with a loaf for us. The cost, for a large, frying-pan-sized puri: .50 Lari, or about 30¢. We ate it with a can of sardines, standing up in a park - maybe the best lunch of the country.

Georgian Food

Georgian food is like a great sitcom. A classic one. Sure, it's formulaic and mostly predictable, but there are enough little surprises, enough zest, a guest star now and then to keep you hooked. When it's "bad," it may feel uninspired and laid on too thick, but when it's good it's damn near brilliant. The cast of characters include: walnuts, garlic, cilantro, pepper, mushrooms, eggplant, pomegranate and beans. The lead, the cornerstone of all Georgian food, is khinkali.
In small eating joints, it may be the only thing on offer. At restaurants with a scroll of a menu, they are still often the only thing ordered. Khinkali are a lot like Chinese soup dumplings. You have to get the hang of eating them, as the doughy sacks are filled not only with a ball of spicy meat, but also some great liquid. You grab them by the nub (which remains uneaten) bite and slurp out the juices, then go about eating the rest of it with your hand or a fork. When they're stuffed with mushroom or potato, there's not quite the same half-filled water balloon experience, but they're still a treat. Some were satisfying, some were great, some were transcendent. All were ordered in bulk, as asking for less then five khinkali is basically impossible.
The thing is - Georgian food is just absolutely packed with flavor. Sometimes to a fault, but mostly to sheer pleasure. This was another ubiquitous menu item - badrijani nigvzit, eggplant with walnut paste, topped with pomegranate seeds. Here's where that hard-to-complain-about predictable formula comes in. Just about everything, especially every vegetable, is prepared with crushed walnuts and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. The walnut puree is so garlic enriched, so flavorful, that you'll swear it's some sort of cheese. But Georgians just know how to work wonders with the nut.
And they make them so hard to recognize! What are these, you ask? Candles? Sausages? (My guess and Merlin's, respectively). They're churchkhela, strings of walnuts dipped into a flour and grape juice paste. Think: nut-filled fruit roll up on a string. Mostly, they were brown or deep burgundy, but these festive ones ran the full gambit of grape varieties. On the side of almost every road were churchkhela stands. Many of them were covered with a plastic tarp or a piece of lace to shield the gummy creations from kicked up dust.
Probably my favorite walnutty dishes were pkhali, veggie pates most often made from spinach, beet or cabbage. Oh, the mounds of spinach walnut mash I consumed. Every now and then one would be just a little more garlicky or salty or... do I taste dill? Scallion? No two tasted exactly the same and they were always a pleasure. Merlin and I commented that the pkhali in Georgia were like the paprikas in Hungary, dishes that were introduced to us on this trip and will likely be incorporated into our lifelong cooking. Here, a veggie plate is rounded out by "peasants salad" (tomato, cilantro and cucumber), eggplant w/ walnut, kidney beans and mchadi, a dense cornflour cake.
Speaking of kidney beans, lobio was the chameleon of the menu's main players. Sometimes it was cold, but most often it was served "in a clay pot." This could mean anything from plump, crisp-skinned beans with or without liquid to a mash to a stew. This bowl of lobio was incredible with a heavy dose of cumin, a bay leaf at the bottom and a biting black pepper spice. Georgia's really only the second country on our trip so far (after Hungary) to kick things up with spice. Here, it wouldn't be surprising to find a dried chilli pepper somewhere in your dish or to discern that the heat culprit was just a heavy dose of raw garlic or one strong red onion.
With all these flavor explosions and the sad, but common, occurrence of over salting, dishes like shredded beets in mayo (with a dusting of crushed walnut, of course) and "fresh greens" came in handy. The latter was a plate full of cilantro, scallions, parsley and radish. People chewed on these herbs to help with digestion and drank neon green soda water infused with tarragon. The plate often signaled a respite for us, a break before the next round of dishes came. And they always came.
You see, it is just too easy to order way too much. Food is very inexpensive in Georgia, menus are big and servers just keep saying "and..." until you've exhausted the list of things you know how to say in Georgian or can successfully charade. I have to mention the one food I probably ate more of in Georgia than anything else, but isn't really all that photogenic. S'oko - mushrooms. Saying the word alone would bring a sizzling cast iron skillet of whole mushrooms in oil and spices. Another alternative was to get the same preparation but filled with sulguni, smoked cheese. The best, though, were "stewed mushrooms," which came in so many different variations of yumminess.
Meat can be ordered in any number of sauces, with common bases being tomato, yogurt, garlic or walnut. Sausages, like the one above which had pomegranate seeds mixed into the filling, are usually served in a sizzling pan with potato and onion. Stewed veal was almost always on hand, as was the delicious tabaka, a flattened (or spatchcocked, if you will) whole chicken, fried. The simplest of meats, the almighty kebab, which could be seen grilling on any and all fires, can be ordered with an array of sauces: chilli (ajika), plum (tqemali) and pomegranate (masharaphi) being the most popular.
Sure, we almost always left a Georgian dinner with a certain amount of stomach pain. Yes, the covert walnut infusions probably had a lot to do with it. And the irresistible bread. But it was all worth it. Most restaurants in Georgia are located in cellars, below a sidewalk with no windows. Walking downstairs and opening a door, you never know exactly what you'll find... except you always kind of do. It'll be Georgian food, served with Georgian hospitality and devoured with Georgian vigor by the Georgians seated all around you. If Georgian food is, indeed, a classic sitcom - your fellow diners are the laugh track.

David Gareja - A Treasure in Isolation

In the summer of 1987, a group of Tbilisi students began protesting Russian troop movements that were happening far away in the deserted Kakheti region of Georgia. The country was still controlled (occupied would be a better word) by the Soviets, who were fighting the last, losing stages of a war in Afghanistan. The Kakheti wasteland - a world of treeless slopes, sheep, rock and hardened people - was being used as a training area because of its supposed resemblance to the hills of the war zone. The Georgian youth weren't protesting the war, though, and they were only nominally protesting Russian rule.

The group was trying to save one of the great treasures of the Caucasus.

David Gareja cave monastery (also called "Davit'garejis," "Keşiş Dağ məbədi" and "დავითგარეჯის სამონასტრო კომპლექსი") is among the most unique, hauntingly historic and beautiful places we've been on the trip. It further proves a point - if you want to see amazing things with very few other tourists around, come to Georgia. This is a country of astounding history.

In the sixth century, a small sect of Assyrian monks arrived in Georgia. They split up when they reached the Caucasus, with some settling further east, near present day Tbilisi, and some heading to the foothills. A monk named St. David, drawn to the desolation and purity of Kakheti, decided to build a monastery there, high up on a bluff overlooking present-day Azerbaijan. For three centuries, it grew slowly - the few devotees who kept up the site lived very simply in small hollows dug into the rock. Then, in the 9th century, the Georgian kingdom began to flourish, and the monastery took on a special role in the religious lives of the monarchy.

With royal support - from such notables as David the Builder and Queen Tamar - David Gareja expanded and thrived in the 9th to 13th centuries. It was during this period that the most notable caves were cut into the rock, and when the monastery's extraordinary frescoes were painted.

The wall paintings are especially important because of where they are and what they’ve endured – nearly one thousand years of graffiti has taken its toll on some of the images, not to mention the wind and sand. Most of the frescoes lie just a few feet within cave walls, unprotected by doors, open to the elements. Some are even on exterior surfaces. The biggest threat, though, came not from exposure, but from Russian artillery fire.

In the 13th century, the entire population of David Gareja was massacred by the invading Mongols. Some two hundred years later, a small contingent of Christian Georgians had reoccupied the monastery, but the place remained sparsely and sporadically populated – there were regular attacks by both Persians and Ottomans. A new height was reached at the end of the 16th century, but in 1615, six thousand monks were killed here by the Persian Shah Abbas. Then, the Bolsheviks arrived and banned access to the entire area. The caves deteriorated some simply from disuse, but it was when military training began in Kakheti, in the 1970’s, that things really got bad. Russian tanks ran shelling sessions along the ridge, and frequently targeted the church caves. Huge amounts of damage were done. Some chambers were lost forever.
From Tbilisi or Signaghi – the two most logical starting points for tourists visiting the monastery – it takes about 1 ½ to 2 hours to reach the site by car. There are no buses or other public transportation options. For the last 45 minutes of driving, the road is extremely rough and the landscape becomes increasingly barren and empty.

We watched hawks and eagles skim the low grass. Men on horseback herded cows and sheep across the brown earth. There were no other cars. The road was washed out to bare rock in some places.
David Gareja is enormous - there are several hundred caves spread over a few kilometers - but there are two main, accessible parts. The first section is called Davit Lavra; the immediate group of buildings just beside the "parking lot," this is a fairly compact warren of caves and ancient walls. It has been re-inhabited by monks, who have closed off the majority of the chambers. There are a few visitable caves and a recently refurbished, uninteresting chapel. It's worth about twenty minutes of your time - the views are excellent, the structures are fun to look at. There's a little shop that sells icons and candles, and nothing else (plan on bringing your own food and water, if you need it). Our taxi driver tried to convince us that this was the complete monastery.
In fact, it's just the beginning. A twenty minute hike up the hill from Davit Lavra (find the trail immediately next to the shop) leads to the the back side of the ridge, just above the border with Azerbaijan, and to Udabno. The lower desert stretches into the distance. The trail gets rougher, and a little scrambling is required. There are no guardrails - a fall would likely be deadly.

At first, there are only a few small hollows in the rock, with no adornment and rough-hewn walls. As the trail continues, though, the caves become more elaborate. Frescoes begin to appear on the inner walls, then on the outer faces. Near the end of the ridge, the caverns become truly engrossing, the painting more intricate. One of the most famous paintings, this 10th century depiction of the last supper, graces the wall above the old monk's cafeteria - the strangely carved rock along the floor was once a low table.
A visit to Udabno won't be forgotten. It is truly a magical experience, coming face to face with these frescoes - a thousand years old, unprotected, painted on cave walls in the desert. One feels a rush of discovery, and a sense of utter loneliness. There are no signs, no guides, no admission fee, no opening times, barely any other people. If you can get there, you are simply there.

Emerging from the caves into the light, the emptiness of the landscape is captivating. This part of the monastery feels ancient in a way few other places can - there is not a single mark of modernity in sight, there are no voices. On the day we visited, there wasn't even a gust of wind. It seemed that we had stepped back a millennium.
The student group was successful, in 1987, in putting an end to the Soviet military maneuvers at the monastery. This kind of effective protest was almost unheard of in the USSR, and some historians mark the event as the genesis of the Georgian independence movement. Sadly, ten years later, the Georgian military began training at David Gareja, and it took another popular protest to put an end to the shelling.

Because the Georgian international border with Azerbaijan technically runs along the ridge-top of Udabno, there is currently a low-grade dispute between the two countries over who owns the monastery. There is another part of David Gareja that is some 2 kilometers into Azerbaijan, and several other, more inaccessible compounds on the Georgian side.

Of all the places we've been, I can't say that there are any more striking or moving than this one. Driving back through the bare nothingness, we couldn't think of anything to say - the taxi driver pointed at huge eagles, young boys sat motionless on tall horses, the sun got very low in the sky, the rocks turned blue and red. We sat in the car both melancholy and excited, feeling that we'd made a discovery - one of the greatest triumphs of traveling.