With four Georgian scouts to lead us we walked into the wilderness. Or so we hoped. It turned out that the route they took us along would mainly follow a road, which was a bit disappointing. Not long before we turned off the road we even walked through a pitch black tunnel where cars occasionally passed us. The Georgian scouts didn't seem to mind but it scared the living daylights out of the rest of us!
Once properly in the mountains and away from the road the path became very steep and the going got much harder. It was all worth it, though. The place where we set up camp was beautiful, save for the stray bits of rubbish that are found in even the remotest parts of Georgia.
The next morning we went back to Kazbegi and hiked up the mountain, without our rucksacks, to the Gergeti Trinity Chruch. The church is at the very top of the mountain, overlooking Kazbegi.
This time we camped nearer to civilisation, just one kilometer from Kazbegi. The following day was overcast but we shrugged it off as a bit of low cloud. We very soon realised that we were in for a good all-day downpour. We had walked for no more than a kilometer or two before the rain started. I quickly got soaked as I didn't have a proper raincoat with me. A car offered us a ride at one point, but only two of the Georgians accepted. The rest of us were already too wet to care. I was even enjoying myself. We walked until we got to the little tumbledown hut the others had been dropped at. We waited inside for the rain to lull and the pelted up the path and put the tents up. While the rain beat on the outside of the tent I lay in my sleeping bag, right until dinner.
The next morning we took a mashutka (a minibus that usually has a specific destination but will in reality take you almost anywhere) back to Tbilisi.
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