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Outside Magazine March 2003

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DESTINATIONS SPECIAL: The Next Frontier
Hot Spot
Question: Can adventure travel take root in struggling, war-ravaged countries where the smoke is still clearing?

Test Case: The Republic of Georgia, home to unspoiled wilderness, beautiful mountains, and (oh, drat) fugitive Chechen rebels and rumored Al Qaeda cells

Answer: Good question!

By Fen Montaigne


	Big sky country: at 9, 500 feet in Georgia's Greater Caucasus Mountains, with a view into Azerbaijan (Joshua Paul)

"KAFTAR! KAFTAR! KAFTAR?"

Kaftar, I'm sorry to report, is nowhere in sight. Neither are his horses, which are supposed to carry us out of this forsaken patch of semi-desert in the beautiful but wobbly little nation of Georgia, a former Soviet republic on the southern border of Russia. As men around him yell for Kaftar, Paata Shanshiashvili, the father of his country's fledgling national parks system, is silent. Better than most, he knows that nothing comes easy in his native land.

We're in the easternmost part of the country, on the banks of the Alazani River, where the tracks of golden jackals and wild boars are stamped into the sand and poisonous Levantine vipers cling to sedimentary bluffs in search of prey. The sun has set. A cool, silver-blue light lingers in the western sky, silhouetting ramparts in the surrounding canyonlands and casting a chrome sheen on the muddy Alazani. I've been traveling with the 45-year-old Shanshiashvili for ten days, sampling the local ecotourism menu—including this float trip down the Alazani—a work-in-progress that he hopes will someday help support an ambitious network of parks and nature reserves. The striking beauty of the Caucasus Mountains has made a profound impression; inevitably, however, our tour has hit a snag. Like all the protected areas in Georgia, the nature reserve we're in, Vashlovani, has been virtually abandoned by the cash-starved national government. Its 14 employees, who earn an average of $15 a month and rely solely on two dilapidated vehicles prone to breakdown, ricochet from crisis to crisis.

The immediate problem is Kaftar Elanidze, a 30-year-old park ranger whose absence really isn't his fault: Our raft was hours late for this rendezvous, thanks to one of our jeeps rolling over in a washed-out riverbed, not to mention our being waylaid by a typical Georgian lunch that involved large quantities of food and homemade wine. As stars pop into place in the night sky, we face a decision. We can hike five miles in the dark through snake-infested canyons to the nearest dirt road, or keep floating a few more miles downriver, where, in theory, a 73-year-old driver named Volodya Elizbarashvili will be waiting in a 27-year-old Soviet-made truck to collect the raft and its three-man crew.

Paata Shanshiashvili and Paata Khumarashvili, 45, the nature reserve's director, opt for plan B, a reasonable choice—except that it requires entering the neighboring country of Azerbaijan. I don't have a visa to go there, and the consequences of being caught slipping in illegally are not pleasant—I might spend a night under guard at the border post, or I might be shipped off to the capital, Baku, for deportation. But it's either that or the nighttime viper hike, so before long we're all back on the Alazani, drifting through the darkness into a new land.

The truck, of course, is not there. (We find out later that it died that afternoon.) Now we face the least appealing of the evening's ever-shifting alternatives—marching eight miles through viperous wastes, past an Azeri frontier checkpoint, to the nearest outpost of the Georgian border patrol.

We set out shortly after 8 p.m., with the temperature in the thirties. A halogen miner's lamp strapped to my forehead lights our way along a sage-bordered dirt track. Up ahead, a shepherd's dogs snarl, prompting one of our boatmen to tear into a bush and hand us branches for self-defense. But the shepherds who emerge from the blackness bring good news: The Azeri border patrol has abandoned its position for the night. With that threat receding, and the snakes apparently off duty, I start to enjoy our stroll under a sky filled with an unfathomable number of stars. For much of the way, we march along a gravel riverbed cut by braided channels of shallow water, our escorts stopping occasionally to debate the proper path or puff on reeking cigarettes.

After slogging several hours we reach the blacked-out box that a handful of Georgian border guards call home. A teenage soldier carrying an automatic rifle invites Shanshiashvili and me into a hut and gestures for us to sit down on saggy, metal-spring cots. By the light of a kerosene lamp, he connects a car battery to a Russian TV and, voilˆ, a singer fills the room with the improbable sound of Azeri rap. It's around midnight, and in seconds Shanshiashvili is snoring on the cot next to mine as two kittens burrow into my coat for warmth.

OK, so the float trip down the Alazani needs a little work.

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