August 7th: We have just returned from a trip to Oni. This is a place up north not far from the Russian border. We were visiting our fellow volunteer Eric who was running a sports camp for a some of the students in Oni.

Eric - one of the best!

Eric’s dog, Bombura, has just had pups and she is busy with, and tired of, feeding them! Motherhood is getting her down.



The camp was a lot of fun. We played a number of team sports in the local sports ground and cooked ourselves some great dinners in the evening.

On the third day, after an abbreviated camp, we took a vehicle into the mountains. The vehicle was an ex-ambulance and was very, very uncomfortable. You see these vehicles all over the place. They may be uncomfortable, but they seem sturdy and good at dealing with rough roads and countryside - and we had a lot of that.

We stopped at a dilapidated summer resort which was probably quite the place to go in the soviet era. It had a delightful stream running through it and we stopped on the bank to have a late lunch and cool down.

Beside the stream.

Beside the stream.

Beside the stream.

Georgia is littered with derelict buildings, many of which were probably once rather grand - some dating from the Romanov era. This was an example, although this shot does not give a true impression of its state of disrepair. The place was literally falling down. The stairs inside were in quite good shape, but in many places the floors were soft an in a few had completely collapsed. Cows were tethered up in the basement!

However, the view from the top of the building was spectacular.

On the way out of the resort we saw two interesting sights. The first was a caged bear. He/she looked so sorrowful in a very small, dirty cage with only an old tire to play with.

The other was a decaying statue of Stalin. It seemed to summarize everything.

Later we visited a man who was camping in the woods. He was minding his bee hives. It is common here to move hives up into the mountains here in the summer time and move them down again in the fall.

Here he is centrifuging the combs to get the honey out.

Gill takes a walk in the woods.

Later we took a rather scary ride higher up in the mountains. The road was very rough, narrow and right on the edge! However, the views were spectacular.

Our driver, Koba (in red), decided that one of us, Jess , should marry his son and spent most of the time calling her “daughter-in-law”. She (far left) was tolerant of his attention, but not in favor of the idea. When this photo was taken we were just two kilometers from Russia.

At a pit-stop on the way back, we reviewed some of the day’s photographs.