mountains, money and sausages

I planned to go to Abkhazia this week*. Instead I have spent most of it in bed, completely debilitated (in an ironic way) having eaten some 'Abkhazura' - a delicacy from Abkhazia of minced meat wrapped in a stomach. It is a kind of mini-haggis, which I had fondly imagined was pre-cooked, but was not. Raw stomach was not very good for my own stomach, and by the time I'd heard from the Deputy Foreign Minister of Abkhazia that my visa application had been refused while the Presidential stand-off continued, it was probably a good job -- I couldn't manage much more than a trip to the sulphur baths, full of hairy Georgian men (nakedness mandatory), which kind of revived my senses.

Recovery was slow, partly because I'm staying with a septogenerian widow (and ex-German teacher) who lives in a house preserved beautifully from the 1950s, faithfully lacking any heating. She is an inveterate tidier, shuffling around the house while people are out, arranging their messy but memorable piles into confusing new ones, and throwing away any loose bits of paper, including those containing the only record of my new-found friends' phone numbers. She also threw away my rehydration salts and told me to take some of her "house medicine" instead (which I think is basically elderflower juice left for 6 months in her unpowered fridge). Anyway, I have certainly lost a couple of inches around the waist...

So, I'm coming to the end of the Caucasus part of my trip. It has definitely been a reality-check on aspirations for 'conflict resolution'. I switch between wondering what an outsider can offer (since ultimately the conflicts have to be resolved by the people themselves) and then, listening to the opinions of many people I meet, wondering how on earth anything's going to change if the situation's left in their hands (it seems to be entirely socially-acceptable to write-off an entire people as 'bad' - in particular Armenians with respect to Azeris and vice versa). There's a kind of democratic dilemma, where one ends up thinking that some kind of paternalistic help will probably be necessary.

Some people put their faith in economic progress, reasoning that people living comfortably are less likely to resent their neighbours. Even if that's true, there seems little chance of progress being significant enough in the near future. Armenia is completely stifled by its corrupt regime and sealed-borders wıth Turkey and Azerbaijan; Georgia has a more positive atmosphere following the 'revolution', but is putting much hope in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan BP oil pipeline even though it'll only provide $50million/year in transit revenues; Azerbaijan has massive oil resources but, like so many oil-rich countries, seems to be lining the pockets of the 4WD-driving few while still paying its schoolteachers $30 a month. Those teachers have to supplement their incomes, either by finding other work in the evenings or by accepting other payments in return for good grades. Other public officials supplement their incomes in a similar fashion, and none of this helps the climate for foreign investment or domestic progress.

All this brings me cheesily to my final anecdote, which combines my customary near-death experience with a serious message. A couple of weeks ago I was in the Azeri mountains bordering Daghestan. I was keen to reach an (apparently) picturesque mountain village, and in a fit of highly-misguided optimism somehow convinced myself that the village would be above the cloud line and out of the snow which was falling gently on the bitterly-cold base station town. There was a collection of old men in furry hats waiting for transport, but none wanted to go to this village, and so I had to negotiate with the gaggle of jeep-drivers and charter one for myself. My driver looked absolutely identical to one of the baddies in 'The Untouchables': I can't find a picture on the internet, but imagine a spherical head with grey balding hair, glazed eyes, buck teeth (one of which is gold), a long sheepskin coat and gold rings on fingers.

On the way out of town we stopped (in order of priority, more or less) for petrol, then cigarettes, then engine oil, then a warm jacket, then strong cord and a kitchen knife (I'll get to this in a minute). We turned off the main road and started ascending through small villages, all blanketed in snow. The road became a track, which became a path, which became a field. And soon we just seemed to be driving up a river bed; banging our heads on the ceiling of the jeep as it crashed over the stones hidden by the snow. Everything was white, and it was hard to see since the little windscreen wipers kept freezing up. Soon we stopped and put chains on the back tyres. 10 minutes later we stopped again and put chains on the front tyres; many of
the chain-links were broken and so we had to improvise with the cord, fastening the chains to the wheels and cutting the cord with the big knife. I was pretty cold, with snow leaving my trousers sodden from the knee down; Seftar (my driver) was colder, with his fingers made raw by the rusty chains and snow. We started driving again, and visibility was down to ten metres. Large boulders emerged through the fog, cliffs began overhanging our path, and still we continued uphill. We'd been driving one-and-a-half hours; I asked Seftar whether we were almost there - he said we still had two-thirds of the way to go. After negotiating a series of hairpin bends which were so tight we had to do 3-point turns around each one (with the back wheels hanging close to a cliffface), sanity won through and Seftar recommended we turn around.

We started back towards the base station with a sense of relief, and probably driving far too fast. The hairpin bends were negotiated without problem, but by the time we were racing back through the outer villages, Seftar was getting a bit ahead of himself, singing along to the radio and shouting at the woman-with-potatoes we'd picked up along the way. We completely lost traction on one of the bends, slid off the road, through a fence into someone's front garden, and hit a tree hard enough for me to cut my head on the windscreen. Anyway, apologies having been made to the fence's owner, we started on our way again -- and soon met a much worse accident, with another jeep completely written off on the side of the road, and a group of men standing arguing next to it. There were bits of bonnet and engine scattered across the snow, some dazed-looking passengers inside, and for some reason (expect the unexpected in Azerbaijan) also a live cow sticking out of the boot. The Soviet UAZ jeep had met a new American Chevrolet coming the other way, driven by some rich Bakunians up for the weekend; it was the jeep's fault, and the Bakunians were suggesting settlement by the modest sum of $1000 to mend the bonnet of their Chevrolet (which was much less badly damaged than the jeep). The jeep's passengers were paying $6/each, and $1000 is way-over the yearly income for the jeep driver who'd already suffered a written-off vehicle. If I was writing a newspaper article I'd say "It was a vivid illustration of the inequalities of Azerbaijan's new economy." It didn't seem very fair.

P.S. I've just finished reading 'Death and the Penguin' by Andrey Kurkov (a Ukrainian). It is brilliant; I recommend it. You can see it here (even if, hopefully, you don't actually buy it from Amazon):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860469450/qid=1102176048/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-6621089-3769422

*Abkhazia is an autonomous republic within Georgia, which declared outright independence following a war in the early 1990s, during which 250,000 Georgians were expelled by Abkhaz forces (supported also by Russia) - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3261059.stm and http://www.c-r.org/progs/caucasus.shtml