Caves

Vardzia

Vardzia Cave City

Vardzia is listed as one of the highlights of Georgia in our guidebook. We made it here on our second trip to Georgia, in October. Basing ourselves in Akhaltsikhe, we got a driver for the day to take us to the old cave city and other spots along the way. Although it is only 60km to Vardzia we spent an entire day away. The journey from Akhaltsikhe is along the Mtkvari River and the scenery was just gorgeous with canyons, green valleys and also […]

Gori’s Stalin Museum & Uplistsikhe Cave City

Our second day-trip from Tbilisi was quite a different adventure to the first one to the mountains! It involved first of all taking a marshutka to Gori to see the Stalin museum & Stalin’s home. Joseph Stalin was born in Gori and went to school here. An ethnic Georgian, his Georgian name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. The small building above was a home he lived in as a child. The larger building is the museum which was rather fascinating. No mention was made in […]

Overnight in an Ancient Cave Village, Iran

Residents of Meymand

Meymand is an interesting place with a very long history of troglodytes (cave dwellers). It is a small village with half of its residents living a semi-nomadic existence, sometimes residing in the cave-village, at other times they live in the wider area with their animals or tend their gardens in nearby valleys, depending on the season. We expected many to be home when we were there (end of winter/ beginning of spring) but hardly saw a soul. In fact here are all the residents […]