Zaqatala, Zaqatala

The homeland of walnuts and wild nature. There's no point describing all the beauty of the nature there - you could say it's one big nature reserve. We visited close friends in the village of Mosul, one of the few places where the Ingiloy people live...

For the first time, in the Zaqatala Reserve, I saw a waterfall you can actually be proud of. You can see its scale in the photos. To see it, we had to trudge for 2.5 hours through wild forest, getting past obstacles of varying difficulty. Sometimes I just wanted to collapse on the ground and pass out from exhaustion (I need to quit smoking). As you approach the waterfall there's a decent, almost vertical drop. The only way down is a steel cable that hangs halfway down the drop, and after that you have to slide down on your backside, grabbing onto rocks and roots sticking out of the cracks in the cliffs. Then you have to cross a river. At first it seems like no big deal, since the water is only knee-deep and it's no more than 15m wide, but as soon as you put your foot into the churning stream it instantly freezes from the cold (and this is in summer!) and goes numb within a few minutes. On top of that, the current is so strong that lifting your foot more than 10-15 cm off the bottom is genuinely dangerous - it can easily knock you over and drag you downstream. But then, after the exhausting hike and the endless ups and downs, you get to sprawl out on a huge boulder or a wide log and just rest. Or even better, have a bite to eat :)

You can also go down to the Alazani River and visit a holy place (I don't remember the name). If you swim across the Alazani, you can end up in Georgia (or, if they catch you, in one of our holding cells). The river flows through neutral territory separating our countries and is guarded by our border guards, and as a result - a total ban on fishing, and in general, as I was told, you're not allowed to come closer than 1-2 km to the border (the river). But on the Georgian side nobody guards it, and on that bank you can grill shashlik and throw a party with songs and dancing - nobody cares (so they say). The Georgians call us Tatars and say our side guards the border well, so why should they bother too...