20. Georgian Wedding

I would like to describe the wedding of a dear friend who recently married in Tbilisi, Georgia (the central European country, not the US state). So far in this blog I have tried to refrain from writing about anything to do with my social life (what there is of it). I hope I have managed to restrict myself to events or narratives which may be of interest to people that don’t know me, as well as to those that do. And I have tried to steer clear of anything of a private nature.

However, I found my friend’s wedding a quite extraordinary event. For a start, it gave me my first taste of a remarkable country which I might otherwise never have visited. I was only in Tbilisi for a few days, but many aspects of the city made me think of descriptions of Middle Earth in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. When you look around you see castles, churches and monasteries perched on cliff tops. There are also a number of huge white statues of proud warrior women, their swords uplifted. However, the architecture is much more eastern than I had anticipated: many buildings have the sort of carved wooden first floor galleries that I associate primarily with Nepal. The language and alphabet are also quite unlike anything else I have ever encountered - in fact, the alphabet is unique. On the other hand, the similarities to England are also striking: both countries have almost the same flag, St. George as their patron saint, and a great love of drinking and sport.

Mama Georgia Statue

I also gained an extremely positive impression of the Georgians themselves. For a start, they seem to be extremely laid back. In fact, they take laissez-faire to a whole new level. However, at the same time there is a strong sense of pride, honour and chivalry. This is expressed in their treatment of women who, I was reliably informed, are placed on a pedestal and never permitted to pay for anything. They have also embraced rugby, which is surely quite unusual for a central Asian republic. And they are fearsome wrestlers, which I know firsthand from having been unfortunate enough to spar with the occasional Georgian at my judo club.

My friend’s wedding took place in the Mama Daviti church, on the steep side of Mount Mtatsminda (‘Holy Mountain’). There are no seats in the church; everyone stands. However, it is perfectly acceptable to wander in and out as you wish – again the Georgian laissez-faire. At times this attitude can maybe go too far: I was standing next to a woman whose mobile phone started to ring. She rummaged around in her bag, eventually found it, and then started blithely chattering away. That would not have gone down so well at an English wedding.

Mama Daviti Church in winter

Outside it was a bright and sunny; inside the church was very dark. Three ancient women chanted haunting madrigals and the incense smoke curled thickly around the candles. Bride and groom both wore crowns and the groom – my friend – was addressed with the new Georgian name which had been conferred upon him when he converted to Georgian orthodoxy two weeks beforehand in London’s Seven Sisters. The only incongruous note in this solemn ceremony was that two other couples were being married at the same time – normal procedure, apparently, though for a brief moment it did make me think of Las Vegas.

The following day the wedding guests were driven to a lunch half an hour outside Tbilisi, in the countryside. In dappled sunlight we walked down wooden steps, crossed and recrossed a small river, and walked below platforms and treehouses suspended in the foliage above. The path lead to a walled, shady terrace overlooking a broad river. It reminded me of Rivendell, the home of the elves in Middle Earth. On this terrace we were served a Georgian banquet. Since no one could read a menu, it was hard to pace oneself. Dish after dish arrived, most of them in dumpling form, and most of them very salty. This wasn’t a problem for me since I like salty food. However, in Georgia even the mineral water is salty; I found myself wishing for some normal water with which to dilute it.

Following our return from lunch, I decided to go to the sulphur baths in Tbilisi with a friend and his girlfriend. I was expecting something like a Turkish steam bath. However, the negotiations with the bath house mistress were futile since the communication barrier proved insurmountable. We were lead into our private room; I am not sure whether this was a tourist luxury or the norm. There we were given thin sheet-like towels and directed towards our private sulphur bath – a sort of hot tub full of pungent eggy water. I think we were supposed to get into the tub naked but, although I have overcome my public schoolboy’s embarrassment about male nudity, being with a friend and his girlfriend changes the dynamic. None of us had brought swimwear, having been informed that it would not be necessary (and assuming that men and women would be separated). So, we climbed into the eggy hot tub in our towels.

The water was indeed hot but in no way as satisfactory as a sauna for sweating out the accumulated toxins of the past few nights. After some minutes we heard a knocking on the door of the anteroom. I went to open it and was confronted by the burly figure of our masseur. I let him into the anteroom and he promptly took all his clothes off. I wondered whether there had been some miscommunication. The burly masseur must have seen the consternation in my face since he put his black y-fronts back on again, then he followed me into the room with the eggy hot tub.

There was a large marble slab against the side of this room. The masseur indicated to me to get onto the slab. I sat on it and swung my legs up as lithely as I could, given the restrictive nature of the sodden towel which I still had wrapped around me (and which was by now quite see-through). The burly masseur tore it off in disgust, then he began to pummel my naked form on the hard marble top, in full view of friend and girlfriend (who, I hope, chose to look elsewhere). There were three stages to this punishment and at the end of each stage a new victim was required; this involved copious amounts of soggy towel application, soggy towel removal and a complex trigonometry of gaze aversion. My favourite moment occurred during a respite in the proceedings, when my friend was naked and supine on the slab and the masseur had popped out to look for his instruments. We suddenly heard childish giggling; looking up, I could see the outstretched pointing arms and delighted faces of a number of street urchins who were peering down at us from the windows in the side of the cupola which crowned the small dome directly above our heads.

Though I wouldn’t say that I particularly enjoyed the brutal massage or the eggy water, I do feel that I have shared a bonding experience with my friend and his girlfriend. And we all enjoyed the walk from the baths back to our hotel. It was still early on Sunday evening and the streets were full of people wandering aimlessly around in large family groups. In Western Europe, certainly in Northern Europe, we only go out if we need something, or to shop. This was more similar to the Italian passegiata – couples flirting, children running around, adults stopping to shoot the breeze. There was a very enjoyable sense of unhurried bonhomie – a sort of collective stock taking. We are much the poorer for not having this in the west; I might even trade our fine northern saunas for it.

19. Matterhorn Peak

I recently read Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. The story is narrated by a character called Ray Smith; he heads off with his beatnik friends - Japhy and Morley the yodeller - to climb Matterhorn Peak in the Eastern Sierra, on the Nevada border, in search of solitude and the Zen way of life. I enjoyed the book and was inspired to climb Matterhorn Peak myself.

I left San Francisco at 7am on Saturday morning and arrived in the tiny settlement of Bridgeport around midday. There I filled out a wilderness permit before driving the 10 miles to Twin Lakes, following in Kerouac's footsteps. I parked my car at Twin Lakes and set off up the steep Horse Creek trail. The trail led me alongside a chattering brook, through beautiful scented pine glades and eventually up into a magnificent, boulder strewn valley. Kerouac wrote:

With my sneakers it was as easy as pie to just dance nimbly from boulder to boulder, but after a while I noticed how gracefully Japhy was doing it and he just ambled from boulder to boulder, sometimes in a deliberate dance with his legs crossing right to left, right to left and for a while I followed his every step but then I learned it was better for me to just spontaneously pick my own boulders and make a ragged dance of my own.

'The secret of this kind of climbing,' said Japhy, 'is like Zen. Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen.' Which it was.

Kerouac describes the beauty of this valley - part of the Hoover Wilderness - in detail. He does not exaggerate; it loses nothing by comparison with the finest valleys that I have seen in the Alps. The jagged Matterhorn Peak (3738m) rises serenely above it.

Matterhorn Peak

I climbed for four hours and then bedded down for the night at a tiny, unnamed lake just below the North Face. There was a fearsome gale blowing by the time I climbed into my sleeping bag. I made some Kava tea which a friend of mine had recommended to me. Kava is a herbal relaxant; Polynesians consume large quantities of Kava and I imagine it must have some active ingredients since it is illegal in both the Netherlands and the UK. However, I noticed next to no effect. That may have been due to the fact that I was camping at just over 3000 metres, so my breathing and heart rate were probably already rather higher than usual. In any case, I saw many shooting stars which more than compensated for the disappointment of the tea.

Lake Camp and Northeast Couloir

The gale blew itself out overnight and the following morning dawned with perfect clarity. I packed my rucksack and climbed up a long scree slope to the northeast couloir. I had read a description of this route online and it had sounded quite straightforward. This turned out not to be the case. I think the recommendations were intended for winter climbing; with snow and crampons, the couloir would have been steep but not too hard. However, the small amount of snow left over was really just compacted ice and I didn't have crampons. I climbed up the rocks alongside the 'snow'. The going was very steep indeed and the rock was crumbly and treacherous. I was lucky to be climbing alone since I dislodged some fairly sizeable slabs which bounced their way menacingly back down towards the lake.

Eventually I made it onto the eastern ridge. From there I was able to traverse to Matterhorn Peak itself and then pick my way up the less steep south face, though even this had its interesting moments. At the summit I discovered an old metal cartridge box containing a few sheets of paper filled with names and dates. I contributed my empty moleskine notebook as a summit book; I have always thought that is a fine tradition.

I climbed back down the south face and was able to descend the soft sandy scree slope with huge lung-gom-pa leaps. At the bottom of the south face was another tiny lake. This is Kerouac's description:

We finally got to the foot of the Matterhorn where there was a most beautiful small lake unknown to the eyes of most men in this world, seen only by a handful of mountainclimbers, a small lake at eleven thousand some odd feet with snow on the edges of it and beautiful flowers and a beautiful meadow, an alpine meadow, flat and dreamy, upon which I immediately threw myself and took my shoes off.

Kerouac's 'most beautiful small lake.'

It was midday and hot by the time I got to the lake, so I undressed and jumped into the water. There is an interesting physiological phenomenon which occurs when I jump into very cold water (sub 5 degrees): when I emerge, my vision is cloudy for a few seconds. The first time it happened I thought thought there was dust in the air, but I have now noticed it on a number of occasions. I would like to know more about this but I can't find anything online; I'd be grateful for any information.

From the lake I took the pass between Twin Peaks and Matterhorn Peak - a much more pleasant route. The descent back down to Twin Lakes took about 5 hours during which I didn't see another soul; from there I drove back to San Francisco, quite content.

Good Climb