A Place for Honey

It's not often that we get to go see something completely new in Georgia anymore. Sure, there's always one more 6th-century church, or yet another healing mineral spring, but unless you're an architect or a springologist, you probably can't tell much of a difference after the first ten or so have gone by. It was with this mindset that a group of volunteers finally mustered the willpower to take a ten-minute taxi ride from their site to a point of archaeological and spelunkerific interest.

Sataplia-- "a place for honey" (though I saw no honey)-- is located ten kilometers from the city center of Kutaisi, or so the 10th form English textbook tells us. Its two primary features are a cave and dinosaur footprints, two distinct attractions in the category of Naturalists' Paradise. Having been to so many aforementioned mineral springs and churches, we told ourselves to expect an afternoon of mild interest, the kind where you take pictures just for the sake of it and then delete them afterward.


First stop: the cave. Clever, jaded travelers as we are, we strode straightaway to the trail down to the cave, ignoring the protestations of the charlatan Sataplia employee who insisted that we needed a guide. Having successfully navigated the paved path to the cave entrance, we realized that the door was locked and it was thus necessary to wait for the guide. Our plan to ditch him as soon as the lock unclicked was undone when we noticed that the interior lights installed in the cave were nonoperational, and we would need someone to walk ahead of us and lower our chances of getting stabbed in the eye by a stalactite. He didn't even end up charging us anything, which only proves that we know nothing about Georgia.


Turns out that the cave was really cool. We lit our way with light from our cell phones and with camera flashes. Sataplia cave amenities include a small waterfall, stalagmites galor, and according to the guide, the world's largest heart-shaped stalactite. We didn't doubt it for a second. Take that, Luray Caverns!


Being Peace Corps volunteers, we took a break after the cave excursion to relax in the woods on wooden benches and unpack a picnic from our Kelty backpacks. Our lunch was catered by Populi (remember this post?), which makes me wonder why I chose nuts and raisins like a hippie while the others had fried chicken.


Next up: the dinosaur footprints. The most noticeable aspect of the footprint area was that it also contained a Soviet footprint-- acres of concrete. The fence was open, so we stomped around on the marked footprints, certain that future chances to legally disturb archaeological sites would be few and far between. It was a leap of faith to trust that the labeled footprints were genuine dinosaur prints, while the unlabeled ones were accidental indentations in the concrete, since they all looked the same. I wonder what led the Soviets to see a plain of fossilized footprints and then to decide that what it needed was a flood of concrete to give it that historical touch. In any case, it was lame.

Thus concluded our sojourn to Sataplia, and thus disappeared another entry from our list of unique things in Georgia left to see. I still have high hopes for Signaghi, a renovated town in the far east of the country with a French restaurant. There's also the breakaway republic of Abkhazia, but once passports start getting stolen, I think the line between tempting and forbidding has been crossed. Maybe South Ossetia is where it's at...