The most precious nature spots are usually just around the corner, staying undiscovered, pristine, until some curious mind will stumble upon them. I’ve always traveled thousands of miles away on my vacation to get a ‘‘sip of fresh air’’, planning my trip, tickets, baggage, and never payed attention to the nature surrounds me here, at home, ‘‘what interesting can I find here?’’ I was saying, ‘‘I need to go to the most remote place and do some alpine hiking or ascent. Local mountains? Oh, they’re too boring, homey, bet half of the city is hiking them round the year, and I need something special.’’
But, as years go by, we all become lazy, choosing easy roads instead of ones that require some major planning. And that is how I started to explore the local nature spots. Thanks to Google maps it’s now an easy and exciting thing to do, having an entire globe under your mouse pointer.So I thought ‘‘Ok, if I’m skipping this years’ journey to alpine mountains, which as always would be a tough adventure with minimum supplies and comfort, I’m gonna need some tough routes here, in the vicinity of my home town.’’ I started to analyze satellite shots on GM, going through vast green areas with no signs of activity on them, deep valleys, gorges, forests. They were all around, living their own secluded life near the noisy city. Having previous mountaineering experience, where everything is based on overcoming difficulties, being in cold, on high altitude, with low oxygen in the air, heavy weather conditions, I was sure these local nature spots would be an ‘‘easy park walk’’ in compare, no matter how steep or hard they’ll be. The first route was set. It was a mountain overlooking the Batumi city, Mt. Mtirala, a place where I wanted to go since childhood, but eventually always traveled north to Big Caucasus mountains instead. I decided to go straight uphill, not caring about any route, direction, etc., here’s the sea, here’s the mountain, I won’t get lost anyway. So I cycled as close to the mountain I could, crossed the roaring mountain river, and went straight up, following a narrow creek, getting through the dense greenery covering it’s slopes. I was amazed how the landscape and atmosphere changed right the moment I left the narrow Mtirala Nat Park road. Everything around was literally breathing with wilderness, pristine and intact forest, plants, rivers, and just a start. As I went higher the nature was changing even more significantly, gigantic tall trees with large tentacle-like roots, covered with moss, absolutely jungle-ish tropical plants, very dense and beautiful, made me feel like I suddenly appeared somewhere on Borneo, probably this kind of diversity of plants and species was caused by the closeness of the sea and warm humid climate, making all the greenery literally burst with power of life. It was an early spring time, the birds singing was so loud and overlapping. that it gave me a feeling of walking in a ‘‘cathedral of nature’’ with pillars made of trees, walls made of leaves and plants, and the hall filled with heavenly chorals of thousands of birds. The most difficult thing was to make stops and take photos, videos of the surroundings, it took a lot of time and efforts, but certainly was so pleasant to have all those '‘digitalized’'memories when I was back home. The higher I climbed the tougher was the way, which made me think I’d rather be somewhere on 5000m altitude in freezing cold than to make my way through these jungles. However, the steep part of the route ended up soon and I found myself on the top of the mountain, took a few photographs, videos of the beautiful sea bay and the city, then started to descend with a different route, on sight. It was tough, I appeared in a deep canyon with roaring water and hundreds of waterfalls cascading from 1200 meters altitude right to the sea level. Rocky, slippery walls needed some climbing to continue the way down, but the views and atmosphere up there was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced before, pure wilderness, untouched nature, stillness of the forest, it was really great experience. The variety of waterfall types, forms, and structures made me spend a lot of time filming them, even though it was already getting dark and I was on this route from early morning. After a few more drops and small still valleys, where roaring mountain river took a gentle calm flow before dropping from a cliff again, I finally stumbled upon a few foot prints and path, which meant my trip is over. Soon the village showed up, and a narrow road lighted by the moon led me to the civilization I got so hungry for after this long journey into the unknown. This day felt like a year of journey and left unforgettable beautiful impressions, which made me thing how relative time is, because this day could have been spent in a daily routine, like thousands of others. Since then I have been to the most of the ‘‘green areas’’, sort of blind spots of my city, and these adventures were as amazing as this one, but it’s another story).
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Hello @Laniakey ,
Welcome to Connect!
Thanks for sharing your experience. I felt like I was there hiking with you. And I couldn’t agree more that the older we get, the easier tracks we choose. However, we should try to challenge ourselves in every aspect of life. Is hiking your hobby now? Did you capture all the photos with your phone? Somehow I think it would be a burden if you carry a huge DSLR camera on these trips.
Since you are new here, why don’t you explore the many sections of the site and check out the conversations happening among our Local Guides? You can check Your guide to Connect.
In addition, perhaps you should edit your title so that it better represents your post and what it is about. Just click on the three dots on the left to do that.
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Thank you for your kind words, MoniDi! Indeed, a proper lens cam would be much better to document those lovely spots, I carried another cam too, Sony Cyber shot, some of the pictures are taken with it. I think hiking became a hobby to me, since I do it quite often, it’s fun. Hope this summer will bring some great adventures to all of us.
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Inspiring walk! I loved wandering around my city but now it’s dangerous because of explosive remnants of war.
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@Laniakey Really you don’t need to search something when you have such a beauty just under your nose! Incredible views and really wonderful photos, it’s real joy to see them, thank you for sharing.
The honour to be a Friday favourite is your by right, take my congratulations!
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Спасибо за теплые слова, очень воодушевляют на новые ‘‘открытия’’). Много еще таких мест вокруг, совсем нехоженных, может какнить доберусь и до них. Алсо, скоро будет пост про еще один трип, вот там реальная глушь и дебри.
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That’s quite a concern. May I assume, the city’s Volgograd? I heard the fields on the outskirts of that city still contain a lot of weaponry left since WW2.
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@Laniakey Don’t forget to mention the person who you are speaking with: symbol @ and the name, otherwise your comment can be missed.
Will wait for your futher stories, hope I won’t miss them.
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