cows and pictures of the dead

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I couldn’t hang out in circuses and swimming pools forever. So today I packed up my stuff and walked out of Zestafoni:

Someone had apparently been trying to make the road a bit prettier by painting murals on some of the walls:

This echoed some of the older murals that the Soviet Union had left behind on factory walls. Many of those factories were now ruins:

I quickly left the main road and went southwest into the mountains:

This meant entering cow country. There were so many cows, and almost all of them stood still when they saw me:

They would just stand there…

…staring at me…

…softly shaking their heads, making their bells ring…

…sometimes looking as if they were talking to each other about me…

…and sometimes they would just hide in the bushes:

Meanwhile, the road would wind up and down, up and down, up and down, seemingly forever:

And every once in a while there would be a building that lay in ruins:

When I came to a graveyard I noticed that many of the headstones were accompanied by large painted portraits of the deceased:

I had seen small portraits on graves before, and I had also seen photographic portraits on fresh graves.

But this specific sort of large painted portrait seemed interesting to me:

I wondered if it was the same artist who painted all the dead people in this village:

But since nobody was around I had no way of finding out.

When the sun went down I was still on the road. The valley looked good from up there:

But I was too tired to fully appreciate it. The ups and downs of the mountain road were taking their toll, and I was still fighting with the general feeling of fatigue that had been with me for the last month or so.

So I stumbled through the night…

…until I reached the village of Baghdati.

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