Category: climbing

Climbing in Kutaisi (September 2023)

During the time Cindy’s mother and her husband visited us, we went for climbing in Kutaisi.

Our friend Zdenko came visiting us and with him he brought a nice young couple from Belarus. Zdenko slept on the roof of the apartment of Cindy’s mother, the young couple in Thor (Racki’s car) and Racki and I in Rosinante.

Together we went climbing in the very small climbing area of Kutaisi. It’s always nice to show and experience rock climbing with people who had just little or any contact with this sport.

This climbing area is falling apart (September 2023)

Racki and I went to the area around Borjomi and went for some more rock climbing.

But the rock was so loose… To me it felt pretty ridiculous to climb there.

Occasionally a whole piece of rock just collapsed under our hands. Wearing a helmet was absolutely necessary and never got hit by so many small rocks.

And it was a pretty crazy experience to climb there and somehow trust the rock to hold my feet and weight although I knew that this would sometimes just not work out. Sometimes I noticed that instead of “will this hold?” I was thinking “will this hold as long as I need it to hold”.

Although I would not recommend anybody to climb there, I’ve to say it was an interesting experience.

Climbing in Tbilisi and loosing the skin from my hands (September 2023)

After Serpentine had left, Racki and I went to the climbing area in the Botanical Gardens of Tbilisi.

The routes there were pretty much used and  interesting: most of them were top rope routes and instead of anchors to put your rope around, they have big metal pipes which are around twenty meters above the routes. So you have to walk up with your rope, throw it around the pipe and walk down again.

We did some climbing there, but it was not our favorite climbing crag but I used my super awesome new climbing shoes for the first time.

A friend of Cindy had given them to me for free and Serpentine had brought them from Germany. They were tied but awesome!

And my hands transformed into real climbing hands by losing all their upper skin layer. Or it was just my alien dinosaur skin renewing itself.

See the climbing area on The Crag.