i don't know hopefully they come our marshy christmas leave in 20 minutes
and it looks like a massive cheese pizza careful oh that's all
okay this walk through the caves is becoming very maze-like now
we're Nicole and Mico in 2021 we decided to take the leap and trade our nine-to-five
jobs in order to travel full-time we believe travel is one of the best ways
to build understanding between people so we've hit the road on a journey to learn
more about new cultures unique places and different foods we'd love for you to join
us and if you're interested in coming along you'll find new videos here twice a week
today we're off to see the varsity caves and right now we're headed over to the bus station
to catch yourself a bus over there marshuka
right now it's about 15 degrees celsius it's a little cloudy so it's a lot chillier than we're
used to but hopefully by the time we get to the caves it'll be a little bit warmer
okay before we get to the caves the first thing we have to do is get a mashup bus
to take us over there so step one get a ticket step two find out which bus will take us there
it's a little tricky to get a ticket when no one's here we've been knocking shouting
your purse is here maybe you gotta yell on russian yeah maybe we need to learn some
russian or georgia i don't know hopefully they come our russian christmas leave in 20 minutes
which means we have a seat on the masuka let's go start
so now that we have a ticket we have to find out which one of these buses it is
the trouble with finding the right bus is that all the signage or most of the signage is in either
georgian or russian we basically have to just kind of point to our phone maps and sell people here's
where we wanted to go and they hopefully will help us find the right bus uh barzia caves i come away
okay thank you
bus is here
we made it to the caves to bouncier caves um but it is noon it was about an hour and a half drive
up here and the marshmallow left a little later than we had expected so it's noon uh so we are
having lunch first before we head into the cape so we can
happy and full and not grumpy because i get crappy when i'm hungry
i forgot to say we are also getting coffee also essential we haven't
had any today so we're going to be caffeinated hydrated and fed and we
should have a good time at various caves if i have knocked all those things off my list
and this is not a bad place for lunch too it's really stunning got a great view of
the river and also the hills across from it and it's actually a really good price
what'd you get dear okay i got a massive plate this is the mcgrui kachapuri and it looks like
a massive cheese pizza she said there's cheese on the outside which you could definitely see
and there's also cheese on the inside wow that is uh cheese and cheese and cheese and bread
big cheese pizza
all done lunch that was so good but that was way too much food
so we packed up some of it and we'll have it for tomorrow now we're off to buy some tickets
let's see if we pay an extra 80 cents you can get
a light up which is great because i'm full of cheese
so we're off walking to the varzia caves and it was really nice to get the golf cart right up
nicole has the audio guide so she loves listening to them i like to hear her cole's notes on them so
we'll see what we can learn we're at the varsity caves which is effectively a cave city so in the
late 1100s the medieval kingdom of georgian was under attack from the mongols and so as a
way to protect itself it built this underground sanctuary it was originally 13 levels and had 6
000 apartments and it was a massive stronghold but unfortunately just a century after it was created
an earthquake came and destroyed a lot of it and made a lot of it visible whereas previously it
was very very difficult to see that there was a city here at all so even though an
earthquake came through the monastery and city continued to thrive and it wasn't until 1551
when it was overtaken and raided by persians that it really stopped being used as a monastery
and then it kind of lay dormant for a number of centuries until it was discovered in the 1900s
i'm doing some cave exploration now whoa it is significantly cooler in here
than it is out there it's actually really refreshing nice it's really nice
oh if you're paying attention here yeah i know right like you just fall that's
super dangerous if i was just walking here and then didn't think of anything of the shadow boom
boom track
this is not safe for children to just run around
guys you gotta be really careful walking around here
just there's lots of holes and cliffs everywhere be careful there might be a cliff on the other end
we found some good examples of a traditional dwelling house here in the city i mean the
roof is collapsed by the looks of it but i think i think this whole space like these multiple rooms
um yeah would have originally been for lebanon this place is nice it's
got natural lighting right up there that's pretty cool that's the next floor though
natural lighting with the people above you
wow and here we're in the cellar area the audio guide says this also would have been part of the
dwelling house so three rooms uh that according to the audio guide have survived in almost their
original form i think on the sixth level right now so i think that would have been the seventh level
oh man maybe it's like your besties live above you and you have a
stairwell attaching your houses or like multiple multiple generations
of family members say what you will but it's definitely a fixer-upper wow
it's actually a really big space like yeah it's a living i wonder how many people live in one run
you throw in some granite some pot lights
wood flooring hardwood flooring's back right i think so um
i think if you live in the city you gotta be really fit to go up and down so many stairs just
to go one room over if there were stairs back then i guess so we're in a secret passageway um and
varzo was created in such a way that it was only accessible by a handful of
secret passageways and i guess as we go down we're gonna see sort of the small little rooms
off to the side of the passageway and those were um where guards would have
been to keep a lookout because there really was only a couple of ways that were really
quite hidden to actually enter the cave city back in the day the steps are so inconsistent
along with the height of the roof
i think he can go there
wow this is cool oh it's so cool in here like cold yeah wow it is cold
that's so cool you don't want to be tall
god nice and again it's nice and cold so i just listened to the audio guide apparently the spring
is constant they would clean it once a year when they took the water out it would take four to five
days for the spring to fill back up and it just sits at a consistent 11 degrees no matter the
season which is so cool and they use it for like drinking it's apparently delicious all right so
it looks like they take some water from the spring and put it inside this tub for visitors to enjoy
all right leave some for the monks
tastes like water the spring stuff is always really cool i don't know
why but whenever we come across these old cities i'm always oddly curious about how
they kept up the city's infrastructure in terms of water like how did they irrigate
and provide water for everybody on a city built on the hills i think it's really cool
okay this walk through the caves is becoming very maze-like now
you gotta you gotta squeeze through this low hallway watch your head can you imagine living
down here and you're like i shouldn't do this every time so cool it's like a maze
where does it go so these tunnel systems are part of our zoo's defense system so
if they were infiltrated or if somebody was trying to take over the city they would like go into
these caves and then use like one of these drops for instance to like throw boulders on incoming
folks and kill them i can't imagine just being under attack and then having to run through these
hallways with a boulder in your hand just so you could drop it on somebody in one of those holes
wow i guess we're gonna eventually it sounds like come to a space where there's a door
and they would use that spot to kill infiltrators one by one as they tried to get through the door
because it's so small smart nicole is a secret military tactician in case anybody's wondering
don't mess with her i think this is where you get slaughtered if you've made it this far
definitely a good place for an ambush
we made it back to the outside world i also think the best part is when you go through the
tunnels and you come back outside and then you see how beautiful of a day it is and hot yeah
so nice
really neat up here you can see all the greenery it's actually because the monks live here still i
last i read there were seven monks who continue to live here and keep up the property do you
want to call it that um yeah so we actually are obviously like growing plants and things up here
so beautiful again like this is their backyard lucky
we've got to start heading back now because there's only one bus that'll take us back in town
and we have to get all all the way over there
i'm coming
gonna catch our bus i am very thankful that today is not a rainy day these could be very slippery
steps and you definitely gotta watch your step because there's all of a sudden a large hole
wow wow we are done we made out of the caves so impressive it was pretty epic it's uh a little
out of the way in georgia but honestly i think it's worth it not just for the marzia caves
but the region is stunning like i'd say this is probably the the most beautiful part of georgia
totally yeah rolling hills that i think some might even consider mountains but i think they're still
yeah but they're they're beautiful so worth it for that too so now we are headed back down to ketchum
i can't believe gorgeous hi there hello
i'll be by
we're off the bus now going out to grab some groceries for dinner
so
all right dinner is served that's the end of our day i think all we're doing tonight today is just
doing some travel planning a little bit of research of where we're going to next yeah
we think we're headed to armenia which shares a border with georgia um but we need to do a little
bit of research on how exactly we can get there we hope to get them by marshutka which are a really
common mode of transportation here but it's a little tricky to get over the border right now in
the marshooka if we can't cross the border through by marshuka we'll probably have to take the train
our merchant back to tibilisi the capital of georgia and then take the train into armenia
but that's it for us today so we'll see you next time all right thanks for watching
we're off to catch a van and uh phil managed to get there
because we might die the point is there was an earthquake that was devastating
i think these stairs were made after the little caves and passengers and tunnels and
it was uh yeah it was a cool experience was it cool babe it was cool it's a lot of pasta
i didn't get anything about pasta lemony you