Sataplia

The road from Svaneti passes by Georgia's second city, Kutaisi, which happens to be located a few kilometers from the Sataplia nature reserve. The Sataplia nature reserve is famous for honey, forests, caves, and preserved dinosaur footprints, and since traveling with me is a little like traveling with a six-year-old ("Dinosaurs!") and a little like traveling with grandma ("Oh, local honey!"), we made a stop.

The dinosaur tracks were of course the big draw for me. But Sataplia nature reserve itself is a really pretty stretch of hilly land mostly covered by "Colchian" forest and, when we went, shrouded in warm mist.



Our first stop was the dinosaur track pavilion. I'll admit to low expectations; someone had said you needed to use your imagination to see anything. But that made it all the more incredible. These were very clearly dinosaur footprints, so my imagination was left free to design a saddle for my pet dinosaur.





There were a number of signs making mention of some of my best childhood friends -Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, and so on - but I'm pretty sure they weren't the species represented. But then, I am, for reasons that can only be attributed to poor life choices, not a paleontologist.


Anyway, BP has funded a really nice, climate-controlled pavilion to protect the prints from further damage and decay, and I have to say that if a gigantic mega-corporation wants to mask the brutality and destructiveness of the market system, giving me a day with dinosaur footprints is a good (ahem) step.

From the pavilion, we walked through the Colchian forest (featuring very tasteful statues of dinosaurs), to a wooden walkway along a cliff side. The mists were covering what is usually a pretty broad panorama, but on the stone side of the cliff, the guide pointed out the dwellings of the wild honeybees who (he said) gave Sataplia ("Place of Honey") its name.





A bit further on, we came to the entrance of Sataplia cave. Perpetually cool and damp, the cave featured an underground river, semi-translucent stalactites, a variety of different formations, and a famous stone shaped by water to resemble a human heart. I'm a sucker for caves, especially those with glitzy artificial lighting, and this was a good one.






Sataplia is a world treasure. I know I'm 100% the target audience - forested hills, honeybees, caves, and dinosaurs - but this is the kind of thing that I wish everyone could see. It wasn't raw majesty on the scale of Svaneti, but you get something strange running down your spine when you see footprints made in soft mud in days when those mountains from the last few posts hadn't even been born.