Trail Gallery is an occasional feature highlighting other voices along the 21,000-mile trail of the Out of Eden Walk.
None of us walks the Earth alone.
True, the Out of Eden Walk project is “solo” in concept. I am retracing the global pathways of the African ancestors who discovered the world in the Stone Age by navigating my way, unaided by a team of field logisticians, across the planet.
But I hope it’s clear by now that I am rarely solitary. I like to walk with local people. They are my guides. They become my family. Most of them are daring and creative souls in their own right. (Who else would say “yes” when asked to leave their daily lives to trek across their home countries with a stranger?)
We launched Trail Gallery to highlight the voices of my fellow walkers: the photographers, singers, storytellers, and artists who, one way or another, have helped nudge this long trek onward to the next horizon. Some of these co-voyagers appear as characters in my dispatches. Others work behind the scenes. All have their own unique visions of life to share.
This second installment of Trail Gallery focuses on the country of Georgia, where I spent months waiting for both the weather and visas to clear before launching the next phase of the journey into Central Asia.
In Georgia, I walked with Ana Jegnaradze for a week.
Jegnaradze joined my main guide, Dima Bit-Suleiman, and me in the grasslands of her country’s desolate southern borderlands. Her choice of trail was deliberate. Jegnaradze is a documentary filmmaker. With partner Marita Tevzadze, she is producing a series of videos on the border villages of Georgia. Their multimedia project, “Brink,” is an unsentimental examination of rural life in the Caucasus, a crossroads of the world often riven by painful boundaries. Their beautiful work is now airing on Georgian national television. Though produced in Georgian, the pair’s sensitive, observational eye requires little translation: In our noisy globalized times, they are recording a vanishing, quieter world:
Nino Akhobadze is a painter and photographer.
Akhobadze, who works at the International School of Design in Tbilisi, joined me on a ramble into the mountains of eastern Georgia, where I went to write about the steadying role of poetry in tumultuous Georgian national life. Her photos (in the slideshow above) represent a lush mosaic from a private, parallel world. She reshapes the surfaces of ordinary urban life into facets of strange and startling beauty. She is a miniaturist who packs a wallop of enchantment into her photographs of peeling walls, parsed city skies, and the rainy, color-drenched streets under cars.
National Geographic editors Patrick Wellever and Amy Bucci helped choose the selection of work from these fellow storytellers along the route.
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Ana Jegnaradze and Marita Tevzadze
It was kilometer 24 of the day’s walk when we finally saw the village of Udabno (“Desert”) on a grassy plain in southern Georgia. We started picking mushrooms for supper before entering the village. Every effort to bend down to pick a mushroom was a struggle for my knees—it was the third day of my one-week trek with the Out of Eden Walk, from the towns of Rustavi to Sighnaghi. That evening we didn’t get any mushrooms, only pumpkin soup for supper. High winds destroyed all the makeshift wooden doors and windows of the Polish-run hotel where we were staying. The cook didn’t know how to prepare our wild food. I’ll always remember the uneaten mushrooms from that day.
Two months later, on another sunny day, my filmmaker colleague Marita Tevzadze and I went back to the village of Udabno to begin working on a new documentary project called Brink. The Polish hotel staff barely remembered the windy night I stayed there. And they of course had no idea where those uneaten mushrooms went. Maybe it’s the walk that makes my mushroom-picking memories so alive, and made that windy night so festive.
Brink is a series of stories about villages along the borderlines and occupied zones of Georgia. We tell about places, people, and things in different media: Videos, photos, voices, gifs, old stories. We’re trying to describe the people we find in just the way they meet and greet us when we enter each place.
Our first video-story is about the Polish hotel that lost all of its brightly colored doors one windy night on the Out of Eden Walk.
Nino Akhobadze
Taking photographs is interesting to me. I like finding the unusual in the usual. Some people think my photos look like paintings. Maybe this is because I pay close attention to colors and shapes. I build my images by making connections between very different subjects and surfaces. Much of my process is spontaneous. Meeting Paul was like this—a chance encounter. We walked with friends in the Pshave Mountains of eastern Georgia.
In my photography, realism doesn’t interest me. I like to capture fragments. I choose small details that can tell more about an object or scene than an entire panorama. I like that my pictures are difficult to understand at first glance. Life often can be like this. You find beauty in everything! You must only look carefully. I shoot what I see.
