We have been able to visit two of the charming cave towns of Georgia – Vardzia (established around 1185 CE) and Uplistikhe (perhaps first settled around 1500 BCE). Vardzia is still an active monastery, however Uplistikhe is now abandoned. We were able to wander through a maze of streets, bakeries, churches, palaces, apartments, and prisons, all carved into the limestone caves. In Vardzia, John and Adrian chose to explore the dark, narrow, slippery innards of the cave system, while I made the much more scenic decision to return to the bus via a quiet path through the meadows, sharing my trail with lizards and birds enjoying the sunshine.

The day met an adorable end when John discovered a puddle of puppies sunning themselves on a footbridge. They ran up to me enthusiastically, and responded blissfully to a belly rub. Whenever I moved away, the followed me and plopped down at my feet, begging for more attention. I felt like sneaking one into my bag, but they appeared to be well loved by the farming family that lived nearby.

We are in Italy for two weeks with our friend Lina, and started our sojourn with a daytrip to Slovenia. We booked a day tour on the web a while back, and we were waiting for our tour bus to turn up outside our hotel in Trieste, when a guy in a black Mercedes pulls up. He has my name written on a piece of paper, but the only word in English he knows is “okay”, and the only word I know in Italian is “grazie”, so we are unable to communicate further. We shrug and hop inside the car, and off he zooms. We pass the border crossing between Italy and Slovenia, now only indicated by a few blue signs on the side of the road. Our driver speeds us down the deserted highway, and we end up at the Postojnska Jama caves by 9 AM.

The tour doesn’t start until 10, so we spend an hour walking past the river and poking through the souvenir stores. They have some beautiful crystals and fossils, but the ones that we like don’t look like they would be easy to fit into a suitcase. Soon it is time for the tour to begin. They load us onto the world’s first underground railway, and it zooms off like a roller-coaster. Suddenly we are inside enormous limestone caves, ducking our heads to avoid the stalactites that come whizzing past at 20 km/hour.

We end up in a grand cave, filled with sparking and dripping columns. Slender stalactites reach down from the ceiling, and squat stalagmites inch form thick turrets from the ground. The stalagmites grow faster than the stalactites, at a speedy rate of one centimetre every hundred years.  Out guide then takes on a guided walking tour for the next two kilometres, over the Russian ridge originally build by Russian prisoners of war, though the spaghetti room with a ceiling cascading with fine noodle-like appendages, the white room dominated by pure calcium carbonate structures, the red room tinted with iron oxide, and then we get to meet a curious proteus, the blind cave-swelling amphibian. Off again for another train trip through the caves, this time past black manganese-tinted towers, and then over the underground river that first carved out these caves eons ago.

We pick up some interesting looking blueberry honey, cinnamon honey, and honey liquor from a stall outside, and then find our driver who is waiting for us, smoking a cigar and reading the paper. In less than an hour, we are back in Trieste, ready for a delicious lunch of gnocchi and pizza.