Dagestan

The year 2021 provided an opportunity to fill another gap on the map. I’ve been going to Dagestan for a long time. Work at a brick factory, with my complexion, did not threaten me. I didn’t really believe in stereotypes, especially after traveling through my beloved Romania. There’s nothing to be afraid of, and the trip promised to be eventful. Lada Granta and mapsme work wonders. And here we are, two Russian women, in a car with Dagestan license plates, driving in the mountains: pitch darkness, thick fog and visibility of 0 meters. There is no connection. The road leads nowhere at all, another 10 meters and even mapsme shows a dead end. When we finally got to the overnight stay, the owner of the house grabbed his head when he saw where we were on the map. No wonder I never trusted detailed maps with goat trails :) The mountain villages of Dagestan are an otherworldly reality. I was particularly struck by the pottery village, where there is no running water, where people live the old-fashioned way. Driving around tourist highways, we moved along secondary mountain roads, looking into small villages, spent the night at a mill surrounded by mountains. It turns out that you can see a lot in a week :) I took pictures for my own pleasure with an old Soviet lens.