Dagestan. The beginning of the voyage - The airport does not accept...

Greeting, friends.
It seems to me that I am ready to start preparing a series of short articles about my trip to Dagestan at the end of December last year.

What is Dagestan?

This is the southernmost region of the Caucasus in the Russian Federation. It borders Azerbaijan to the south, the Georgian border runs to the west, and this mountainous republic is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east. In fact, it is a lake, but because of its huge area, ancient people began to call it the sea.
Dagestan is a very multinational region. This created its own peculiarities of communication between people in the old days. Sometimes one village or village was a separate nationality or nationality and people spoke their own language, which the people of the neighboring village did not understand. This can be said about mountain villages, between which there were no roads. It's a different story on the plain, where the nationalities were more numerous and stronger. There were conquests until Dagestan became one. And we must also remember the Caucasian war, which the Russian tsars waged for more than a hundred years against the peoples of the Caucasus in order to seize these lands, mountains.

Even now, residents of Dagestan communicate with each other in the so-called literary language. Transformations in human relations began to occur around 1991, after the fall of the USSR. The old archaic relationships began to disappear. The driver who drove us on this trip told me that his parents forbade him to marry a girl from another village. It was in the late 80s of the last century. His parents picked up a wife for him, with whom he lived for 3 years, but then he ran away from the village to marry a woman of another nationality. Currently, his parents communicate with him, but they have no relationship with his wife.
But the changes are visible. People come down from the mountains to live on the plains, life becomes easier.

Dagestan is a tourist region

Dagestan became a tourist region after the pandemic. States closed their borders and Russians began to travel more in their own country, in Russia. I must say that the domestic tourism business was practically not developed. Usually people went to Sochi and Crimea in the summer, to Karelia and a little to Altai. This is due to the poor development of transport routes: poor quality of roads, the lack of regional airlines and the complete lack of all kinds of logistics infrastructure on the ground.
In 2021, Dagestan faced a large number of people who decided to look at the beauty of this region. It was from that very time that I thought about going to this region. This opportunity came to me last winter, thanks to the company in which I work. The employer organized a trip of the company's employees for 4 days to Dagestan.
And now we are flying from Moscow to Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.
The flight lasted about 3 hours, the airport did not want to take the plane due to heavy fog and we made several circles before landing. It was not very fun and there was tension in the cabin of the plane.

We took off from Moscow around 7 o'clock in the morning. It should be taken into account that I do not live in Moscow, but in Kirov. It is 1000 km to the east. And I arrived in Moscow the night before by plane. When I left home, we had a temperature of -15C, and in Moscow the temperature was about zero degrees and it was freezing rain. The Moscow airport also did not immediately let our plane land. Can you imagine, friends? In less than a day, I'm hanging out in the sky for the second time and the earth refuses to accept me.

Below us, the water surface of the Caspian Sea glistens through the clouds. This is already pleasing, so there are gaps between the clouds.
The pilot radioed that we were going to land.

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The plane tilted its nose and went down. The clouds began to approach. They were getting closer and closer, and there comes a moment when nothing is visible behind the glass of the porthole, one continuous fog.

The clouds suddenly disappear and I see the runway. She literally appears almost immediately. This means that the clouds hang at a height of no more than 300-200 meters.
Later they explained to us that this is a common thing for Makhachkala at this time of the year. The mountains and the sea create humidity and fog in winter. On the last day, when we were descending from the mountains, I observed a similar picture from the bus window.

Wow, we're on the ground! The airport is small in size, the baggage claim area is also small and the luggage was on the pick-up tape before we were at the airport. I was almost the first to go to the square in front of the airport, I saw friends meeting us. The area was full of cars and people. A lot of men earn money working as taxi drivers. They all arrive by the time the plane arrives to pick up people and take them to the place they need.
Friends told us that the Sun is shining in the mountains, that we will have wonderful sunny weather for the next few days. And they didn't deceive us!

Привет, Дагестан. Я еду смотреть на твои красоты, на твои горы и равнины.
Дорога до Дербента. Это равнина, это множество виноградников. В Дербенте нас ждал Каспийский Морской Монстр, прогулка по древней крепости и праздничный ужин в ресторане.