The captivating European country with remote mountains and fairy-tale forests – but no tourists
It’s late afternoon on the fifth day and we’re scrambling up the tumbled rocks of Guli Peak at 2,925 meters in the High Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. On the summit we flop onto a lawn of warm grass beside a weather-beaten wooden cross and gaze northward towards the serrated blade that marks the border with Russia. Glaciers and ice-falls hang like stilled cataracts above sunlit valleys and dark swathes of forest. This is wild country. ‘D’you think we’ll meet a bear?’ asks Kit, with a bit too much relish. My son has cycled from London to Georgia. I have flown.
The High Caucasus has long been the stamping ground of serious mountaineers, yet little-known to summertime hikers. With the opening of Georgia to international tourism, that is beginning to change. Since 2015, the non-profit Transcaucasian Trail Association has been mapping and improving hiking trails in both the High Caucasus and the Lesser Caucasus ranges. Over the next ten years or so, TCA intends to open two, linked hiking ‘corridors’ of 1,500 kilometres each. The Transcaucasian Trail puts Georgia on the adventure map. Our plan was was to walk an 11-day section of the Trail through the remote region of Svaneti, from the Nenskra valley to the village of Ushguli, one of the highest year-round settlements in Georgia.
One-day’s travel by train and swaying minibus took us from the boulevards and bars of Tbilisi to the mountains. The Nenskra welcomed us with a ferocious roar. Svaneti’s rivers are powerful beasts. Fed with glacial meltwater and summer rainstorms they can fling boulders about as if they’re handfuls of shingle. Bridges get torn away. We started up the Trail as water vapour from pounding waves rose to meet gauzy drizzle. The whole valley seemed to tremble and smoke.
We walked back in time. The trail squirmed through silent pines. Streams were crossed on fallen trees. Above the tree line, a shepherd’s hut seeped smoke. Ten years ago, these slopes would have been dotted with grazing cattle but today, some of the herders’ summer cabins stand empty, roofs leaking and cooking pots gathering grit. We came across poems neatly inked onto a wall, cut-out movie stars and drawings of a church. We spent our first night in a partially-collapsed hut, unrolling our sleeping bags on a bed Kit had assembled from planks.
Over the following days we climbed the Utviri Pass, the Bak Pass and Guli Pass, sleeping in the homes of hospitable villagers or in guesthouses whose owners sent us off in the morning with packed lunches of kachapuri (cheese bread), fresh cucumbers, tomatoes and wraps of svan salt - a mouthwatering mix of salt, pepper and spices. Picnics were interludes of restful bliss. It took a while to discover why I was able to keep up with my son. Then one of our hosts put our rucksacks on the family scales. Mine was nearly 10 kg lighter than Kit’s. Our equipment had been pared to the milligram but Kit was carrying our tent, cooking gear, food and a gigantic timber staff called Gandalf.
Svaneti’s character has been preserved by isolation. The Trail followed a diverse band of contours, alternately carrying us up to a world of rock and panoramic views then plummeting to wriggle through hamlets and woodland. We passed hay fields rasping to the sound of scythes and walked through clouds of butterflies. In villages, old, stone-built houses stood shoulder-to-shouder with defensive towers that have functioned through the centuries as last bastions in times of trouble. Tiny, solitary churches perch on mountainsides beyond the reach of marauders. For the first four days, we met no other tourists.
On our fifth night, we pitched the tent on spongey turf beside the Koruldi Lakes and woke as sunrise bathed the surrounding snowfields. It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful place for morning coffee. There’s a spot below the lakes where you can peer over a precipice to see the rooftops of Svaneti’s capital laid out like a map in the Enguri valley. Mestia is a kind of pocket Kathmandu with clean air, live music and horsemen in the high street. We stayed two nights, repacked the rucksacks and walked out of town laden with the biggest packed lunch of the trip.
Mestia to Ushguli is the most popular four-day hike in Svaneti, so we shared this section of the Trail with other backpackers. This had the advantage that the Trail was well-marked and it was more difficult to get lost than it had been further west on less-travelled sections. The highlight was a hamlet we reached two days beyond Mestia.
Adishi appeared below us like a Tolkein model of towers and ruins set precariously above a ravine carrying meltwater from a glacier at the head of the valley. We had no booking but found a pair of beds in Koba Qaldani guest house, a grand. crooked building in the centre of the village run by Larna. We might have been in Tibet. Outside our room a crooked timber balcony ran the length of the building. Coloured laundry fluttered like prayer flags from a strand of wire. As Kit and I lazed in the sun, the ladder-like staircase thumped episodically to the socked feet of weary hikers taking their last climb of the day, hauling backpacks that had come from France, Canada, Germany, Croatia. Adishi’s alleys are too steep and tight for motor vehicles and at dusk, peace settled like a duvet on the old stones and bleached timber. That night, there were fourteen for supper at a long table in the snug stone cavern that formed the ground floor of Larna’s house.
From Adishi the trail led west up a tightening valley towards a curtain of ice draped from the shoulders of Jangha at 5,059 metres and its neighbours, Shota Rustaveli and Katintau. As we approached the river crossing, the rising boom of meltwater was joined by the random percussion of falling ice blocks and rumbles of thunder. There is no bridge over the river, which is braided below the icefall into a series of torrents separated by boulders and spits of rubble. The options are to wade or to pay one of the local horsemen to give you a lift. Not that the equine ubers of the Caucasus are any less alarming than braving the torrent. We watched a backpacker cling to a horseman’s waist as he lurched into the waves then decided to de-trouser and take the plunge. Without walking poles I’d have been upside down. Mighty Gandalf proved a popular asset. From the security of a mid-stream boulder, Kit passed his staff back across the torrents to aid those less sure. Drying off, we scampered over a pass while volleys of thunder reverberated between the peaks.
The final day should have been easy. The recommended route to Ushguli is a gentle amble on a dirt road along the Enguri valley. But Kit had spotted an alternative:
‘It seems a bit anti-climactic, Dad, at the end of such an amazing walk, to follow a boring road...’
I knew what he was thinking. The Svaneti Ridge forms the sky-high central rib of mountains that runs through the heart of the region. We could see it above the Enguri Valley. Instead of nine-kilometre, level trundle to Ushguli followed by hours of celebratory beer, hot showers and eating, we could walk more than 20 kilometres, climb at least 1,500 metres, tackle some tricky navigation and stay out till dark.
‘It’s obvious which you want to do,’ he told me as we started climbing.
Two-and-a-half hours sweating up a steep, jeep track took us to the ridge, where we were poured black tea by a family building a church at the crest of the pass. Kindness is part of the Svan climate. By late afternoon we were reclining on the grass at 2,900 metres, boiling a pan of water for our last sachet of Georgian ‘kakao’. Far below, Ushguli was catching the end of the day’s sun, fingery shadows extending from each defensive tower. Behind the village rose a spectacular, cloud-dappled backdrop of glaciers and rock walls. Kit was right. This was the place to be on the last day.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘I don’t want this to end.’
Nicholas Crane’s new book You Are Here: A Brief Guide to the World (￡12.99; Orion) is out now in hardback.
How to do it
A 10-day Trans Caucasian Trail Hike Georgia from World Expeditions (0800 0744 135; worldexpeditions.com) costs from ￡1,290, with full-board accommodation, entrance fees and local transport. International flights extra. Departures between May 2019 and September 2020.
An introduction to Georgia
Imagine a small country with mountains five times higher than those in the UK, a country with thousands of vineyards, with sunny beaches, ski resorts, dashing rivers and with forests covering nearly 40 per cent of the land area. Georgia has good geography.
The climate is temperate, with hot, dry summers and a sub-tropical Black Sea coast. The Caucasus Mountains catch winter snows and are decorated with innumerable glaciers. Georgia’s extraordinary terrain, from plain to peak, comes about because Georgia is the collision zone between two of Earth’s crustal plates.
The Caucasus mountains are super-sized ripples caused by a geological tiff between Eurasia and Africa-Arabia. And it’s this location at the meeting point of continents, that provides Georgia with its cultural mix. It’s an old land whose inhabitants claim descent from Noah and whose flocks provided the Golden Fleece. Later, this fertile avenue between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea was overrun by Romans, Persians, Arabs, Tartars, Turks and Russians. Yet Georgia has a very strong, independent culture, with its own alphabet and language and with a passionate commitment to those bastions of identity: food, drink and customs.
Stroll the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, and you sense that the pace of change is as rapid as the current of the Mtkvari river that charges through the gorge below the Old Town. Crooked timber town-houses with quaint glazed balconies stand a few streets from glittering shopping malls. In the street market on the Dry Bridge, you can still buy Soviet era lapel badges for a few lari. But not for much longer. Tourist arrivals are up from 2.8 million in 2011 to over 7 million last year.
To get a feel of old Georgia, read Stories I Stole, (2002), by Wendell Steavenson, who spent two years living and working in Tbilisi as a journalist during the era of power cuts and political upheaval. She has been compared to Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski. But to understand modern Georgia, you’ll need a copy of Tim Burford’s Bradt Guide to Georgia. Burford has always been good at picking countries to write about just before the crowds surge for charter flights. It was Burford who wrote the best English-language guide book to Romania, back in the 90s. He describes Georgia as ‘one of the most heart-warming and exciting of all European destinations.’
