Hiking in Tusheti — Unagira Summit & Oreti Lake, 4 Days

Day 1 · Tbilisi — Alaverdi — Abano Pass — Omalo

Driving 7–8 hours · about 1 km on foot at Keselo · 280 m → 2,826 m → 1,900 m · lunch and dinner · guesthouse in Upper Omalo

Out of Tbilisi at seven, north-east over the Gombori Pass into Kakheti. The first stop is Alaverdi, an eleventh-century cathedral about fifty metres tall that was the highest building in Georgia for the better part of a thousand years. It is a working monastery and the monks make wine in buried qvevri, which is a reasonable introduction to the country you are about to spend four days in.

Picnic lunch, and then the road stops being a road. The Abano Pass is seventy-two kilometres of unpaved track climbing to 2,826 metres, and it takes four to five hours in a 4×4 with a driver who does it every week. It is the single most photographed drive in Georgia and the photographs do not do it justice, mostly because the parts that are frightening do not fit in a frame.

You reach Omalo in the late afternoon. Drop your bags, then walk the twenty minutes up to Keselo — the tower cluster on the ridge above Upper Omalo, and the view that ends up on the cover of every book about Tusheti. It is better in the evening light than at any other time of day, and it costs you nothing after seven hours in a car.

Dinner at the guesthouse with chacha and wine — the traditional welcome, and you will have earned it.

Be realistic about this day. It is seven to eight hours of driving with two stops, and arrival is late afternoon rather than lunchtime. That is simply how long the Abano road takes.

Day 2 · Unagira Mountain, 3,050 m

16 km · 6–7 hours · 1,900 m → 3,050 m → 1,900 m, +1,150 m / −1,150 m · full board · guesthouse in Upper Omalo · can be ridden instead

Breakfast at nine and then the main day.

The trail climbs steadily out of Omalo through alpine meadow — eleven hundred and fifty metres of it, which is a real day’s work and the reason the fitness note on this page is not boilerplate. Between mid-June and mid-July the slopes are covered in flowering rhododendron the whole way up, pink and white against the grass, and there is a small seasonal lake near the top that dries out later in the summer.

From the summit ridge the Pirikiti and Gometsari valleys open out on either side. The tower villages are down there as small grey clusters — Dartlo, Kvavlo, Chesho — and on a clear day the peaks keep going until the haze takes them.

Lunch at the top, unhurried, then back down the same ground with a different set of views. Guesthouse by evening, and the beds will feel better than they did last night.

Prefer to ride? The same route can be done on horseback. Tell us at booking, or the night before.

Day 3 · Oreti Lake, 2,850 m

15 km · 5–6 hours · 1,700 m → 2,850 m → 1,700 m, +1,150 m / −1,150 m · full board · guesthouse in Upper Omalo · can be ridden instead (23 km route)

A short drive to Kumelaurta and then up through the summer pastures, which is where this day differs from yesterday: you are walking through worked country rather than empty country, and there are people in it.

Tushetian shepherds still practise transhumance — they bring the flocks up over Abano in June and take them back down in autumn, the same movement in the same months for as long as anyone has counted. Their summer camps are on this route. You will be offered tea and cheese and, if you have any time at all, a conversation that works despite neither side having much of the other’s language.

Oreti sits at 2,850 metres in a classic glacial bowl: cold, clear, the peaks upside down in it on a still morning. From the ridge above the lake you can see most of Tusheti’s gorges at once, which is the view that ends up on people’s walls.

Back down to Kumelaurta, where the vehicle meets you for the short drive to Omalo.

Prefer to ride? The horse route is different and longer — 23 km, starting from the guesthouse rather than from Kumelaurta. Both finish at the lake.

Day 4 · Shenako — Diklo — Pichekhi — the museum — Tbilisi

Driving 8–9 hours in total · about 4 km on foot · max 2,826 m at Abano · breakfast and lunch · in Tbilisi by evening

An early breakfast, because this is a long last day and worth every hour of it.

East from Omalo to Shenako, which has a handsome nineteenth-century church and a strong sense of itself, and then on to Diklo — a village on a spur a few kilometres from the Russian border, in a position that makes the reason for its existence fairly obvious. From there it is an hour’s walk out to the Pichekhi fortress on the ridge beyond, which was built to watch the passes for raiding parties out of Dagestan. Standing on those walls explains the towers better than any amount of reading.

Back down through Lower Omalo, where the ethnographic museum is small, well made and genuinely worth the twenty minutes: clothing, tools, weapons, and the household objects that make the last three days make sense.

Then Abano again — just as spectacular going down and, most people find, slightly more alarming — into Kakheti, with a stop for lunch, and into Tbilisi in the evening.

A note on the order. Shenako, Diklo and Pichekhi used to sit at the end of Day 1, which made that day about fifteen hours long. They are here instead. If you would rather see them on arrival and have a shorter final day, tell us and we will run it the other way round — but we will drop the Pichekhi walk, because it does not fit.