Mystic South Georgia: Vardzia, Volcanic Lakes and Borjomi — 4 Days

Day 1 · Tbilisi to the Javakheti plateau

Tbilisi → Dashbashi Canyon → Javakheti plateau → Paravani Lake → Poka → Sagamo. About 250 km. A long day — expect to reach the guesthouse in the evening.

The road south out of Tbilisi is ordinary for the first hour and then stops being. At Dashbashi the Khrami river has cut a gorge through old lava flows, leaving basalt walls up to a hundred metres and a string of waterfalls along the floor. A glass bridge now hangs across it, which is either the best or the worst thing that has happened to the canyon depending on who you ask; either way you can stand out over the middle of it and look straight down.

After that the road climbs, and keeps climbing. Somewhere above 1,800 metres the trees give up. The Javakheti plateau is volcanic tableland — grass, black rock, enormous sky, and villages of low stone houses where the shop signs are in Armenian. It is cooler and drier than anywhere you have been in Georgia so far, and in July the difference between midday and nine in the evening is about fifteen degrees.

Paravani is up here at 2,073 metres: Georgia’s largest lake, thirty-seven square kilometres of crater filled with water that seldom passes 15 °C. On a still day the peaks around it come back off the surface. On a windy one — and it is often windy — it looks like slate.

At the village of Poka, on the shore, there is a working nunnery. The sisters run a dairy and a small chocolate workshop and sell both at the gate; buy some. Then Sagamo, a second crater lake, smaller and emptier, for the last of the light.

Up here there is almost no light pollution and the air is thin. If the sky is clear, go outside after dinner.

Overnight: guesthouse on the Javakheti plateau. Lunch and dinner included.

Day 2 · Vardzia, the hermit caves and Saro

Javakheti → Khertvisi → Vardzia → Vanis Kvabebi → Upper Tmogvi by jeep → Saro. A full day, and the most walking of the four.

The morning follows the Mtkvari down through a gorge that gets narrower and stranger as you go. By high summer the slopes here are the colour of dust — eroded volcanic rock, almost no vegetation, shapes that do not look like they were made by weather.

Khertvisi comes first, a tenth-century fortress on an outcrop at the junction of the Paravani and the Mtkvari. Everyone who wanted this valley fought for this rock — Georgians, Mongols, Ottomans — and each of them added to the walls. Standing on them, you can see the whole argument at once.

Then Vardzia. Around six thousand chambers were cut into this cliff during the reign of Queen Tamar; the earthquake of 1283 took the outer face of the mountain off, and roughly five hundred caves survive, in tiers that in places run thirteen and more deep. What is left is a cross-section of a building that was never meant to be seen from outside. You walk corridors carved in solid rock, up stairs worn smooth in the middle, past bakery and cellars and living quarters, into a church whose walls carry a portrait of Tamar painted while she was still alive — one of very few. The spring that supplied the complex still runs. Give this two hours; it repays the second one.

A short way downstream, Vanis Kvabebi clings to a vertical face. These were hermit cells, reached by narrow paths, and the difficulty was deliberate: the monks who came here wanted a life that cost something to get to.

In the afternoon a 4×4 with a local driver takes the group up a track no ordinary car will manage, to the ruins of Upper Tmogvi on a ridge above the gorge. Few people make the effort. You will most likely have the whole ridge to yourselves, which is worth the shaking you take on the way up.

The day ends at a family table in Saro, a wine village that tourism has not found. The volcanic soil and the altitude give the grapes here a character you will not meet in Kakheti, the fermentation happens in qvevri buried in the yard, and the food comes out of the garden behind the house. Expect more of it than you can eat and a run of toasts you will not entirely follow.

Overnight: Akhaltsikhe (or near Vardzia on request). Breakfast, lunch and dinner included.

Day 3 · Rabati, Sapara and a forest on horseback

Akhaltsikhe → Rabati fortress → Sapara Monastery → Borjomi → horse riding in Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park. A full day.

Akhaltsikhe means “new castle”, which stopped being accurate several centuries ago. The Rabati complex above the town holds a Georgian Orthodox church, an Armenian church, a mosque with its minaret, and a synagogue, all inside one set of walls — four communities that lived here at the same time, arranged the way they actually were. The Ottomans held the town for a long stretch and the architecture says so.

The 2012 restoration was thorough, and not everyone approves; some preservationists think it went too far and left a replica where a ruin had been. Judge it yourself. As a way of understanding what this border region was, it works.

Twenty minutes east, up a road that winds into thick forest, Sapara Monastery is the opposite case. Nobody has smoothed it over. The main church holds frescoes from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — confident composition, colour that has held for six hundred years, Orthodox iconography worked through in a distinctly Georgian way. Where Vardzia dominates its cliff, Sapara sits down into the hillside and almost disappears.

North from there the landscape changes again, from the dry south into humid mountain forest, and drops into the gorge where Borjomi sits at 810 metres. In the central park a spring delivers the mineral water warm — carbonated, salty, faintly metallic, and not at all like the bottle. Georgians queue at it with five-litre containers. Try a cup; you will either love it or make a face, and both are the correct response.

The afternoon goes into Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park, 85,000 hectares of temperate forest with bears, wolves, lynx and more than two hundred bird species in it. You ride into it for two to three hours on trail horses that have done this many times. No experience needed — the guides match riders to animals, the pace is a walk with some trot if you want it, and after twenty minutes you stop thinking about the horse and start noticing how big the forest is.

Overnight: Borjomi. Breakfast, lunch and dinner included.

Day 4 · Abastumani, and back to Tbilisi

Borjomi → Abastumani Observatory → Tbilisi. About 160 km on the return leg, 3–4 hours. Half a day plus the transfer.

Twenty kilometres from Borjomi, at 1,650 metres, sits the Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory. It was founded in 1932 — the site chosen for the number of clear nights, the stillness of the air and the height — and it has been reading the sky ever since, through the Soviet period and out the other side. It is a working institute, and the visit depends on their schedule and the weather, but when it happens you see the historic telescopes and hear from people who use them what a mountain does for an image.

It is a deliberate ending. On Tuesday you went inside a mountain because monks wanted to be closer to something they could not see. On Friday you look through a lens pointed at the same problem from the other direction. Eight hundred years apart, roughly forty kilometres apart, and not really a different question.

If the weather does not cooperate, the morning goes back into Borjomi — a longer walk in the park, the sulphur pools, or the town itself, which is worth an unhurried hour.

Then the drive to Tbilisi: about 160 kilometres, three to four hours depending on the road at Gori. It is a good stretch for working out what you actually saw.

Ends: Tbilisi. Kutaisi start and/or finish available — ask when booking. Breakfast included; lunch depending on timing.