Around Georgia tour in12 Days: Svaneti, Wine Country and Cave Cities

Day 1 — Arrival in Tbilisi

We meet you at the airport whatever time you land and take you into the city. If you arrive in the morning you have the afternoon free — walk the neighbourhood, find somewhere for dinner, let the time zone settle. If you come in late, sleep, because tomorrow is on foot.

Overnight Tbilisi, central hotel

Day 2 — Tbilisi

Tbilisi is a city built in layers and the old town shows all of them at once. We start at Abanotubani, the sulphur bath quarter, which is where the city began in the fifth century around the hot springs — the brick domes in the ground are the bathhouse roofs. Up to Narikala by cable car for the view: a fourth-century fortress rebuilt by every power that took the city, and from the ridge you can see how Tbilisi is wedged into a valley between two ranges.

Down to Metekhi, thirteenth century, on the cliff above the river where the royal quarter stood — it survived the Soviet period by being turned into a theatre. Then Rustaveli Avenue for the other Georgia: Imperial Russian facades, Soviet blocks and new glass along one boulevard.

Dinner is a proper Georgian table, which means a supra — a meal organised around toasts, where the talking matters as much as the food and somebody is appointed to run it.

Walking 4–5 km · welcome dinner included · overnight Tbilisi

Day 3 — Kakheti: Telavi, Ikalto, Gremi and Sighnaghi

A long day east and a full one. Kakheti makes seventy per cent of Georgia’s wine, in a valley between the Greater and Lesser Caucasus, from grape varieties that mostly grow nowhere else — and the archaeology puts winemaking here at eight thousand years.

Telavi for the market. Ikalto, eighth century, which housed one of Georgia’s first academies — philosophy, rhetoric and astronomy — and still has the monks’ wine cellar with its qvevri sunk into the floor. Gremi, a Silk Road capital until Shah Abbas destroyed it in 1615; from the tower the Alazani valley runs all the way to the mountains.

Lunch is at a family winery with a tasting — four or five wines, made in clay buried to the neck, alongside food built to go with them. Then Sighnaghi, on its hill above the valley, walled by Erekle II in the eighteenth century with four kilometres of rampart and twenty-eight towers still standing. On a clear afternoon you can see into Azerbaijan.

Driving 5–6 h · walking 3–4 km · a long day, back in Tbilisi late · wine lunch included · overnight Tbilisi

Day 4 — Mtskheta, Uplistsikhe and west to Kutaisi

Jvari stands on a bare hill above the meeting of the Aragvi and the Mtkvari — sixth century, and the model church builders across the Caucasus copied for the next five hundred years. Below it, Mtskheta was the capital for a thousand years and is still the country’s spiritual centre; Svetitskhoveli is where the kings were crowned and buried, on ground that has held a church since the fourth century.

Then Uplistsikhe, and it is worth arriving without expectations. From about 1000 BC people cut an entire town into soft volcanic rock — streets, houses, a theatre, a water system, and at its height something like twenty thousand people. You walk through it. Halfway round you pass a pagan temple that was reworked into a Christian church, which tells you the whole story in one room.

West to Kutaisi, and one more stop before the hotel: Gelati, twelfth century, founded by David the Builder with an academy that pulled scholars from across the Middle East and Europe. The mosaics are the high point of medieval Georgian art.

Driving 5–6 h · walking 3–4 km · overnight Kutaisi

Day 5 — Okatse Canyon and the road into Svaneti

Half an hour out of Kutaisi, Okatse has a steel walkway bolted to the cliff — seven hundred and eighty metres of it, with the river twenty to thirty metres below and limestone the water has been shaping for a very long time.

Then the drive that changes the trip. Six hours from Kutaisi to Mestia, following the Enguri up into the High Caucasus and gaining more than fifteen hundred metres. The last stretch is partly unpaved and cut into steep ground. Somewhere in the middle of it you understand why Svaneti stayed separate from the rest of Georgia for so long: the mountains do the work of a wall.

Into Mestia in the evening, at 1,500 m under Ushba, with the air noticeably thinner and colder than the lowlands you left this morning.

Driving 6–7 h · walking 2–3 km · overnight Mestia, all meals

Day 6 — Mestia’s towers, then Chalaadi Glacier

The morning belongs to the towers. Svan families built them between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, one per household, and when a feud or an invasion started everyone climbed into their own and waited. Nothing quite like them exists anywhere else — it took the right stone, real isolation, and constant danger. The Svaneti Museum holds the icons and worked silver that were hidden inside them for centuries, some of it ninth century.

Then the walk. Chalaadi Glacier starts at Lenjeri, ten minutes out, and follows the Mestiachala up through pine and alpine meadow, over wooden bridges across meltwater, steepening at the end. Twelve kilometres there and back, five to six hours, topping out near two thousand metres. The glacier comes down off Ushba and it is actively calving — you hear it crack and shift while you stand there, and the ice is that particular blue.

Hiking 12 km, 5–6 h · overnight Mestia, all meals

Day 7 — Ushguli by jeep

Forty-five kilometres and two and a half to three hours each way, because no ordinary vehicle goes up there. We take 4×4s. The road fords rivers with no bridges, climbs passes and runs along cliff edges, and the roughness is the reason Ushguli is what it is.

Ushguli is four hamlets at 2,100 m, holding around seventy families year-round, with more than two hundred towers between them — the densest concentration in Svaneti, and the reason Upper Svaneti is a World Heritage Site. Shkhara stands directly above: 5,193 m, Georgia’s highest, glacier-covered, and close enough that the contrast with people going about an ordinary morning underneath it takes a while to process.

Walk the stone lanes between the towers — ground floor for animals, middle floors for the family, top for defence. Some households will show you theirs. The twelfth-century Lamaria church above the village has frescoes that isolation preserved.

Back down the same road, in different light.

Driving 5–6 h return by 4×4 · walking 3–4 km · overnight Mestia, all meals

Day 8 — Becho and the Shdugra waterfall

Forty-five minutes deeper into the range to Becho, in the valley below Ushba and a good deal quieter than Mestia.

The Shdugra trail runs up the Dolra through pine and then out above the treeline into meadow — in July that meadow is solid with flowers — with the peaks opening out on both sides as the valley widens. Twelve kilometres round trip, about four hundred metres of climb, five to six hours, topping out near 2,300 m. The falls drop around thirty metres in stages, straight off a glacier, and the water is the colour glacial silt makes it. Horses can be arranged in advance for part of the route, around 50–60 GEL; the last section to the falls is on foot either way.

Tonight is the most basic bed of the trip and the one people remember: a Becho guesthouse, simple rooms, everyone eating at one table, and the electricity taking the occasional evening off.

Hiking 12 km, 5–6 h, +400 m · overnight Becho, all meals

Day 9 — Out of the mountains, Prometheus Cave, Borjomi

The longest day, and worth knowing about in advance: we are on the road from after breakfast until the evening. Back down the Enguri to Kutaisi, then south.

Prometheus Cave breaks the drive — 1.6 km of developed passage through stalactite chambers, an underground river and lakes, at a steady 14 °C. The coloured lighting divides people; the formations behind it do not.

Borjomi in the evening. The Russians built it as a spa in the nineteenth century around the mineral springs, and the water is still the most recognisable Georgian export there is. If there is light left, the walk up the park along the river to the original spring is worth it — the water comes out warm, around 38 °C, and tastes strongly of what is in it.

Driving 7–8 h · plus the cave and the park, so a long day end to end · overnight near Borjomi

Day 10 — Rabati, Sapara and Saro

A shorter day, deliberately, after yesterday. Rabati dominates Akhaltsikhe — thirteenth century in origin, rebuilt under two hundred and fifty years of Ottoman rule and again by the Russians, and inside one set of walls it holds a mosque, an Orthodox church, a Catholic church and a synagogue. That is not decoration; it is who lived here.

Twelve kilometres away, down a wooded gorge, Sapara is the opposite: a working monastery, tenth century in foundation with a thirteenth-century main church, hard to find and holding some of the best frescoes in southern Georgia. They survived because the Ottomans converted the church rather than knocking it down.

Then Saro, a nearly empty village of stone houses high above the Mtkvari gorge, with the remains of a cyclopean wall on the hill behind it — prehistoric, unexplained, and visited by almost nobody.

Driving 2–3 h · walking 3–5 km · overnight near Akhaltsikhe

Day 11 — Vardzia at dawn, then home across Javakheti

Early, so that we are at Vardzia before the coaches and before the heat.

Queen Tamar’s masons cut it into the cliff above the Mtkvari in the twelfth century, and at its height it held around two thousand monks in six thousand chambers across thirteen storeys — churches, stores, libraries, and a water system that lifted water four hundred and fifty metres from the river. The earthquake of 1283 took away roughly two-thirds of it and, in doing so, opened the inside of the mountain to the air. What is left is still enormous. The Church of the Dormition has a portrait of Tamar painted while she was alive, and a handful of monks still live there.

Khertvisi on the way north, where the Mtkvari meets the Paravani — a fortress on that ridge since at least the second century BC, guarding the road to Armenia and Turkey.

Then the Javakheti plateau, and the country changes one last time: volcanic highland around two thousand metres, treeless, wind-scoured, with dormant cones on the skyline and Armenia’s Mount Aragats visible to the south. We stop at Paravani, Georgia’s largest lake, and at Sagamo. Tbilisi in the evening.

Driving 5–6 h · walking 2–3 km · overnight Tbilisi

Day 12 — Departure

Breakfast, and free time if your flight allows it — most people use it to go back to one thing in the old town they only half saw on Day 2. Transfer to the airport to suit your departure.

Transfer to Tbilisi International Airport