Svaneti and Racha: 7 Days Over the Zagaro Pass

Day 1 — Arrival in Kutaisi, and Gelati

We meet you at Kutaisi airport, which is twenty-five minutes from town, and take you in or if you have landed in Tbilisi, we travel from Tbilisi.. Kutaisi is Georgia’s second city and was the capital of two kingdoms, and it wears that lightly — a compact centre, a market worth an hour, and the Rioni running through the middle of it.

Above the town, Gelati. David the Builder founded it in 1106 with an academy attached that pulled scholars from across the Middle East and Europe, and the mosaics in the main church are the high point of medieval Georgian art. It is a UNESCO site and it is usually quiet in the late afternoon.

Dinner in Kutaisi — Imeretian food is lighter than eastern Georgian, and the local khachapuri is the one the rest of the world copied.

Overnight Kutaisi

Day 2 — A canyon, the Enguri, and up into Svaneti

North first, to one of three canyons depending on the season and what you feel like. Martvili puts you in a boat through a limestone slot where the water runs turquoise and waterfalls come in from both sides. Okatse is a steel walkway bolted to a cliff for seven hundred and eighty metres with the river twenty to thirty metres below — better if you want height, wrong if you do not like it. Balda is undeveloped: a proper walk along the river, rougher path, almost nobody.

Then the climb. We follow the Enguri up into the High Caucasus, gaining more than twelve hundred metres, with a stop at the Enguri Dam — 271 metres of concrete arch wedged between canyon walls. The gorge narrows and keeps narrowing, and about four hours in the first Svan towers appear above the road. Six hours from Kutaisi, and somewhere in the middle of it you understand why Svaneti stayed separate for so long.

Into Mestia in the late afternoon, at 1,500 m under Ushba. A walk before dinner through Lanchvali, Lekhtagi and Lagami — Mestia’s three old quarters, more than a hundred towers between them, each cluster from a different century.

Driving 6–7 h · walking 2–3 km · overnight Mestia, dinner included

Day 3 — Chalaadi Glacier, and Mestia’s museums

The walk. The trail starts at Lenjeri, ten minutes out of town, and follows the Mestiachala up through pine and fir, over wooden bridges across meltwater, then out into alpine meadow — solid with wildflowers in June and July — before steepening at the end.

Chalaadi Glacier comes down off Ushba’s flank and the face is actively calving: ice breaks off it while you are standing there and you hear the whole thing cracking and shifting behind the noise of the river. The blue in the ice is compressed snow with the air squeezed out of it. Twelve kilometres there and back, five to six hours, topping out near 2,000 m — and the altitude makes it feel longer than the distance says.

Back in Mestia for the afternoon and the three museums, which are better than they sound. The Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography holds medieval icons, worked gold and silver, and manuscripts going back to the ninth century, most of it hidden inside the towers for centuries so invaders would not find it. The Margiani tower house is a two-hundred-year-old family home left as it was — animals below, family above, tower attached. And the Khergiani museum is about a climber they called the Tiger of the Rocks, and tells you more about this region’s relationship with its mountains than the icons do.

Hiking 12 km, 5–6 h · overnight Mestia, dinner included

Day 4 — Latali, then the road up to Ushguli

West first, twenty minutes to Latali, for the church at Matskhvarishi. Tenth to eleventh century, and the frescoes are the reason art historians come to Svaneti: painted by Svans with no Byzantine or Persian painter to copy, and it shows — brighter colours than anything in lowland Georgia, compositions arranged differently, saints depicted in ways that exist nowhere else, and inscriptions in both Svan and Georgian.

Back through Mestia, and if the sky is clear the Hatsvali cable car is worth an hour: 2,347 m, with Ushba to the north, Tetnuldi to the north-east and the whole Mestia valley underneath you.

Then east, and this is the road people talk about. Forty-five kilometres to Ushguli and two and a half to three hours to do it, in a 4×4, fording rivers that have no bridges and running along cliff edges. We go up in the afternoon and arrive as the day vehicles are heading down.

And that is the point of this itinerary. Ushguli is four hamlets holding about seventy families at 2,100 m, with more than two hundred medieval towers between them and Shkhara — glacier-covered, three thousand metres straight up — standing directly above. Everyone else sees it between eleven and three. You get the evening.

Driving 3–4 h, 4×4 · walking 2–3 km · overnight Ushguli, dinner included

Optional extra night — Latali. If you would rather not do Latali and the Ushguli road on the same day, we can split it: a night in a family guesthouse at Latali, a slower morning in the Lower Svaneti villages, and up to Ushguli the following afternoon. That makes it an eight-day tour and it is the gentler version. Tell us when you book.

Day 5 — Ushguli at first light, then over the Zagaro Pass into Racha

Be up early. Lamaria sits above the village — twelfth century, with frescoes that isolation preserved — and the light on Shkhara behind it in the first hour is the reason to have slept here. Then Chazhashi, the best-preserved of the four hamlets, and its towers: ground floor for animals, middle floors for the family, top floors for defence, and some households will let you climb one. The icon museum holds what the village churches have kept.

Then the crossing, and it is a long day. The Zagaro Pass road climbs out of Ushguli to roughly 2,600 m and drops into Lower Svaneti — four to five hours over sixty-odd kilometres, unsurfaced the whole way, with almost nothing on it but high pasture and the occasional shepherd. From Lentekhi the road improves and turns east, following the Tskhenistsqali down and over into Racha.

Into Ambrolauri in the evening. It is a small town at the centre of a wine region, and after four days of mountains the change of scale is abrupt and welcome.

Driving 7–8 h, 4×4 required for the pass · overnight Ambrolauri

If the pass is closed. It happens — snow early or late in the season, or heavy rain at any point. Your guide checks conditions the evening before and again in the morning. If Zagaro is not passable we go back down to Mestia and out via the Enguri to Kutaisi, which means losing Racha and Day 6 as written. We will tell you the moment we know, and we would rather do that than take a group onto a road that is not safe.

Day 6 — Racha, and back to Kutaisi

A gentle day after yesterday. Barakoni stands above the Rioni at Tsesi, built in 1753 and one of the last great domed churches raised in Georgia before the tradition stopped — tall, elegant, and almost never busy.

Then the wine. Khvanchkara is Georgia’s famous naturally semi-sweet red, made from Alexandrouli and Mujuretuli grapes, and it is made here — these slopes, this valley, and nowhere else in the world. A tasting at a family cellar, which is a different thing from the bottle you have met abroad.

On the road out, Nikortsminda. Consecrated in 1014, and the exterior carving on it is the best in Georgia — the whole building is worked, doorframes, drum, window surrounds, in a way nothing else quite matches. Inside, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century frescoes on every surface. If you see one thing in Racha, see this.

Down to Kutaisi through the Rioni gorge, arriving in the evening.

Driving 3–4 h · walking 2–3 km · wine tasting included · overnight Kutaisi

Day 7 — Departure from Kutaisi

Breakfast, then the airport when your flight needs you. If you have a late departure there is time for Sataplia twenty minutes out of town — a three-hundred-metre cave walk, dinosaur footprints in fossilised mud, and a glass platform over the forest looking west toward the sea.

Transfer to Kutaisi International Airport