Svaneti and Vardzia: A 10-Day Private Tour of Georgia

Day 1 — Arrival in Tbilisi

We meet you at the airport and take you to your hotel in the old town. When you have dropped your bags we walk — and Tbilisi is a city that rewards walking, because everything is stacked on top of everything else. Sulphur baths under a fourth-century fortress. An Armenian church at the end of a lane of wine bars. The Metekhi cliff above the river, with King Vakhtang on his horse looking at the city he founded in the fifth century. We finish around Shardeni and Erekle II square, where the evening happens, and leave you to choose your own dinner — your guide will tell you where to go.

Walking 3–4 km, flat · overnight Tbilisi, 4-star

Day 2 — Mtskheta, Uplistsikhe and on to Kutaisi

West out of the city, and two sites that explain most of what follows. Jvari stands on a bare hilltop where the Aragvi meets the Mtkvari, built in the sixth century when Georgia had been Christian for two hundred years; church builders across the Caucasus copied it for the next five hundred. Down in Mtskheta, Svetitskhoveli is where the kings are buried, on a site that has held a church since the fourth century.

Then Uplistsikhe — a town cut into a riverside cliff and lived in from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages. You walk the streets, a pagan temple that became a church, and a theatre carved out of the rock. Lunch is at a family winery in Kartli, where the wine is lighter and sharper than the Kakhetian bottles you will have met already. Kutaisi by evening, and a short walk round a very compact centre.

Driving 5–6 h with stops · walking 3–4 km · lunch included · overnight Kutaisi, 4-star

Day 3 — Martvili Canyon and the road to Svaneti

North into Samegrelo. At Martvili the Abasha has cut a limestone slot forty metres deep, and you take a boat through the narrow part of it, under walls hung with moss and fern. Early is better — the water is still and the light comes down in shafts. If you would rather have height than water, we swap it for Okatse and its walkway suspended over a 140-metre drop.

Lunch in Zugdidi, where the food changes: Samegrelo cooks hotter and more aromatic than the east. Try gebzhalia, which is cheese folded in mint, or kupati.

Then the climb. We stop at the Enguri Dam, 271 metres of concrete arch wedged between canyon walls and still the second-highest of its kind anywhere, and after that the gorge narrows and keeps narrowing until the first Svan towers appear above the road. Into Mestia in the late afternoon and a walk through the Lanchvali and Seti quarters while the light goes.

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

Day 4 — Mestia’s museums, then the Becho valley

The morning is indoors and worth it. The Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography holds the best collection of medieval icons and worked gold in the country, much of it hidden in towers for centuries so that invaders would not find it. The Margiani tower house shows you how a Svan family actually lived — animals below, people above, tower attached. And the Khergiani house-museum is about a climber they called the Tiger of the Rocks, which sounds niche and is not: it tells you more about this region’s relationship with its mountains than any of the icons do.

Afternoon in Becho, half an hour away, for the best road-accessible view of Ushba — the twin-headed peak at 4,710 m that everyone in Svaneti navigates by. You choose your effort: the village and its church and photographs from the valley floor; or the Shdugra waterfall, four or five kilometres there and back; or on up to the Ushba glacier viewpoint, another four kilometres with steep sections and three more hours.

Dinner back in Mestia, and if you want it, a demonstration of kubdari — the meat bread that Svaneti will not let you leave without eating.

Driving 30 min · walking 4–8 km depending on your choice · overnight Mestia

Day 5 — Ushguli

Forty-five kilometres and two and a half to three hours, because the road is unpaved, forded in places and hairpinned in others. We go in a 4×4 with a driver who knows every hole in it, and we stop where it is worth stopping.

Ushguli is four hamlets — Zhibiani, Chvibiani, Chazhashi and Murkmeli — holding about seventy families who stay through winters that bring three metres of snow. At the top, Lamaria church, twelfth century, with Shkhara filling the sky behind it; this is the view every photograph of Svaneti is taken from, and it is better in person. Chazhashi has the densest cluster of towers, some of them ninth century, and you can walk the lanes between them. The ethnographic museum is one preserved tower house and a room of icons.

Lunch is in somebody’s home, because there are no restaurants here in any meaningful sense. Back in Mestia by early evening.

Driving 5–6 h return, 4×4 · walking 3–4 km · lunch included · overnight Mestia

Day 6 — Down from Svaneti, Prometheus Cave, Kutaisi

Out of the mountains the way we came, with one stop that is worth breaking the drive for. Prometheus Cave runs 1.4 km of developed passage through stalactite chambers, an underground river and lakes. The coloured lighting divides opinion — some find it too much — but the formations behind it are the real thing, and there is an optional boat out along the river at the end.

If you want it, we can stop at Tskaltubo. It was one of the Soviet Union’s great spa towns, and the enormous sanatoriums now stand mostly empty — extraordinary buildings if you have any interest in that architecture, and quietly sad if you do not. A few of the bathhouses still operate.

Evening at a family winery outside Kutaisi. Imeretian wine is made in qvevri like the Kakhetian, from different grapes, and it comes out lighter — a good comparison to have if you tasted in Kartli on Day 2.

Driving 5–6 h · walking 1.5 km · wine dinner included · overnight Kutaisi, 4-star

Day 7 — Over the Zekari Pass to Abastumani

A quick stop first at Bagrati, Kutaisi’s hilltop cathedral — eleventh century, blown up in the seventeenth, rebuilt in 2012 in a way that cost it its UNESCO listing and still divides Georgian opinion. Whatever you make of the reconstruction, the view over the city is excellent.

Then the crossing. From the spa village of Sairme a gravel road climbs to Zekari Pass at 2,182 metres, over the ridge that separates Imereti from Samtskhe-Javakheti. It is slow and rough and we take a 4×4. What you get for it is a landscape changing under you in real time — wet green forest, then alpine meadow with shepherds and their flocks, then the dry open highlands of the south, and no other vehicle for hours.

Abastumani sits in a wooded valley, a small resort town with a mild microclimate and a row of nineteenth-century sanatoriums. Above it, on the ridge, is the Astrophysical Observatory, built in 1932 and still working. If the sky is clear we go up after dark. At 1,650 metres in dry air it is one of the best places to look at the sky in the Caucasus, and the original Soviet telescopes are the ones you look through.

Driving 5–6 h, mountain roads · overnight Abastumani, guesthouse

Day 8 — Rabati, Sapara, Saro and Khertvisi

Akhaltsikhe means “new fortress”, and Rabati is why: an Ottoman administrative seat for two hundred and fifty years, and the complex holds a mosque, a synagogue, a church and a castle inside one set of walls. The 2012 restoration is polished to the point that some visitors find it Disneyish; others are glad to be able to read the layers at all. Make up your own mind.

Twelve kilometres away, down a wooded gorge, Sapara is the opposite kind of place — a working monastery, hard to find, with thirteenth-century frescoes in the Church of St Saba that are among the best in the country. It feels genuinely remote and is twenty minutes from a city.

In the afternoon, Saro: an almost-empty village of stone houses with the remains of a cyclopean wall above it, pre-Christian and unexplained, and essentially no visitors. Then Khertvisi, guarding the meeting of the Mtkvari and Paravani since at least the second century BC — the walls you see are tenth to fourteenth century. A short stop for photographs and the story, and on to Vardzia.

Driving 2–3 h · walking 3–5 km · overnight near Vardzia, guesthouse

Day 9 — Vardzia at dawn, then Javakheti and home

Early, deliberately. We are at Vardzia before nine, before the coaches and before the heat.

It was cut into the cliff above the Mtkvari in the twelfth century and at its height held six thousand chambers, churches, storerooms and a water system, with a monastic community of several thousand living inside the rock. An earthquake in 1283 tore the outer face away, which is why you can see into it at all. What is left is thirteen levels connected by tunnels, the Church of the Dormition with its frescoes — including the portrait of Queen Tamar, painted in her lifetime — and a handful of monks who still live there. Two to three hours.

Then east across the Javakheti plateau, and the country changes again. Volcanic highland at around 2,000 metres, treeless, thinly populated, with dormant cones on the skyline and cattle scattered across grassland. The villages here speak Armenian first. We stop at Paravani, Georgia’s largest lake at 2,073 m, and at Sagamo, which is smaller and quieter. Tbilisi by six or seven, and a last dinner wherever you have not been yet.

Driving 5–6 h · walking 2–3 km · overnight Tbilisi, 4-star

Day 10 — Departure

Breakfast, then the airport, timed to your flight. If you have days left over we can add Kakheti and its wine, Kazbegi and the Military Highway, or the Black Sea coast — ask us before you book and we will price it in.

Breakfast included · transfer to Tbilisi airport