Mountains, glaciers, rivers, towers and cows – hiking in Svaneti, Georgia

This post is slightly out of  chronological order, but I wanted to share our experience in Svaneti, a region in the Great Caucusus of Georgia, which was the most fascinating part of our trip to the country. We did a four day hike through extraordinarily varied mountain scenery, met a number of fellow travellers on the journey and by staying in guesthouses got a real insight into life in this isolated region, known for its medieval towers built to protect the villagers from their neighbours due to significant blood feuds in the area.

 Our view of Mestia from our hike

 

When we got to Mestia we went straight to the Tourist Information Centre and were given a map marking the route for each of the four days of hiking we planned to do. We had booked a guesthouse in Mestia through Booking.com, but when I had emailed them with our arrival time they said they were closed for repairs…the Tourist Information Centre rang up a different guesthouse and within five minutes an elderly couple, Robi and Ruso, were at the door ready to drive us to their apartment.

 

We had an inauspicious arrival: the “car park” of their building was muddy and already populated by cows and chickens, the staircase up to their home was unlit, the stairs were concrete, and the walls were unplastered (taking the exposed brick trend to the extreme). By contrast their apartment was clean and well decorated with taxidermy (shot by Robi himself, an officer in the Red Army), pictures of Mary, Jesus and Saint Nino (who converted Georgia to Christianity in the 4th Century), and drinking paraphernalia. They proposed a reasonable-sounding price of 100 lari (£32, $40) for the two of us one night, full board. As soon as we had agreed that price, Robi and Ruso took us down from the guest floor of their apartment to the floor they lived in and force-fed us homemade bread and jam, local cheese, tomato and cucumber salad and tea. Ruso chatted away at us in Russian, whilst her husband stayed quiet only smiling and saying words that he was confident we would understand i.e. not many.

 

  

Chris and I then headed back into town and the Tourist Information Centre, where we found out that flights from Mestia to Tbilisi were fully booked for the rest of the month and that the marshrutka left at 07.30 each day. We grabbed a beer at a cafe to make use of Wi-Fi for the last time for an unknown number of days and then headed back to Robi and Ruso’s, where they were delighted to hear that we now needed to stay another night in a few days’ time given the time restrictions on leaving Mestia.

 

For dinner we were joined by a German accountant in his mid 30s who was staying at Robi and Ruso’s en route from Russia to Turkey. He had been in Russia learning Russian for three months and apparently only really wanted to be in Mestia to practice his Russian; the delights of the mountain scenery apparently escaped him and he was frustrated that there was no Wi-Fi and his Georgian SIM card only provided internet intermittently. The German accountant proved to be an invaluable translator over dinner. The food was good, but the defining feature of our meal was Ruso’s attitude to wine. We drank their homemade “wine”, which they were very proud of, but tasted more like vinegar. The Georgians do not sip wine, they down it (perhaps because the commonly-drunk homemade stuff tastes so bad). I sat opposite Ruso and anytime my glass was anything fuller than a quarter full she would elbow the German accountant, smile mischievously, point at my glass and say “look”. I would then have to drink as much of my glass as I could stomach. This woman would destroy a university drinking society.

 

In the morning we had a hearty breakfast and several trips to the toilet to expel the “wine”. We then agreed a price for Robi to pick us up from the end of our four day walk and bring us back to the guesthouse. This took quite a while due to the standard of our Russian and their English. The German accountant must have overheard and once our hosts were back downstairs came out to tell us that we could get a taxi for much less money and that we were paying twice as much as him for our room. He was clearly missing talking to clients and proceeded to give us detailed advice about how much things should cost in Georgia.

 

 

Having been suitably chastised for our frivolity we cancelled the ride with Robi and set off on our hike. It was raining, which meant I felt right at home. Fortunately the rain didn’t last long, and the clouds didn’t block much of the view, instead they provided some much-needed shade and added even more drama to the scenery. We had a pleasant gradual ascent through woodland with nobody for company other than cows until we got to the final, steepest and muddied part of the 500m ascent, when we were overtaken by a man we later discovered to be a Brazilian couchsurfer who had been on the road for 2.5 years and were nearly overtaken by a surly local guide leading a German couple.

  

We found more people at the top, where we had a beautiful view over the valley below and the villages we would walk through. The Brazilian chef was topless, walking around attempting to dry his t-shirt. The German couple with the surly guide arrived shortly after us and were quickly frogmarched off, it was apparent that their guide didn’t speak any English let alone German – they didn’t appear to be having the best time.  As we admired the view we got chatting to a US expat (the first American we had met in Georgia) and his Georgian girlfriend. We had forgotten to get lunch from Ruso, but ate some pancakes we had picked up in Kutaisi assuming we would be able to pick up some lunch in  one of the several villages we would walk through.

 

 

We were sorely mistaken. The villages were tiny and didn’t even distinguish between roads and pigsties, there were certainly no shops or even friendly locals willing to sell you some bread. On the plus side, we added pigs, calves, goats and chickens to the list of animals we saw on the walk. The last 3km of the 14km day involved walking alongside the river, according to the map. In reality we were tramping through water and mud, dodging cows, and jumping from rock to rock whilst wearing our backpacks. Perhaps we should have copied a German man who overtook us by not caring whether he was stepping in mud or water – it was hot and our boots were already muddy, it would probably have been a relief to have wet feet.

 

 

 We arrived at the village and were met by two old women who asked us whether we had a place to stay. We didn’t, but we established the going rate and went off in search of a guesthouse that would be able to give us beer. As we didn’t give a firm “nyet” (because we needed the option to come back to these women in case there was nowhere else to stay) one of the old women chased us up the route into the village along a muddy river with surprising nimbleness shouting at us in incomprehensible Russian the whole way. We quickly realised that it be no issue finding a place to stay where we wouldn’t get harassed in a language we barely understood: a woman started waving to us from her garden, but before she could reach us a woman in her early 20s approached us and spoke to us in English. We fancied the luxury of being able to communicate with our host and went with the young woman. Her house had a “market” outside, a big garden and was one of the best maintained houses in the village. She showed us the rooms and we managed to agree a price of 15 lari less each than she proposed (the German accountant would be proud of our new-found bargaining skills).

  

After we were settled in we asked our host if we could buy some beer from her market she told us that her mama had the key and was out (oddly the Georgian word for father is “mama”, so it was unclear which parent she meant). This seemed like a strange business model,  but we realised that the parents were wise because shortly after they arrived back we saw a man who we assumed to be their adult son helping himself to the stock. I then went to ask the parents for some beer and met the quieter of the two old women who had met us at the entrance of the village, we assume that while her friend was chasing us up the road she rang her granddaughter and told her that tourists had arrived and that she should come out to meet us. Unfortunately the father told me that the market was out of beer, but I could have cognac or chacha (the national spirit). Unsurprisingly I declined these options.

 

Dinner at this guesthouse was a rather different affair to the night before. We were the only guests and ate alone at a massive table in an incomplete extension to the family home. Sometimes the door to the living room/kitchen was open and we could observe family life, other times it was closed. We were mostly served by the young woman, who was clearly having a tough day. We had heard her fight with her husband earlier and her four month old baby cried a lot. The food however was good, although Chris was disappointed by the lack of meat. After dinner we had tea made with mint leaves and hung around in the garden watching the father and grandfather bring in the three cows, milk them and feed the three pigs. We tried to chat to the thieving son, but his English was only a little better than our Russian, so we didn’t manage to establish even if he was the son let alone if he was the father of the three children we had seen around the house earlier in the day.

 

 

 

Our bedroom had no windows so I woke up at dawn, but fell back asleep only to be awoken again by the noise of the pigs being fed (they were so loud that people we met later in the day assumed that the pigs were being slaughtered). Breakfast exceeded our expectations and we were well looked after by the parents. The father managed to pour us tea, whilst holding the baby, laughing at our sunburn and stroking my hair. It was nice to know that the family clearly weren’t talking about us as like his children the night before the father asked us how old our own children were (as opposed to “do you have children?”). Neither his English nor our Russian was good enough to understand “not yet”.

 

We then set off in the direction the father pointed us in, which fortunately allowed us to avoid the river. After about 20 minutes we reached the first point of navigational difficulty in our walk so far: there were more paths than marked on the map and the least obvious looking path was the correct one. We hadn’t been on it for more than 50m when I heard shouting below us. A man, who turned out to be a guide, said “you are mistaken! That is the old way. It was ruined by the ski resort, you can go that way, but it is more difficult and less enjoyable and goes by the river.” We were a little sceptical and were concerned about ignoring the map so early in the day, but the guide appeared to be going the way he advised and we were keen to avoid walking through another river. The guide, unsurprisingly, turned out to be right: the path was new and our map was from 2011. It would have been helpful for the Tourist Information Centre to have told us the map was out of date when they gave them to us…

 

  

The journey was beautiful. We walked through meadows with colourful flowers we had never seen before and every 20 minutes saw a new snow-capped mountain. After a couple of hours we reached the road and the chairlift for the brand new ski resort.  We decided to follow the map and take the path perpendicular to the road,  rather than going up the road. As soon as we set foot on the path we heard a voice behind us “again you are mistaken. You should take the road”. If only a friendly Georgian guide with excellent English appeared at every junction in your life to tell you that you were doing something wrong.

 

Our journey continued through meadows, green mountains, streams and past snow-capped mountains. The only draw-back of this day was that every picturesque spot for taking a break was a meadow, and every meadow had horseflies. I didn’t finish my lunch because I couldn’t bear it any more.

 

After a six hour walk up a mountain, across mountains and down a mountain we arrived in the village of Adishi. What a difference those six hours made. We had reflected as we left Zhabeshi in the morning that we felt that tourism was having a positive impact on that village. It appeared that the 11 person family we were staying had previously made whatever money they could off their seven animals. The house had an outside toilet, but the family now had a bathroom inside and there were two bathrooms for guests as well as further new rooms which they were in the process of decorating. Our family had a big house – which they had recently extended – their kitchen was one of the nicest we had seen in Georgia and they had a large garden with views of the mountains. It was also apparent that our family weren’t the only ones doing well from Zhabeshi being part of a popular hiking route: several large houses were being built in this small village. However Adishi was a different matter. The village was in the spot it had been for centuries, however families no longer lived in their stone houses or towers, and instead built homes out of what appeared to be scrap wood alongside the stone ruins. We were met at the entrance to the village by a surly man. Our family in Zhabeshi had given us a recommendation for Adishi and Chris asked the man where that person’s house was. The man said he didn’t know but instead led us to his house. We walked through the pigsty to get to the entrance to the house which was about as stable as the Weasley’s Burrow. I was feeling apprehensive but looked around and realised that every other house in Adishi was built in a similar fashion. This house at least had a large balcony/terrace where we met the Brazilian couchsurfer and a couple who were in their last year studying architecture in Switzerland (she was German, he was Swiss) and on a two week holiday to Georgia before he had spent the rest of the summer doing non-military service.

 

 

We settled down to a beer with our fellow guests and enjoyed the view from the terrace. After a few hours we were served dinner by the family, during which three tall men and their shorter friend traipsed through the dining room. At first the five of us felt very pleased that we had completed the hike in so many fewer hours than the new guests. However as the four of them came back through the dining room we realised that they knew what they were doing so concluded that they must have done the first two days of the route in one day only.

 

Our new guests turned out to be even more adventurous then we thought. Over more beers on the terrace these four Dutch men told us that they had been hiking for three days, off-piste, making their own paths. They had camped on the edge of a cliff before an enormous thunderstorm and were then trapped there through the storm because there was a massive dog guarding the village which they concluded was more likely to kill them than the weather (this seems legit: every dog in Svaneti is enormous, apparently to protect the animals from wolves). The next day they ran out of water, went to a village 700m below in the valley to find water, but couldn’t and were then trapped in the village overnight as it was too late to make a 700m ascent. Whilst they didn’t say it, it was evident that this alpha-male group had decided that living life literally on the edge wasn’t much of a holiday and they had therefore decided to come to the relative luxury of a guesthouse in Adishi and to do day 3 of our walk.

 

  

We spent the evening talking with the other guests and observing life in the village, including watching one woman attempt to milk her cows. There was one bad cow which kicked the woman milking her, when the woman hit the cow with a stick the cow tried to jump over the wall; this didn’t work: the walls had been well designed to keep the cows in. The woman’s husband then appeared and held the cow’s horns whilst the woman carried on milking, the cow kicked her again, the husband thumped the cow – the two other cows just watched, bemused. We also observed clothes shopping Adishi style: a van full of clothes was parked in the middle of the village (this itself was surprising as none of the “roads” in Adishi seemed wide enough for a anything more than a cattle-drawn sleigh) and people tried on clothes in the middle of the “street” whilst their neighbours commented on them.

 

Conversation moved from hiking, through climate change to politics. At least one benefit of Trump and Brexit is that there’s always plenty to talk about…

 

 

The morning started off with a nice group breakfast, followed by less nice competition for the one bathroom the nine of us were sharing which hung precariously off the balcony and no longer contained loo roll. We were at least doing better than the family who appeared to share one room of the house between two siblings, their spouses and a five year old daughter and didn’t have a bathroom (we saw the girl doing a wee in the pigsty).

 

 We set off with the Brazilian couchsurfer and the architecture students alongside the river in a valley with steep mountains on either side – grass and meadows to the right; trees, rocks, rivers and snow deposits to the left. We were heading in the direction of a glacier and after about an hour and half came to the rushing river at the bottom of the glacier. Our host had ridden past us whilst we walked and was waiting to take us across by horse, as were two other men. The Brazilian couchsurfer, always keen to save money, attempted to find a place to cross on foot, but after half an hour returned for some equine assistance.

 

Everyone else on the trail was also wisely taking the horse route, save for one German family who were doing it alone. As we arrived the father was coming back across the river, having walked it alone. We then saw him take his four year daughter across on his shoulders, then return to carry his eight year old son. When we left he was bringing his wife across with ropes. We all failed to understand why they risking their children’s lives for less than the cost of a pint.

 

 

After the river crossing we had an 800m ascent, our walking companions quickly left me in the dust and we didn’t see them again until the top. The walk up gave us better views of the glacier and the tranquillity was frequently punctuated by the sound of the glacier cracking. We also had plenty of shallow rivers to walk through, we were now experts and strode straight through them.

 

 

When we finally made it to the top and met up with our new friends from the day before the views were fantastic, particularly of our walk earlier in the day:

 

  

The walk down was steep and took us down to a settlement a wooden huts used by shepherds in summer (or so we were reliably informed by a guide we met who was kept waiting by his unfit group: we didn’t see any sheep let alone shepherds ourselves). The Swiss architect told us that a friend of his had done this walk the week before and 3km before the end there had been a bar with a sun terrace. After walking along a steep gorge in the searing heat (I had taken to wearing my scarf on my head like a pirate it was so hot) we were really hoping that this friend was right and nothing had changed in the intervening 12 months. Thankfully we reached a village ruined save for one building: the bar we were after.

 

 

 

 The Dutch guys announced at the bar that they were cutting off the rest of the hike and getting a taxi straight to the village that we would be walking to the next day to do a nicer walk to a glacier there, rather than the reportedly uninteresting walk we had ahead of us. However the rest of us stuck to our guns: we were doing a four day point to point walk and we weren’t going to cheat by taking a taxi through the “boring” bits (it is impossible to describe the Caucasus as boring). Chris and I then walked to the village of Iprali with the architecture students and the Brazilian couchsurfer. We lost the latter in Iprali as he wanted to hunt for cheaper accommodation whereas we wanted to pay a premium to ignore each other and use the wifi at the only hotel in the village.

 

The other guests at the hotel included a noisy tour group of Scandinavian retirees and the German family who had walked across the river. It turned out that they had wanted to get a horse, but the horsemen asked them which guesthouse they had stayed at and then refused to cross them. They stayed at the very guesthouse we had been recommended, but which our host had pretended not to know of (a clear impossibility in a village of fewer than 20 houses). It turned out that that the owners of that guesthouse didn’t get along with the horsemen and apparently their animosity was so deep that it spread to their customers. We finally understood why this part of Georgia was full of medieval towers: if people didn’t like their neighbours this much in 2017, imagine how they felt about them hundreds of years ago.

 

 

 We set off on our final day of the walk with the student architects and a further novelty of a 400m descent at the start of the day (every other village had been in a valley, so we had begun with an ascent). We had a lovely day walking with them, particularly for Chris who managed to indulge his passion of town planning with the Swiss man (perhaps a little ironically given that we were in the middle of nowhere).

 

 At the first village in the valley we came into navigational difficulty as the map said to stay in a the road, but a signpost suggested that we head up into the mountains. According to the map the only path went up 1000m above where we were, and there was no way by legs could handle that. After some disagreement we continued along the road, which wasn’t the most pleasant experience due to the number of cars (particularly Mitsubishi Delicas) which were also using the road, and had greater difficulty than we did traversing the rivers which ran across the road down into the gorge below.

 

 We soon realised that we should have followed the signs (given that the map was always the least reliable navigational tool we should have already realised this – where was our helpful guide when we needed him most?). As a result when we found the “old path” we had to smash through it, with nettles taller than me. Even when we had made the 500m ascent, we weren’t at the top of the mountain, and our views of below were frequently masked by trees, grass and flowers. The architecture students were faster walkers than me, so we agreed to meet in Ushguli for a final beer.

 

Chris and I then took a break for a boiled egg (lunch was always classic farmer’s food in Svaneti), and were very quickly given a glass of wine each by a Belarussian group sat near us. I say glass, what I really mean is yoghurt pot. The wine was a surprisingly good semi-sweet red. I jokingly offered them the bread and cheese that we had been carrying around for two days (as I had been unable to eat it due the risk of being attacked by horseflies), and to my great surprise that took and appeared to enjoy the cheese that had been roasting away in the heat of my backpack…When we had nearly finished our wine and were about to leave, one of the party asked if he could practice his English on us. We could hardly refuse and had a 20 minute conversation about American, Belarussian and global politics in broken English.

 

 We then continued on along the “road” for a few more kilometers until we reached Ushguli. This collection of four hamlets is UNESCO world heritage listed, but was underwhelming given the height of our expectations and the beauty of the previous four days (I had the same experience finally arriving at this Sistine Chapel having walked through the Vatican museum for miles to reach it).

 

 

 The first people we met on arrival in the centre of the village were an English/Lithuanian couple (we didn’t meet a single straight couple on the walk who were of the same nationality…), we had met them back in Adishi (the husband heard my voice across the village and like a homing pigeon headed for the first English accent he had come across in Georgia) and had a good chat along the journey between Adishi and Iprali. However they were in some difficulty having found a taxi driver willing to take them and three others to Mestia, but when they went to the driver’s car they found it only had four seats. They refused to travel with the driver, who was now preventing every other driver in the village from taking them. Keen not to be associated with these people and risk having our own car difficulties we quickly head off to “explore” the village.

 

As with every other village in Svaneti, there was nothing to explore, but en route to finding a bar we came across the Brazilian couchsurfer and the student architects. At the bar we then found the Dutchmen, and our Adishi guesthouse group was reunited (I think this gives an idea of the scale of Ushguli).

 

Chris and I left the group after only one beer, worried not only that we might fall into taxi issues like my compatriot but also that if we left too late, the roads would be full of Georgians who were currently drinking litres of homemade wine at a monastery en route as part of a festival. Despite our concerns we easily found a shared taxi to take us back to Mestia. The 46km journey took over two hours, due to the near-impassable nature of the mountain roads. The hairpin road up the mountain was being refurbished and was accordingly in pretty terrible condition. We went past plenty of broken-down vehicles, and our own Mitsubishi Delica (the vehicle of choice in Svaneti) paused on the road for a heart stopping 30 seconds three times.

 

We eventually made it back to Mestia and made our way back to Robi and Ruso, who were clearly pleased to see us. Dinner was not the fun affair that it had been on our previous visit, but as we were exhausted it didn’t really matter. At 7.30 we got the marshrukta back to Tbilisi, celebrating our return to civilisation in style by staying at the coolest hostel in town, a converted Soviet sewing factory called Fabrika. I suspect that next time we go to Georgia this area will be different: there will be more people, more shops (read: any shops), and fewer cows. See Svaneti while you can, I imagine that it will be a highlight of our trip.