Four days south, where Georgia stops being green and starts being stone. A city cut thirteen tiers into a cliff for a queen who was expecting a siege, a fortress where a mosque and a church share a wall, and the mineral water an empire drank.
- Vardzia: six hundred rooms, a bell tower, a spring still running
- Rabati fortress, where a mosque and a church share one wall
- The Kukushka railway through the Borjomi gorge
Day by day
- Day 01
The old capital, then the spa town
Mtskheta on the way out: Jvari on the rock above the meeting of two rivers, and Svetitskhoveli, where the country buried its kings. Borjomi by late afternoon, and the water straight from the spring in the park - warm, salty, and not what the bottle led you to expect.
- Day 02
The narrow gauge
The Kukushka, running since 1902, thirty-seven kilometres up to Bakuriani at walking speed through pine forest on a track built for a Romanov. Back by car in forty minutes. The afternoon is deliberately empty.
- Day 03
Vardzia
Six hundred rooms, thirteen tiers, a bell tower and the Church of the Dormition with its frescoes of Queen Tamar painted while she was alive. An earthquake in 1283 took the outer wall off and turned a hidden city into a cross-section. Rabati fortress at dusk on the way back.
- Day 04
Along the Mtkvari
Khertvisi, still standing where it has stood since the second century BC, then Tmogvi on its cliff, then the river road back to Tbilisi with the canyon on one side the whole way.
What is included
- Private car and your tamada for four days
- The Kukushka tickets and the Vardzia entries
- Breakfasts, two dinners, lunch at the fortress
What is not
- Flights
- Travel insurance
- Dinner on the last night in Tbilisi
The practical part
- Where you sleep
-
Crowne Plaza Borjomi, two nights
A small hotel in Akhaltsikhe under the fortress, one night
- When it works
- March to November. The south is drier and colder than the rest of the country; in winter Vardzia is beautiful and the wind is a real argument against it.
- The pace
- The longest driving day is three and a half hours, on day one.
Vardzia and the South
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