Hiking the Caucaus
Welcome to Georgia! Here’s a couple tips to navigate the country:
-
Don’t get your sim card at the airport. Head to any fairly large town and there should be a SIM card provider. I got unlimited data for a month with Cellfie for only 35 Lari.
-
When visiting Batumi I would recommend staying slightly north of batumi (near the botanic gardens), or south of batumi. We went to batumi twice in our 5-day stay and it just wasn’t for us. Head down to the beach near the turkish-georgian border for a nice chill day and cliff jumps!
Svaneti Region
We stayed in Mazeri over the weekend while Iza was working. This left me a couple of free days to do some hike. I decided to do the Ushba glacier hike, a tough, 16.3 km, 6h 30min hike from the valley town of Mazeri to the tongue of the Ushba glacier. It was extremely challenging. I tried to navigate initially with just intuition but that proved to be too much of a challenge. I quickly got lost and ended up off the trail multiple times. After hiking an additional 200m of elevation only to reach a dead end, i sat down to contemplate life just as a dutch guy who had been wild camping appeared and pointed me in the right direction. After another 2 hours of hiking up 60 degree incline dirt slopes i ford the river that feeds the waterfall and bash through shrubs and trees. After 30 minutes of this i suddenly hear angelic voices singing. I think I am going crazy. I crash through the dry vegetation and burst onto the trail to the surprise of a group of tourists. One of them stares at me.
“You have…something in your hair,” she says sheepishly. I realise i look positively insane. I join the girl and together we finally make it to the tongue of the glacier
Mestia - Ushguli
Our initial plan was to do the 4-day hike from Mestia to Ushguli. When we finally arrived in Mestia however, the weather looked right shit. 4 straight days of storms. After careful delibiration we decided to hike from Mestia to Chviiabiani and back, sleeping one night in Chviabiani.
On the first day, we set off to decent weather. 1 km into our 16km hike however and the skies open up. Before long, Iza and I are taking shelter in the ruins of a sanitorium, staring at each other as the wetness penetrates our cheap hiking pants and the sound of thunder echoes across the mountain range. We have no choice however, and continue to hike.
Eventually we make it to Chvabiani and sleep wonderfully.
The next day we hike the other direction across the Zuruldi range, hoping to end at the ski lift which would take us down to Mestia. From Chvabiani, we hitchhike to the trail head in Tsvirmi and begin our hike. Before long, the mountain mist blankets the entire ridge and we are stuck in torrential rain. As we arrive at the ski lift, it is, to no surprise given our recent misfortune, closed. We begin the long hike down the mountain. Near the end we get a hitchhike into Mestia.
Kutaisi region
Visit all the sulfur pools in the region, they are beautiful. We stayed in a car overnight in an extremely sketchy spot just to visit the same sulfur pool twice! Kutaisi was beautiful. We stayed in Belas guest house and she and her husband were such a charming couple, along with their 3 kids. Afterwards, we drove from Kutaisi to Gori where we spent one night in a winery. One bottle was 40 GEL. On the way, we stopped in Chiatura, a town that relies on cable cars as its main form of public transport. Walking through it and taking the cable cars around was such a trippy experience.