Georgia for the first time

What follows is what actually surprises people on a first visit, and the six things we would do differently if we could rewind a first-timer’s trip.

The map is lying to you

This is the single biggest planning error and it is not close. Georgia is the size of West Virginia, and every first-time itinerary we are sent by a client has too many places in it.

The reason is elevation. Tbilisi to Ushguli in upper Svaneti is 250 miles (400 km) and it is a two-day journey. The Tusheti road covers 45 miles (72 km) in four to five hours. Even the good roads carry heavy freight, because the Georgian Military Highway to Kazbegi is the main route to Russia.

Plan by hotel changes rather than by days. Four changes in nine days is comfortable. Seven is a coach tour with better food. How many days you need in Georgia sets out where the cut-offs fall.

The supra is not a dinner

The Georgian feast, the supra, is run by a tamada, a toastmaster, and it follows an order. Toasts go to peace, to the dead, to parents, to children, to the guests, to the country, and each one is a short speech rather than a raised glass. You are expected to respond when it comes to you, and you are expected to drink at each toast rather than between them.

Three things nobody tells you. Wine is drunk at the toast, so sipping through the meal reads as odd. The table fills up rather than clears, so dishes arrive on top of dishes and clearing your plate is not the goal. And the first courses are not the meal, they are the beginning of it, which is how people who eat everything in the first half hour end up defeated.

Being at a supra in a private house is the best evening most of our travellers have in Georgia, and it is the thing our Tbilisi partner arranges that you cannot arrange for yourself.

The wine is not what you are expecting

Georgia has around five hundred indigenous grape varieties and the one you will meet everywhere is Saperavi, a deep red that behaves like a normal wine and that most people like immediately.

The style that exists nowhere else is the amber skin-contact white, made from Rkatsiteli, Kisi or Mtsvane, fermented on the skins in a buried clay qvevri. It is tannic, oxidative, orange in the glass and closer to a light red than to a white in the way it behaves at the table. Some people fall for it permanently. Some people do not like it at all. It is worth knowing that before you commit a week of your trip to it.

Our advice for a first visit: one full day in Kakheti at two family cellars rather than four, one commercial estate for contrast, and a Tbilisi wine bar in the evening where you can taste eight things in small glasses and find out what you actually like. Then, if it turns out you love it, the wine and food route exists.

Tbilisi deserves three days, not one

First-timers routinely give the capital a day and a half and treat it as the airport city. It is the reason a good number of our clients come back.

Three days lets you do it by district: the old town and the sulphur bathhouses at Abanotubani, the Narikala ridge, the art nouveau and Soviet layers in Sololaki and Vera, the Dry Bridge flea market, and the restaurant scene, which over the last decade has become a reason to visit Georgia on its own. Tbilisi in three days is the plan we actually use.

One warning. Tbilisi in August is hot, regularly into the mid nineties Fahrenheit (about 35°C), and the old town is stone with very little shade. In summer the city works as a morning and evening place, and the middle of the day belongs to a car or a long lunch.

The mountain roads, honestly

Two of them need to be understood before you book rather than after.

The Abano Pass into Tusheti. Single-track gravel cut into a hillside at about 9,350 feet (2,850 m), with drops, no barrier and passing places you reverse into. Four to five hours each way. It is driven in a local 4×4 by a driver who does that road for a living and nothing else. It is open in summer only, usually from around June to the first heavy snow in early October, and the opening date moves with the snowpack rather than the calendar. It is genuinely rough and a small number of our travellers find it frightening. If it is not for you, say so early and we build a route without it. Nobody minds.

Mestia to Ushguli in upper Svaneti. The paved road from Zugdidi to Mestia is normal and Mestia is reachable most of the year. The stretch beyond it to Ushguli is part surfaced and part rough, about two hours for 30 miles (48 km) in a 4×4, and unreliable outside summer.

The Georgian Military Highway to Kazbegi crosses the Jvari Pass at about 7,815 feet (2,382 m). It is paved, and it closes in snow and avalanche conditions in winter, sometimes for days. Between November and April we build a Kazbegi day with a written alternative attached.

Guesthouses in the mountains are simple

In Ushguli and Omalo the standard is a clean twin room, sometimes a shared bathroom, hot water that depends on the generator, and heat from a wood stove. There is no luxury tier to buy. This is the region rather than a failing of the property, and paying more does not change it.

The compensation is that the food in those houses is usually the best you eat in the country, and the family will sit down with you.

Six things we would do differently on a first visit

1. Cut one place. Whatever your list is, take one region off it and give the days to Tbilisi or Kakheti. Nobody has ever told us they wished they had driven more.
2. Two nights at Kazbegi, not one. The mountain is behind cloud roughly half the time and two nights gives you two chances at it.
3. Book the second half of September or the first half of May. The harvest fortnight and the spring wildflowers are the two best windows. Georgia month by month has the reasoning.
4. Take a guide for three days out of nine, not for all nine. Mtskheta, a Kakheti wine day and the Tbilisi walking day are transformed by a good guide. The rest works with a driver and a document.
5. Carry cash for the mountains. Cards work in Tbilisi and the larger towns. Guesthouses in Omalo do not take cards and there is no cash machine.
6. Do not book the Black Sea on a first trip. Nine days does not have room for it and Batumi is an oddity rather than a beach holiday.

Small practical things that matter

• Dogs. Village and mountain dogs are working animals, not pets. Do not approach the flock guardians, and do not walk between a dog and its sheep.
• Monastery dress. These are working religious sites. Shoulders and knees covered, a headscarf for women at some, and photography inside is often not allowed.
• Language. Georgian is unrelated to any language you know and uses its own alphabet. Russian is widely understood by older people, English by younger people in the cities. Outside cities, a guide or driver who translates changes the trip.
• Altitude. Nothing on a normal Georgian itinerary is high enough to cause a problem. The highest you sleep is around 7,200 feet (2,200 m) at Ushguli.
• Traffic. Georgian driving on the main roads is assertive in a way most visitors find tiring within an hour. This is the main argument for a driver, and a driver here costs less than in most countries we work in.

How we run Georgia, plainly

GO EAST staffs its own offices in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. Georgia is not one of them. We run it through a Tbilisi partner we have used for years, whose drivers, guides and mountain 4×4 teams meet you on the ground, briefed by us, with your consultant on the same WhatsApp thread from take-off to landing. We would rather name who is actually there than imply an office we do not have. Our founder Doron Reichman has led trips in the Caucasus himself, which is why the road notes above carry timings rather than optimism.

Plan this trip

Tell us your dates and roughly what you want out of Georgia, and a specialist will build you a first outline with honest drive times in it. Free, and with no obligation.

Start planning

Keep reading

• Georgia: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Tbilisi in three days
• What to eat in Georgia, and how a supra works
• How many days do you need in Georgia?
• Classic Georgia in 9 days
• All our Georgia trips

Frequently asked questions