What we would skip in Georgia

Nothing on this list is bad. Georgia does not have much that is genuinely bad. Everything here is either overrated relative to the time it takes, or badly matched to the trip most people are actually taking, or good only under conditions that nobody tells you about in advance. Where we would skip something, we say what we would do with the day instead. If you disagree with us, tell us and we will build it anyway.

Batumi as a beach holiday

The single most common mismatch we correct.

Batumi is a Black Sea city of casinos, apartment towers and a long seafront boulevard, with a pebble beach where the shingle drops away steeply into the water. It is interesting for one night as an oddity: the architecture is a collection of decisions nobody would make twice, and the botanical garden north of the city is excellent.

It is not a beach holiday. The sea is cool, the pebbles are hard work, the season is short and humid, and if a beach is what you want there are twenty better places to fly to.

Instead: if you are going west, put those days into inland Adjara. The Machakhela and Khulo valleys, the arched stone bridges, and Mtirala national park, which is genuine temperate rainforest and rains accordingly. Or skip the coast and give the days to Imereti.

The Stalin museum at Gori

A long half day from Tbilisi for a museum that has barely been reinterpreted since it was built. There is a small corrective room and it does not change the experience. Some people find it fascinating precisely because of what it does not say. Most of our clients find it flat.

Instead: if you make the drive west, stop at Uplistsikhe, the rock-cut town twenty minutes from Gori, which is a good hour and a half of scrambling through a settlement carved into rock. Or leave the Gori road out and give the day to Kakheti.

The large commercial wineries

Georgia has several big producers with impressive visitor centres, a film, a stainless steel hall and a tasting room with a price list. The wine is fine. You will learn less in three hours there than in forty minutes in a family marani where the person pouring made the wine in the room you are standing in.

Instead: one commercial estate for contrast, and two family cellars. That is a full day in Kakheti and it is the day people talk about afterwards. Our wine and food route is built on that ratio, and what to eat in Georgia explains what qvevri wine actually is.

The Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi, as a priority

Sameba is enormous and it was completed in 2004. As engineering and as a statement about the post-Soviet church it is interesting. As architecture it tells you nothing that the sixth-century Jvari monastery or eleventh-century Svetitskhoveli will not tell you better and older, half an hour away.

Instead: Mtskheta, and an extra hour in the Sololaki stairwells with a guide who knows which doors open. Tbilisi in three days has the alternative plan.

Shardeni street

Ten minutes of walking through it is fine. Eating or drinking there is paying a premium for a street that exists for visitors, and the restaurants have photographs on the menu and somebody outside inviting you in.

Instead: walk ten minutes uphill into Sololaki or across to Vera. The price halves and the food improves.

Tusheti on a nine-day trip

Not because Tusheti is not worth it. It is one of the best places in the Caucasus and we build it often. But two of your days go to the Abano Pass, four to five hours each way on single-track gravel at about 9,350 feet (2,850 m) with drops and no barrier. On a nine-day trip that is two days of driving to spend one day in a place that deserves three.

It is also summer only, usually from around June until the first heavy snow in early October, and the opening date is set by the snowpack rather than a calendar. It is genuinely rough, and a small number of our travellers find it frightening, which we say before anyone books rather than after.

Instead: on nine days, Kazbegi, which is three hours on a paved road and gives you the same order of mountain for a fraction of the driving. Save Tusheti for a twelve-day trip or longer, or choose upper Svaneti, which is reachable on a paved road to Mestia. Svaneti or Tusheti compares them.

Ushguli as a day trip from Mestia

Two hours each way on a part-surfaced and part-rough road in a 4×4, for a village that is worth a night. Day-tripping it means you arrive at the same time as everybody else, see it in the middle of the day when the light is flat, and leave before the valley empties out.

Instead: sleep in Ushguli, accept that the guesthouse is simple, with a shared bathroom, generator hot water and a wood stove, and walk up the valley to the Shkhara glacier the next morning. Or do not go beyond Mestia at all and put the day into the Koruldi lakes walk.

Kazbegi in one night

The mountain is behind cloud roughly half the time. One night gives you one chance at seeing Kazbek at 16,512 feet (5,033 m) behind the Gergeti Trinity Church, which is the reason people go. Two nights doubles your odds and the second day fills easily with the Truso valley, the Juta valley or the Gveleti waterfall.

Instead: two nights, always. If your trip cannot afford two nights at Kazbegi, it cannot afford Kazbegi.

Vardzia squeezed into a day trip from Tbilisi

The cave city is one of the best sights in Georgia: thirteen levels cut into a cliff in the twelfth century, with tunnels and a church with surviving frescoes. It is also four hours each way from Tbilisi, which makes it a ten-hour day for ninety minutes on site.

Instead: a night at Akhaltsikhe, with Vardzia in the morning when it is cool and empty, plus the Sapara monastery, which almost nobody visits. Note that the Rabati fortress at Akhaltsikhe has been rebuilt so thoroughly that it reads as new. Children like it. Adults expecting a medieval castle are usually disappointed.

Three or more monasteries in one day

Georgian churches are extraordinary and they are also, after the third in a day, a sequence of dark stone rooms. We ration them deliberately, exactly as we do in Armenia. Two in a day is the comfortable ceiling and one plus something else is usually better.

Instead: one monastery, one cellar, one long lunch. That is a day people remember.

Self-drive

Georgian driving on the main roads is assertive in a way that most visitors find tiring within an hour. The Military Highway carries heavy freight because it is the main route to Russia. And we will not put you on the Ushguli or Tusheti roads in a rental car, which no rental agreement covers anyway.

Instead: a car with a driver, which costs $80 to $120 a day for the vehicle and is the single best-value line in a Georgian budget. Split between two, it is less than most people spend on lunch.

Booking one-night stops because the map is small

The most expensive mistake in Georgian itinerary design, and it is not a money cost. Every one-night stop costs you a packing morning and an unpacking evening, and the map tempts people into five or six of them because everything looks close. Tbilisi to Ushguli is 250 miles (400 km) and it is a two-day journey.

Instead: four hotel changes in nine days, five in fourteen. How many days you need in Georgia sets out where each length gets you, and the best two-week route shows the shape we actually build.

What we would never skip

For balance, the things we put into almost every Georgia trip and would fight to keep:

• Mtskheta, Jvari and Svetitskhoveli, half a day, guided.
• A family marani in Kakheti, with lunch, where the wine was made in the room.
• A supra in a private house, arranged by our Tbilisi partner with a family they have known for years. This is the best evening most of our travellers have in Georgia.
• Three days in Tbilisi, by district.
• Two nights at Kazbegi, for the second chance at the weather.
• Gelati monastery, which has the finest medieval interior in the country.
• One long walking day in whichever mountain region you have chosen.

How we run Georgia

GO EAST staffs its own offices in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. Georgia is not one of them, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. 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. Our founder Doron Reichman has led trips in the Caucasus himself, which is where several of the judgements above come from.

Plan this trip

Tell us the Georgia route you have in your head and we will tell you honestly which parts of it we would change, and why, before you have spent anything. Free first outline, no obligation.

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Keep reading

• Georgia: the complete guide to planning your trip
• The best two-week route through Georgia
• Tbilisi in three days
• What to eat in Georgia, and how a supra works
• Classic Georgia in 9 days
• All our Georgia trips

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