9-Day Georgia Cultural Tour with Kakheti Wine and Svaneti

Arrive in Tbilisi, transfer to a hotel in or just above the old town, and take the afternoon at your own pace. The old city is small enough to walk off the jet lag in, with the crooked balconies of Betlemi, the cable car up to Narikala Fortress and Kartlis Deda above it, and the brick domes of the Abanotubani sulphur baths in the gorge below, where a private room and an hour of scalding water is the traditional cure for having just arrived. Dinner and a first amber wine.

Spend a full day in a capital that has been burned down and rebuilt more times than anywhere has a right to be. Visit the Sioni and Anchiskhati churches, the Museum of Georgia and its extraordinary pre-Christian goldwork, Rustaveli Avenue and its Soviet-era grandeur, the Dry Bridge flea market where the twentieth century is laid out on blankets, and the Chronicle of Georgia on its hill above the reservoir, sixteen black pillars of carved history that almost no visitor gets to. Evening free.

Head north out of the city to Mtskheta, Georgia's spiritual capital, for the sixth-century Jvari Monastery above the meeting of two rivers and Svetitskhoveli Cathedral below it. Then continue east into Kakheti, the wine province: the walled hill town of Sighnaghi looking out over the Alazani Valley to the Caucasus, the convent at Bodbe where St Nino is buried, and an afternoon in a family cellar among the buried qvevri.

Travel west and then north onto the Georgian Military Highway, the road the Russians cut through the Caucasus in the nineteenth century and the only one that crosses this range. It climbs past the Ananuri fortress on its reservoir, over the Jvari Pass at 2,379 metres, and down into the Terek Valley at Stepantsminda. Weather permitting, Kazbek is out when you arrive, and the church is a white speck on the ridge above the village.

Go up to Gergeti Trinity in the morning, on foot for those who want the three-hour climb through the birch woods, or by 4WD for those who would rather save their legs. The church is fourteenth-century, tiny, still in use, and the mountain behind it is 5,054 metres of ice. In the afternoon, walk into the Truso Valley, where mineral springs stain the ground orange, abandoned Ossetian hamlets sit among travertine terraces, and, on most days, there is nobody else at all.

Cross back over the pass and continue west along the Mtkvari. At Uplistsikhe, climb into a town cut out of the rock, with a columned hall, wine cellars, and a tunnel down to the river, that was already old when the Romans arrived. Gori below it is Stalin's birthplace, and its museum is a strange and instructive experience whatever you think of the man. Continue west to Kutaisi, capital of the old kingdom of Colchis, where Jason came looking for the fleece.

The morning is devoted to Gelati Monastery, founded in 1106 by David the Builder and one of the great medieval Georgian ensembles, with its mosaics and frescoes intact and UNESCO-listed. Then head north-west and up: the road runs beside the Enguri reservoir's improbable turquoise, climbs through gorges for four hours, and delivers you to Mestia at 1,500 metres, surrounded by stone towers and by mountains that have not let this valley be conquered.

Take a 4WD east up the Enguri to Ushguli, a community of four hamlets at 2,100 metres that claims to be the highest continuously inhabited place in Europe, and looks it: dozens of medieval towers, stone roofs, cattle in the lanes, and the vast white wall of Shkhara, 5,193 metres, closing the head of the valley. There is time to walk towards the glacier, see the twelfth-century Lamaria church on its knoll, and eat kubdari in a family kitchen before the drive back to Mestia.

Take the short mountain flight from Mestia's tiny airstrip back to Tbilisi, twenty-odd minutes over the whole Caucasus range in a light aircraft, for the best possible last look at where you have just been. If weather closes the strip, you will drive instead, which is long but well broken. Onward international flights leave Tbilisi through the day and overnight; Armenia or Azerbaijan can be added to either end.