A Trek of Smiles

We had our first contact with the Georgians at the Vienna Airport and later in a bank in Kutaisi, to where we flew. The Georgians first appeared to be complicators, but then, later in the mountains, showed their other side. Kutaisi is Georgia’s third largest city, but our wish was to head to the mountains of the Greater Caucasus. A trip to Mestia, the capital of Upper Svaneti, takes five hours. There are minibuses called marshrutkas going there, but they’re suitable only for those with a strong stomach as they’re very fast and drive through many bends.

Mestia is the capital of Upper Svaneti and is packed full of sights. It has a little less than 2000 inhabitants. There’s a glass-wall police station in the centre that is supposed to represent a country without corruption. Mestia has an interesting ethnographic museum where you can discover a few of the secrets of the region where religion is still strongly intertwined with pagan traditions. You can go on a day trip from the city to explore the Koruldi lakes where the locals wash their horses.

The trek goes from Mestia to Ushguli, towns separated by 57 kilometres of travelling through passes and valleys. As you walk, you’re accompanied by tranquillity, flowering meadows brimming with life, and the view of the Greater Caucasus. You can see all the famous mountains in the region, from the beautiful Ushba with its twin peaks to Shkhara, the highest peak with its monstrous glacier. The trek also goes through a skiing area underneath the edges of the mighty Tetnuldi, offering a unique skiing experience throughout the whole winter and far from the masses. Rivers that run deep in the valley are wild and full of mud and other materials from the mountains, especially in June when snow starts to melt. There aren’t many bridges and you need to be careful when crossing the existing ones, so you don’t get carried away by the currents. We crossed the Adishi River on horseback. We came across various animals, such as piglets, grazing freely, and cows, the queens of the roads. But there’s no need to fear running out of water as there are plenty of clean mineral water springs along the way that you can fill your bottle with.

We slept in guesthouses in Zhabeshi, Adishi and Ipari. The villages are interesting and there are many abandoned houses, but families have been coming back in the last years precisely due to hiking tourism. The hike ends each day between 2 and 4 p.m., which means there’s plenty of time to explore the villages and their surroundings. You can watch the locals doing farm chores or head to the towers and small churches that are especially beautiful near Adishi. Within them are icons and swearing an oath on them is sacred. Breaking it means danger threatening you and your family. Almost every house has its own defence tower and, together with the preserved and remote Medieval villages, they put the Upper Svaneti region on UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage Site list. The towers at the end of our trip in Ushguli are a special sight and all 200 of them are specially protected. They served as dwellings for the families and protected them from enemies, more often from internal rather than external ones, as blood feuds were quite common in the area. Cemeteries are also one of the sights as every family often has its own, with large paintings or tombstones, frequently littered with a bottle of wine or some other drink. That’s also where celebrations take place, especially during Easter, but tourists aren’t exactly welcome at these cemeteries.

In guesthouses, you really feel like a guest. There are often just a few rooms available, so it’s important to book in advance in towns, such as Adishi. Food prepared by the family that runs the guesthouse is simply amazing. They use a special kind of salt mixed with various spices as it’s supposed to last longer that way. And don’t worry, guesthouses have Wi-Fi, though the bandwidth has more of a Svanetian pace. You often eat in the family dining room, walk in the courtyard and even raise a glass with the family with chacha, a homemade spirit. The Georgians like to toast, and the toast is carried out by the toastmaster known as tamada. They are revered by society and their toasts are like songs. A glass is raised five times and it’s imperative to toast God, the ancestors, and the homeland. A glass of strong chacha containing 80 per cent alcohol is always finished. Dinner with great food and toasting is called supra. The Georgians like their extended family, so they’re also more than happy to take you to guesthouses and restaurants of their relatives.

We kept running into the same fellow hikers during our trek. Every now and then we would exchange a word or two and learn a bit about their life story. In between, we also met many Svanetian guides who are eager to teach you unknown Georgian words, from madlaba, which means ‘thank you’, to nela, which means ‘slowly’. We had two guides: A Slovenian woman, Ana, who has been living with her Svanetian husband and our second guide, Mateo, for almost a year. Since they know a lot, are very kind and adjust their hiking pace to match the pace of the rest of the hikers, I recommend them. The only important thing is to bring Ana a book and some coffee. Of course, you can hike on your own, without a guide, but in order to do that you need to know Russian because English won’t do you much good in villages. And it’s not always clear which path you should take. A guide gives you a lot of information that you couldn’t have acquire otherwise as there aren’t any information signs like those in Europe that we’re so accustomed to. In addition, a guide will walk with you through the whole trek as if they were going out for a Sunday walk.

You can prepare for Svaneti by watching the film Dede by director Mariam Khatchvani that received numerous awards and is based on true stories. It’s about the life and traditions in Ushguli, which is gaining sort of a celebrity status among the villages. Almost all actors are locals. But don’t worry if you don’t manage to find the time to watch the film as it is on at the director’s sister’s cinema in Mestia every day.

Upper Svaneti is a rugged land where even the Georgians once didn’t dare to venture. It was a land ruled by the mafia and tourists were frequently robbed. Today, everything has calmed down, though tourism hasn’t fully developed yet. The fact that there’s no breakfast before 8 o’clock only testifies to this. But there’s the ancient landscape, dotted with small villages, that people have shaped ion the remote world in the mountains and between the rushing rivers. It was precisely this remoteness that contributed to the preservation of the Svanetian culture and the late discovery of the Svani people, which means tere’s a lot of unspoilt nature. The Svani greet every traveller with a smile and good food. But it’s also important that everyone who travels there, does their best to keep the place a paradise for travellers, that is unpolluted and peaceful.