Tusheti, open ten weeks a year

What Tusheti is, and what it is not

Tusheti is the far north-eastern corner of Georgia: a high plateau of slate-roofed villages and stone towers lying behind the main chain of the Greater Caucasus, on the far side of the watershed from Kakheti, which administers it. The inhabited villages sit roughly between 1,800 and 2,200 metres, strung along two river gorges, and every one of them is reached by the same single road over the Abano pass at 2,850 metres.

What Tusheti is not is a drive, a day trip, or a place where plans can be improvised. There is no fuel station in the region, no bank, and no reliable cash machine; phone coverage exists in patches and disappears between villages. The road is unpaved for its entire length, closes with the first serious snow, and is cleared again only in early summer. For roughly nine months of the year the villages are reachable on foot, on horseback, or by helicopter.

What it is, in exchange, is the least modernised inhabited landscape in the country. The towers of Keselo stand on the shoulder above Omalo; Dartlo is a terrace of slate houses under a ridge that looks unchanged in photographs a century old; sheep tracks are worn a metre into the turf by flocks that still walk down to the Kakhetian lowlands each autumn. Barley beer is brewed for the summer festivals, and shrine sites keep customs that predate the churches beside them.

It invites comparison with Svaneti, and the comparison is useful mainly as a warning. Svaneti has asphalt, hotels, cafés and a ski lift. Tusheti has a gravel pass, family guesthouses with a dozen beds, and a protected-area status since 2003 that has largely kept it that way. People who want the Caucasus with a functioning safety net should go to Mestia. People who want the other thing should come here, with days to spare.

The Abano pass, and the road that gets you there

The road begins on the Kakhetian side, above the village of Pshaveli near Akhmeta, and climbs about seventy kilometres of gravel to Omalo. It crosses the Abano pass at roughly 2,850 metres, which makes it the highest drivable pass in Georgia, and it does so on a single-lane shelf cut into the mountainside with long unfenced drops, blind corners and river crossings that change from week to week. Reckon on four to six hours in one direction, longer if a lorry or a flock is coming the other way.

It is genuinely a serious road rather than a scenic one, and it should be treated as 4x4-with-local-driver territory. Rental agreements for ordinary cars usually exclude it outright, and the drivers who work it daily read the surface, the weather and the oncoming traffic in a way nobody managing it for the first time can. Hiring a seat in a local jeep costs a fraction of what a recovery would, and it removes the only genuinely dangerous decision of the trip.

The season is short and not negotiable. The pass is normally cleared and open from late June or early July until the middle of September, sometimes into early October in a dry year; outside that window it is shut. Even inside the season a day of heavy rain or an early snowfall can close it for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and when that happens nobody comes out. This is the single reason we say, in every paragraph we can, that Tusheti must never be booked against a flight the next day.

Getting there: the jeep logistics

Everything hinges on one transfer, and it is worth arranging before you leave Tbilisi rather than at the roadside in Pshaveli.

The usual pattern is marshrutka or taxi from Tbilisi to Telavi or Akhmeta, then a pre-booked 4x4 over the pass. Guesthouses in Omalo and Dartlo almost always arrange the jeep for you, and that is the simplest route: one message, one driver, both directions.

The villages and the towers

Tusheti is not one place but four dozen settlements in two gorges, most of them half-empty or entirely so. These are the ones with beds, tracks between them and something worth the walk.

Distances look small on a map and are not: everything is measured in hours of gravel or footpath, and the reward is that you can cross most of inhabited Tusheti on foot in a few days.

The walking, from an afternoon to five days

Tusheti is walking country before it is anything else, and the good news is that the network of shepherd paths between villages does most of the work for you. From Omalo you can spend an afternoon climbing to Keselo, a full day walking the gorge down to Dartlo and back by the high route, and a second day going on to Kvavlo and Chesho. None of it needs technical skill; all of it needs decent boots, water and an early start, because afternoon thunderstorms are routine in July and August.

The classic is the multi-day crossing from Omalo up the Pirikita valley through Dartlo, Parsma and Girevi to the Atsunta pass, and over into Khevsureti and Shatili. It is four to five days of remote, unserviced walking above 3,000 metres at the pass, with river crossings, no shops and no reliable phone signal. Most people who do it well go with a guide and a pack horse arranged in Omalo or Girevi, and check the pass conditions before committing, since snow lingers into July.

For everything shorter, register your plans with your guesthouse and with the protected-areas ranger office in Omalo before you set off. Rangers keep an eye on conditions, know which bridges have gone in the spring, and can tell you what the shepherds have seen. Sheepdogs guarding flocks are the other thing worth respecting: give the flock a wide berth, walk calmly, and do not try to pass through the middle of it.

Guesthouse life, which is the whole hospitality industry here

There are no hotels in Tusheti. Accommodation means a family house with a handful of rooms, half-board, and whoever else is at the table that night — which is much of the reason to come.

Eating in a place with almost no restaurants

Food in Tusheti is what the guesthouse cooks, and it is sheep, dairy and barley country rather than the vegetable-and-wine cooking of Kakheti below. Dinner is generous and arrives all at once.

When to come, honestly

Tusheti has the shortest season of any destination in Georgia, and no amount of planning extends it. The road over the Abano pass is normally open from around early July to the middle of September, and outside that window the villages are effectively closed to visitors.

Inside the season, late July and August are the busiest and the warmest, with the summer festivals and most guesthouses running; early September is our preference, with clearer air, empty paths and the flocks starting to move down. Late June and early October are lotteries — sometimes glorious, sometimes a closed pass and a wasted week.

Weather at 2,000 metres does what it likes. Expect warm days and cold nights, afternoon storms in high summer, and the possibility of a snow shower in September. A closed pass is not an emergency here, it is a normal part of the year, which is why the honest advice is to build a spare day into the plan and treat any extra night as part of the trip rather than a disaster.

The practical things nobody tells you in advance

Almost every problem visitors have in Tusheti comes from assuming the infrastructure of the rest of Georgia carries over the pass. It does not.

The five mistakes

Four of the five we have made ourselves, and the first one has ruined more trips here than the road ever has.

The questions that always come

These are the six that reach us every summer, and none of them needs a long answer.