The Mestia to Ushguli trek

What the trek actually is

Mestia to Ushguli is the walk most people mean when they say they are going trekking in Georgia. Four days, roughly fifty-eight kilometres, four villages with beds in them — Zhabeshi, Adishi, Iprali, Ushguli — and a hot dinner at the end of each of them. You carry a day pack rather than a tent. That combination is why it is the most-walked route in the Caucasus.

It is not, though, an easy walk. The days are honest six to eight hour days with seven to nine hundred metres of climbing in each, and the profile is a saw-tooth rather than a ramp: every pass is paid back with a full descent to the next valley floor. By the third afternoon most people's knees have formed an opinion.

The line runs east along the southern flank of the Greater Caucasus, in and out of side valleys, with the wall appearing and vanishing as you turn each spur — Ushba behind you, Tetnuldi alongside, Shkhara ahead. The villages keep their defensive towers, and Ushguli at the end keeps the largest cluster of them.

There is one genuine obstacle and it comes on the morning of the third day: the Adishi river, glacier-fed, unbridged, and cold enough to hurt. Everything else here is walking.

The route, village by village

The trek starts from the square in Mestia and ends in the lower part of Ushguli. Distances below are cumulative from the first, and the altitudes are the round numbers rather than the survey ones.

Waymarking is reasonable — red-and-white flashes, the occasional post — but it thins in cloud and on the open pass, so carry the track on a phone as well as in your head.

The four days

The stages are set by where the beds are, not by the terrain, and the villages sit roughly seventeen kilometres apart. Two days are long, one is moderate, one is short, and shuffling that order is not really possible.

Times assume a day pack, photograph stops and lunch on a rock. Add an hour if you are carrying everything you own.

The Adishi river, and the horses

On the morning of the third day you walk forty minutes up from Adishi to the glacier snout, and there the trail crosses the river. There is no bridge, there has never been a reliable one, and every summer somebody proposes building it.

So there are two ways over: your own legs before the sun gets to the ice, or a horse and its owner, who will be waiting on the near bank from about eight. Neither is shameful and most people take the horse.

When to walk it

July to September is the season and there is not much argument about it. The passes hold snow into June, the guesthouses shut in October, and the river behaves badly at both ends of the year.

Within the day, walk in the morning. Cloud builds on the ridges from about one and August afternoons produce real thunderstorms, which on Chkhutnieri means open grass and nowhere to go.

Guesthouses, and how to book them

Every night of this trek is spent in somebody's house. Dinner is served at a long table, breakfast is bread and cheese and eggs, and the arrangement has been the same for twenty years.

Adishi is the constraint. It is a village of four families with a handful of rooms, it cannot expand, and in August it is full. Book that one first and build the other three around it.

Arriving in Ushguli

Ushguli is four small hamlets at the head of the Enguri valley, inhabited through the winter, which is the fact everybody repeats. What you actually notice first is the towers — several dozen of them, standing in clusters above the roofs, with Shkhara, the highest mountain in Georgia, shutting the valley behind.

Time your arrival if you can. Day-trip jeeps come up from Mestia and unload between about eleven and three, and inside that window the lower village is a car park with a monastery attached and a good deal of theatre. Walkers who come in during the late afternoon get the place back, and the light is better then anyway.

Give it a night rather than an hour. There is the Lamaria church on the rise above the houses, and the walk up the valley toward the Shkhara glacier — around five hours return on a nearly flat track, an easy fifth day for legs that have earned one.

What the four days cost

This is a cheap trek by mountain standards, mostly because you are paying households rather than a company. Everything below is per person, in cash, and rounded generously.

Getting in, and getting out

Svaneti has one road, from Zugdidi up the Enguri, and everything — marshrutkas, jeeps, supplies — comes along it. Getting out of Ushguli is the part people forget to plan, because there is no bus and the jeeps go when they are full.

Weather, dogs and the rest of it

Nothing on this trek is technical, and almost everything that goes wrong is weather or timing. Cloud builds on the passes from early afternoon and August thunderstorms arrive quickly. Chkhutnieri is open grass with nowhere to shelter, so plan to be over it by two rather than sitting on it at four.

Shepherd dogs are the thing nobody warns you about. Large livestock guardians work the summer pastures on days two and three, and they are doing a job rather than being hostile. Walk wide around the flock, do not run, and a raised trekking pole usually ends the discussion.

Signal is patchy — usable in the villages, gone on the passes — so download the track and tell your host where you are heading. The emergency number is 112 where there is coverage. The altitude is modest by Caucasus standards, but four consecutive days of eight hundred metres will find anybody who has not walked since last summer.

The five mistakes

Four of the five we have made ourselves, and the first one gets you wet to the waist.

The questions that always come

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