The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The towers and the glory of Georgia
place in Georgian consciousness – for the rugged beauty of its landscape and the indomitable spirit of its people, untamed and unconquered through many centuries of Georgia’s domination by every regional power (Persians, Turks, Mongols, Russians). Tucked away amid the nation’s highest mountains, the Svan are a race apart, speaking their own language, with their own traditions, admired, feared…and mocked. “We call them woodenheads,” says the
Georgian sitting next to me on the plane from the UK
– a flight from Luton to
Kutaisi ( just four hours’ drive from Svaneti) that is opening up the region to
British visitors. “You can’t explain anything to them.” They seem, though, to be pretty switched on and flexible at dealing with the current rapid rise in tourism. Guesthouses are breeding like proverbial rabbits as the surfaced road creeps deeper and deeper into the mountains.
We have wound our way up from Kutaisi through thick green forest (Georgia is 70 per cent tree-covered), past dead-eyed Soviet-era factories and cows chewing the cud in the middle of the road, stopping first in Becho. There are few towers in this little village, where purple orchids dot the fields and typically round-faced, fair-skinned Svan sit impassive on doorsteps surveying the new arrivals. But other traditions hold strong. We pass a Svan man encouraging a creamy-white ox to pull a solid wooden sled (homemade sleds are still a part of daily life, even when the winter snows recede).
We watch one being loaded with logs as we set off on our first mountain walk, past water bubbling and foaming through resinous conifers and wild hazel beneath the sharp twin peaks of Mount Ushba (the other side of which lies Russia). Ducking beneath the trees where the river has washed away the track, we reach almost to the waterfall that is our target before we are blocked by a too-steep snowfield. We are a little early in the year, our preview trip a crucial three weeks ahead of the first departure of the new Svaneti walking tour by British operator Explore.
At Jena’s Guesthouse – with a new wing just opened – the table is laden, essential to Georgian hospitality. We munch khachapuri (delicious cheesey breads) and kubdari (a meaty equivalent typical of Svaneti), and sip tanniny home-made qvevri, a clay-aged amber wine, as Jena tells us she could now fill her guesthouse twice over. She isn’t worried by the sudden influx; most visitors here are walkers and “only good people come to the mountains,” she says. Certainly this is not stag-do central, with the nearest “shop” a few shelves in a local family’s front room and grunting sows and curious piglets ranging free along the single street.
Back on the “main” road, we reflect that it is only a couple of decades since banditry was rife in Svaneti. After the fall of the USSR, the region fell back on old ways, attacking and robbing the unwary. The koshi towers were not only protection from outsiders, but from each other. The Svan were long famous for bloody inter-family vendettas lasting generations. Still known for toughness and strength – they contribute more than their share of Georgia’s top wrestlers and boxers – communal violence is thankfully a thing of the past.
Beyond Mestia, the lush green valley turns steadily to rock and the road gets rougher until we are jiggling along a narrow shelf hewn from the side of a deep ravine. The Enguri river, once at our side, now bounds along some 130ft below. The road gets narrower still and our progress slows to a crawl before a shiny new road sign hoves joltingly into view. The first in hours, it reads: “Speed limit: 30km/hr”. We laugh. Immediately there is another sign: “warning: zigzag road”. And another: “road