The green is the gardens: the Shekvetili dendrological park, with hundreds of century-old trees brought from all over the country, and the Batumi botanical garden if there is time. The fortresses come first: the trip drops from Tbilisi, seen on foot on the second day, to Gori and the cave town of Uplistsikhe, sleeps in Akhaltsikhe under Rabati castle and gives the fourth day to Vardzia, Queen Tamar's carved city, and Khertvisi fortress, with a night in Kutaisi.
The fifth is the park and the coast, and the sixth, all of Batumi: the Roman fortress of Gonio, the Borjgalo museum and the boulevard. Transfer to the airport on the last day. No high mountains and no Kakheti, with two days of over five hours in the car. Hotels in Tbilisi, Akhaltsikhe, Kutaisi and Batumi.
Itinerary
Day 1 - Transfer from Tbilisi airport to the capital
Total road of the day - 18KM 0 Hours and 25 Minutes We pick you up at the airport whenever your flight lands and go to the hotel. No more programme today. Road 18KM 0 Hours and 25 MinutesDay 2 - Tbilisi - Guided tour in Spanish
No driving Today: Rustaveli Avenue, Metekhi Square, Narikala Fortress, Abanotubani and Anchiskhati.Rustaveli Avenue
A kilometre and a half of plane trees between Freedom Square and Rustaveli Square. This is the street where Tbilisi shows off: the Parliament, the Moorish-looking Opera House of 1896, the Rustaveli Theatre, the Kashueti church, the National Museum and the grand hotels of the early 20th century. It is named after Shota Rustaveli, the 12th-century poet who wrote "The Knight in the Panther's Skin", the book every Georgian can quote.
It takes a good half hour on foot, or two metro stops if the heat is on. In front of the Parliament there is a plaque worth stopping for: on 9 April 1989 the Soviet army broke up a demonstration here and twenty-one people died, almost all of them women. That day still weighs on the politics of the country.
Metekhi Square
The king on horseback looking over the city from the cliff is Vakhtang Gorgasali, the founder of Tbilisi according to tradition; the statue dates from 1967. Next to him, the church of Metekhi, from the late 13th century, built by Demetre II on top of another from the 5th. The royal palace stood here for centuries, and in the 19th century and Soviet times the building was a prison: Gorky did time in it. Then it was a theatre, and in 1988 it became a church again.
We come here for the view, the best of the lower town: the sulphur baths right below, Narikala opposite and the river running between the two. It is a fifteen-minute stop that almost always runs longer because of the photos.
Narikala Fortress
We take the cable car that leaves from Rike Park and crosses the river in two minutes; it costs the same as a metro ticket and is paid with the same card. At the top is Narikala, or what is left of it: the Persians founded it in the 4th century, the Arabs enlarged it in the 8th and the Georgians in the 12th, and in 1827 an explosion of the gunpowder store took out a good part of the walls. The church of St Nicholas inside dates from 1997, on medieval foundations.
The reason to come up is not the stones but the view: the whole old town, the domes of the baths, the river and Metekhi opposite. Careful, the walls have no railings and the rock is polished by so many feet. From here we walk down through the Betlemi quarter to the baths, passing the Mother of Georgia on the way, the aluminium statue of 1958 that watches over the city with a cup in one hand and a sword in the other.
Abanotubani
Tbilisi means "warm place", and the warmth comes from here. Abanotubani is the sulphur bath district, on the right bank of the Mtkvari just below Narikala: brick domes at ground level with the baths underneath, and water that comes up on its own at 37 to 40 degrees and smells of eggs. Legend has it that King Vakhtang Gorgasali founded the city in the 5th century after seeing a wounded pheasant healed in these waters. Pushkin bathed here in 1829 and wrote that he had never seen anything like it.
You can stroll and look, but what is worth it is going in: a private room with a hot-water pool and, if you like, a scrub with a coarse mitt that leaves you like new. Booking is needed in high season, and you bring swimwear and a towel or rent them. The blue-tiled façade belongs to the Orbeliani bath; the others are plainer outside.
Anchiskhati
It is the oldest church still standing in Tbilisi, and it does not look it: a small three-nave basilica of plain stone, tucked into a street of the old town. King Dachi, son of Vakhtang Gorgasali, built it around the year 530. The name comes from the Christ icon of Ancha, which arrived here in 1664 from an area that is now Turkey and is now kept in the Art Museum. The brick bell tower of 1675 is what you see from the street.
If it falls on a Sunday morning, we go in during the liturgy: the Anchiskhati choir sings Georgian polyphony the way it was sung centuries ago, and it is one of the things people remember most from the trip. On other days it is almost empty and takes ten minutes. There are headscarves at the door for women.
Day 3 - Tbilisi - Gori - Uplistsikhe - Akhaltsikhe
Total road of the day - 248KM 4 Hours and 12 Minutes First Stalin Museum, then Uplistsikhe. 248 km, 4 hours 12 minutes; lunch on the way. Road 89KM 1 Hours and 22 MinutesStalin Museum
Gori is the town where Iosif Dzhugashvili was born in 1878, and the museum dedicated to him in 1957 is still open much as it was then. It is three things: the little wooden house where he was born, protected under a pavilion of columns; the main building, a Soviet-style palace with his personal belongings, photographs, gifts from heads of state and one of the bronze copies of his death mask; and the armoured railway carriage in which he travelled to Yalta and Potsdam, because he did not like flying.
Let us be plain: the museum tells the kind version. There is a small room on the repression, added late, and little else. We tell the rest on the road, and the one-hour visit usually ends in a long conversation in the car.
Uplistsikhe
A whole town cut into the rock, 10 km from Gori above the Mtkvari river. People lived at Uplistsikhe from the first millennium BC until the Middle Ages: first a pagan centre, then a Christian one, and always a stop for the caravans. What remains are carved streets, a hall with a ceiling imitating wooden beams (they call it "Queen Tamar's hall"), wine presses, a tunnel down to the river and a 10th-century brick church planted on top of it all. The Mongols emptied it in the 13th century and it never recovered.
One piece of advice: in summer there is no shade and the rock burns, so go early or late in the day, and wear shoes with grip, because the polished stone is slippery. An hour is enough to climb up to the church and look down at the river.
Day 4 - Akhaltsikhe - Vardzia - Khertvisi - Rabati - Kutaisi
Total road of the day - 299KM 5 Hours and 45 Minutes We leave after breakfast. On the programme, Vardzia, Khertvisi Fortress and Rabati Fortress; 299 km in short stretches. Road 60KM 1 Hours and 20 MinutesVardzia
A rock face 500 metres long riddled with 19 storeys of openings: that is Vardzia, the cave monastery Queen Tamar finished around 1185 in the Mtkvari valley, 60 km from Akhaltsikhe. It once had thousands of rooms; the earthquake of 1283 took the whole front off and exposed what you see today, some 600 rooms including cells, wine cellars, refectories, a pharmacy and irrigation channels cut into the stone. In the Church of the Dormition are the 12th-century frescoes, with one of the few portraits of Tamar made in her lifetime.
It is still a monastery, with a few monks, so some areas are closed. The visit takes an hour and a half, almost all of it on stairs and through narrow tunnels: not for bad knees or claustrophobia, although there are routes that avoid the passages. In summer the sun hits the wall from mid-morning; we go as early as we can.
Road 16KM 0 Hours and 20 Minutes
Khertvisi Fortress
Where the Paravani river meets the Mtkvari, on the way to Vardzia, a castle perches on a crag that has been there in one form or another since the 2nd century BC; legend says Alexander the Great destroyed it, though he never came this way. The walls and towers you see date from the 10th to the 14th century, with a church of 985 inside. Khertvisi watched the road between Georgia and the Ottoman Empire, and changed hands as often as the region did.
A 20-minute stop, with a short, steep climb to the towers for anyone who wants the view of the valley. There is a secret tunnel that went down to the river, closed today.
Road 47KM 0 Hours and 50 Minutes
Rabati Fortress, Akhaltsikhe
A 9th-century fortress that was Ottoman for 250 years, with its mosque of 1578, its madrasa and its baths, and which the government rebuilt entirely in a single year in 2012: new stone, gardens, fountains, a hotel inside and even a swimming pool. The result is debated. To us Rabati is a good place to understand Samtskhe-Javakheti, the region where Georgians, Armenians, Turks and Jews have lived side by side, and the museum in the citadel tells that story well. Ten minutes on foot is the Akhaltsikhe synagogue of 1863, still open.
An hour and a quarter. If you like real ruins, you will not find them here; if you like climbing towers and looking at the valley, you will. It is the logical stop before Vardzia, 60 km away.
Road 176KM 3 Hours and 15 Minutes
Day 5 - Kutaisi - Dendrological Park - Batumi - Kutaisi
Total road of the day - 325KM 5 Hours and 32 Minutes Shekvetili Dendrological Park and Batumi. It is 325 km; we leave early so as not to rush. Road 115KM 2 Hours and 0 MinutesShekvetili Dendrological Park
The trees in this park arrived by sea. They are specimens one and two hundred years old, tulip trees, magnolias, eucalyptus, that Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in Georgia, bought all over the country and shipped by barge to the coast of Guria; there is a documentary, "Taming the Garden", that tells the story and does not flatter the owner. Shekvetili park opened in 2020: 60 hectares by the beach, more than 200 species, lakes, a bamboo grove and, in the middle, the biggest tree, visible from the road.
It is free, immaculate, and in summer there are queues at weekends. A good hour's walk; nearby are the magnetic black-sand beaches of Ureki, which local people use as a spa.
Batumi
Batumi is another Georgia: subtropical, humid, with palm trees, casinos and glass towers next to late 19th-century houses, 20 km from Turkey. It is the capital of Adjara and the country's port since always. What you do here is walk: the boulevard along the sea, laid out in 1881 and now 7 km long, the Piazza in the old town with its Italian-looking terraces, and, at the end of the promenade, Ali and Nino, the two eight-metre steel figures that move and pass through each other every ten minutes, by Tamara Kvesitadze. Two things the brochures leave out: it rains a lot, even in summer, and in July and August the city is packed. In return, you eat well: Adjarian khachapuri, the bread boat with cheese, butter and a raw egg on top, was born here and is made better here than anywhere.Day 6 - Batumi and surroundings
Total road of the day - 27KM 0 Hours and 50 Minutes 27 km and 50 minutes in the car in all. Today's stops: Borjgalo Ethnographic Museum and Gonio Fortress. Road 6KM 0 Hours and 15 MinutesBorjgalo Ethnographic Museum
It is not a museum in the usual sense. Borjgalo was made by hand by Kemal Turmanidze, a sculptor from the area, and opened in 2016 on the outskirts of Batumi, near the airport: models and near life-size wooden figures showing how people lived in the villages of Adjara a hundred years ago, the house, the mill, the forge, the wedding, the beekeeper. Many pieces move or make sounds, and Kemal himself or his family are usually around.
It works very well with children and with anyone who is tired of churches by now. An hour. It sits on a residential street with nothing around it, so do not expect a café.
Gonio Fortress
Fifteen kilometres south of Batumi, almost on the Turkish border, the Romans built the camp of Apsaros in the 1st century to watch the coast, and the walls are still standing: a rectangle with a perimeter of almost 900 metres and 18 of its original 22 towers. Later the Byzantines and the Ottomans used it, and the Ottomans called it Gonio. Inside there is a small museum with the finds from the digs, the remains of Roman baths and a grave that tradition attributes to the apostle Matthias, the one who replaced Judas. No proof, but people come to pray.
It is a 45-minute stop, flat and without shade; in summer bring a cap. If there is time, Gonio beach is next door and is one of the quietest in the area.
