Svaneti Trip Part Two - Ushguli

Ushguli, a community of about 200 people, is claimed as the highest year-round human settlement in Europe, in the neighborhood of 2,200 meters. It stands 45 kilometers from Mestia on a winding dirt and gravel road cut by streams and rockslides and closed by snow six months of the year. We knew we wanted to visit while we were in Svaneti, but it proved trickier than expected. Gizo’s car, faithful as it had been on the miserable road up, just wouldn’t be a match for the Ushguli road, and private jeeps and marshutkas were asking prices that could have significantly impacted the U.S. debt ceiling.

So we went about it the old-fashioned way, lying in ambush for foreign-looking tourists and seeing if they would be willing to share a ride. We yelled at people on the street and bothered them at their hotel breakfasts, and, since the universe seems to like this sort of thing, it finally paid off. We met a group of Polish tourists going to Ushguli by minibus with a few extra seats and a guide willing to let us join in for a reasonable fee.

And we set off. Just outside of town we stopped at a mineral spring. The water here is carbonated and really high in iron – the local folks came with plastic bottles that looked like they’d been covered in rust. A few minutes later, we came to a beautiful view of double-peaked Mt. Ushba, one of the great mountaineering challenges of the Caucasus, and a ubiquitous symbol of Svaneti.


And then we settled in, enjoying some good conversation with our fellow travelers; the marshutka rolled over gravel and water, along cliff edges and through mud. The 45 kilometers took about 3 hours, including a brief stop at the “Lover’s Tower,” built, according to legend, for a Svan girl pining for her love who drowned in the river below.


Finally, in the early afternoon, we made it to Ushguli. It’s a kind of beauty that even pictures can’t do justice to, the blue sky and the hills greener than hills are in August, the towers rising under the white peak of Shkhara, Georgia’s highest mountain. Horses and cows on the hills looking healthier and happier than we’ve seen in a long time.



We were given a few hours to do what we would, so we struck off along the river in the direction of Shkhara. As we walked out onto the track, we could hear people singing in Svan over the next hill. We first went to a little church on the hill, then set off to follow the river for an hour or so, passing some tourists on foot, horseback, or jeep, but more often than not finding ourselves alone with the springs running down the hills, the cold river, and the sound of stones.


We came to a school-bus sized chunk of glacier abandoned by the summer retreat, and watched it slowly melting in the sun, before it was time to turn back.


I know we might well be singing a different tune under feet of snow in October and cut off from the rest of the world until May, but just then, we felt like we could have put down our bags and stayed there forever.