Reserve a guided nine night trip to Tusheti, Georgia

Reserve a guided nine night trip to Tusheti and what you are holding is a chain of people rather than a set of tickets. A driver meets you in Tbilisi. A night in Kakheti puts you at the foot of the climb. A second driver, who runs the pass road for a living through the season, takes you over it. A guide stays with the party for eight of the nine days. Nothing in the middle is left for you to solve on the ground. You carry a bag and turn up.

Tusheti is a system of four valleys on the north side of the main Caucasus ridge, and it has one road. That road leaves the asphalt near Pshaveli, climbs about 6,700 feet in twenty five miles of gravel and broken rock, crosses Abano at 9,350 feet and drops to Omalo on the other side. Forty five miles, five to six hours. It is graded open somewhere in the first ten days of June and it shuts with the first heavy fall, usually in the first half of October, which leaves the district with no wheeled route for about eight months of the year.

That one fact sets everything else in the trip. The villages you sleep in are stone with slate roofs because slate is what the hillside gives. Supper is at half past seven because the house cooks once. The lights go down when the turbine in the stream is asked to do more than it can. Nine nights is what it takes to cross the pass twice and still have six clear days on the far side of it.

The track over Abano and the four months it is open

The vehicle is a high clearance four wheel drive with a driver, and it is held for your party for the whole nine days rather than shared with anyone else. The surface is gravel over rock, one vehicle wide along long stretches with cut passing places, and it works upward in a set of switchbacks above the Stori gorge. Two streams run across the road below the pass and both rise through the afternoon when the day has been warm, so the crossing is set for the morning in both directions.

In June you drive between cut snow walls at the top of it. By the third week of August the last of that is gone from the road itself and sits only on north facing ground above 8,500 feet. Traffic is livestock as often as vehicles: between the middle of September and the first week of October the flocks come down this way, one or two thousand head at a time with four or five herders and their dogs, walking about a hundred miles to the Shiraki plains. A vehicle stops and waits for that. Twenty minutes is normal.

Omalo, Keselo and the ground above the confluence

Three of your nights are in Omalo, which is really two villages. The lower one sits at 6,230 feet where the district administration is, and the upper one is two hundred feet above it on a shoulder of open ground. Above upper Omalo stand the towers of Keselo on a rock spur, five of them, four rebuilt from collapse in the early 2000s by a project that carried every slate up by horse. One tower has a single room fitted out as a museum: querns, a wooden plow, felt cloaks, a lock cut whole from a block of wood. It opens in the afternoon and the woman with the key lives four doors down the lane.

Days here are walking days with the guide, three to six miles, with the climb loaded into the first hour. One of them goes east to Shenako and Diklo along the Gometsari side, where the church at Shenako stands on its own above the roofs and the ruined fort at Diklo looks over the last of the inhabited ground. Another follows the ridge north of upper Omalo for the view down both valleys at once. The horses, if you want them, come from a house in the lower village and go out for half a day.

Dartlo, Kvavlo and the road that ends at Girevi

Three more nights are up the Pirikiti valley at Dartlo, fifteen miles from Omalo and an hour and a half in the vehicle because the track crosses the river four times and none of the four is bridged. Dartlo is a shelf at 6,560 feet with a run of towers and stone houses along it, the walls laid dry in flat slabs with no mortar showing. On the slope above the houses is a ring of flat stone seats where the community court used to sit, and the seats are still there and still countable.

From the footbridge below the village the path to the tower at Kvavlo climbs 720 feet in a little under a mile. Forty minutes up, twenty five down, and from the top you look straight down onto Dartlo's roofs and across at the wall of the ridge. Beyond Dartlo the road carries on to Chesho and Parsma and stops at Girevi, where the upper valley becomes a controlled border zone. Your names go to the border police through the operating company ten days ahead, together with the park registration, and neither of those is paperwork you file yourself. Past Girevi there is no road of any kind, only the walking route over Atsunta at 11,250 feet into Khevsureti, which is a different trip and is not this one.

How the nine nights are held and who sends the bill

The Pine Gazette takes the request and places it. The office is at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in New Orleans, LA 70001, Pine Gazette Bookings LLC is the company on the paperwork, and it is registered in Metairie, Louisiana. It owns no vehicles, no beds and no horses anywhere in the world, in Tusheti least of all. Its work is to set your dates before the company that actually runs this valley, hold the rooms and the driver against those exact dates, and get the whole arrangement onto one sheet before you commit to anything. That company writes the contract and sends the bill to you directly under it. No money passes through this office in any form, at any point.

Costing a specific set of days takes two to four working days. The vehicle and the guide are quoted against your exact dates rather than off a rate sheet, and the two houses in Dartlo confirm by telephone, which happens when somebody walks up to the ridge where there is signal. Call +1 (504) 832-6194 or write to bookings@thepinegazette.com with a month and the number of people and we will come back with the figure and a plain list of what sits inside it. If a name is spelled wrong or a date needs moving after you have the paper, corrections@thepinegazette.com reaches the same people.

We sell no airfare of any kind, so getting yourself to Georgia is yours to arrange. What we will do is tell you the day you need to be on the ground in Tbilisi and the earliest day you can leave, so that neither end of the trip is spent driving in the dark. Requests come in through the form below and are answered within one working day.