Georgia Holidays and Escorted Tours
Georgia sits on the southern flank of the Caucasus, a country roughly the size of Ireland with its own alphabet, its own church architecture and a claim to eight thousand years of winemaking that archaeology largely supports. Tbilisi's old town still smells faintly of sulphur from the bathhouses. Two hours north, the road climbs to around 2,400 metres at the Jvari Pass.
Airedale travels there by air from the UK and by coach once you land, basing the tour in Tbilisi and in the mountains at Gudauri, with an English-speaking guide throughout. It suits people who want the history, the churches and the wine explained properly rather than skimmed.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Georgia Tours
Total travel time is usually most of a day. There is no reliable year-round direct service from the UK to Tbilisi, so the tour's flights normally involve one change in Europe or Istanbul, with around six hours in the air in total plus the connection. Georgia is four hours ahead of the UK. Many flights into Tbilisi land late at night or very early. Ask us which airline and routing applies to the departure you are considering.
It is a moderate tour rather than a strenuous one, but Georgia is a hilly country and several sites are on foot. Tbilisi's old town has cobbles and slopes, Uplistsikhe involves uneven rock-cut steps, and the approach to Gergeti Trinity Church is a steep track usually tackled in small vehicles. Gudauri sits at roughly 2,200 metres, high enough that some people notice it mildly. If you have any concerns about mobility or stamina, ask us before booking.
British passport holders have been able to enter Georgia visa-free for extended stays for some years, but entry rules are the government's to change and yours to check. Look at the Foreign Office country pages for Georgia before you travel; they also cover the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which this itinerary does not go near. The currency is the Georgian lari, cards are widely accepted in Tbilisi and cash is handy in the villages.
Not all of them. The eight-day tour includes seven breakfasts, two lunches and one evening meal, so most evenings in Tbilisi are your own. That is deliberate: the city has a good range of places to eat within walking distance of the centre, and your guide can point you towards them. Georgian cooking is bread, walnuts, herbs, cheese and grilled meat rather than heat and spice. Tell us about any dietary requirements and we will pass them on.
Tbilisi, Mtskheta and the Older Capitals
Tbilisi was founded in the fifth century when King Vakhtang Gorgasali, so the story goes, found hot springs where the city now stands. The name comes from the Georgian for warm. It is a walkable old town of brick bathhouse domes, carved wooden balconies and the Narikala fortress on the ridge above, with a funicular and a good deal of Art Nouveau if you look up.
Mtskheta, half an hour away, was the capital before it. Georgia adopted Christianity in the 330s, among the earliest countries to do so, and Svetitskhoveli Cathedral and the sixth-century Jvari Monastery above the meeting of the Aragvi and the Mtkvari are both UNESCO listed.
Older still is Uplistsikhe, a town cut into a sandstone ridge west of Gori, in use from the first millennium BC. Pagan rock-cut halls sit below a small brick basilica, and the whole site was a stop on the caravan routes.
Georgian Wine and the Qvevri Tradition
Georgians ferment wine in qvevri, egg-shaped clay vessels buried to the neck in the earth, and have done so for millennia. The method was added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2013. Several hundred indigenous grape varieties survive here, most of them grown nowhere else: dark, tannic Saperavi for reds, Rkatsiteli and Mtsvane for the amber wines made with long skin contact.
Kakheti, in the east, is the heart of it. The tour includes tastings at Chateau Mukhrani, a princely estate replanted and restored in recent decades, and at Tsinandali, where the nineteenth-century poet Alexander Chavchavadze built one of the first European-style wineries in the Caucasus and kept a famously good cellar.
Wine here belongs to the table. A supra, the Georgian feast, runs on toasts led by a tamada, and dishes arrive all at once rather than in courses.
The Georgian Military Road to Gudauri
The road north from Tbilisi towards the Russian border follows a route used for centuries and rebuilt by Russian engineers in the early nineteenth century. Pushkin and Lermontov both travelled it and wrote about it. It is still the only paved crossing of the Greater Caucasus in this part of the range.
Ananuri, on the shore of the Zhinvali reservoir, breaks the climb: a seventeenth-century fortress belonging to the dukes of Aragvi, with two churches inside the walls and carved stonework on the east facade. Beyond it the road switchbacks up to Gudauri, a ski village at around 2,200 metres where the tour spends two nights.
Further on lies Stepantsminda and the view most people come for. Gergeti Trinity Church, fourteenth century, stands alone on a spur at about 2,170 metres, with the glaciers of Mount Kazbek behind it.
