5 Days – Eastern Georgia Deep Dive

David Gareja may be the strangest place in Georgia: a 6th-century monastery complex carved into a striped, sun-baked ridge where the steppe meets the semi-desert on the Azerbaijani border. Monks' cells, chapels and refectories honeycomb the rock, some still holding fragments of medieval fresco. Around you is a Martian landscape of coloured hills, gazelles and absolute silence. The journey itself, across empty rangeland, is half the adventure.

Sighnaghi sits on a hilltop ringed by a complete 18th-century wall: 23 towers and four kilometres of battlements you can actually walk. Below the pastel lanes and carved balconies, the Alazani Valley spreads out toward the snow wall of the Caucasus. The town's marriage house works around the clock, which is how Sighnaghi earned its nickname, the 'city of love'. Add nearby Bodbe Convent, resting place of St Nino, and you have Kakheti's most romantic stop.

Georgians have been making wine for at least 8,000 years, and in Kakheti the method has never changed: fermentation in qvevri, great clay vessels buried in the earth, now protected by UNESCO. Family cellars pour amber and ruby wines you will simply not taste anywhere else. Between tastings rise some of the country's greatest monuments: Alaverdi's soaring cathedral, fortified Gremi, hilltop Nekresi. Come hungry, because the Kakhetian table is Georgia's most generous.

Uplistsikhe was already ancient when Christianity arrived: a whole town of halls, sanctuaries, wine cellars and a theatre cut into a sandstone ridge above the Mtkvari, inhabited from the early first millennium BC. Caravans of the Silk Road watered here, and pagan priests read fortunes in its smoke-blackened chambers. You wander freely between the caves, climbing to a basilica that crowns the rock. Sunset turns the whole hillside honey-gold.