6 Days – Grand Tour of Georgia

Tbilisi layers 1,500 years of history into one walkable riverside city: Persian-style bath domes, carved wooden balconies, a Soviet avenue and a glass bridge, all beneath the Narikala fortress. Sulphur springs gave the city its name and still steam in the Abanotubani district. The cable car, the flea market, the courtyard cafes and the natural-wine bars each tell a different era. Few capitals reward simple wandering so richly.

Few images say 'Georgia' like Gergeti Trinity Church standing alone at 2170 m against the glaciers of Mount Kazbek. The drive itself, along the Georgian Military Highway, is one of the world's great mountain roads, past fortresses, gorges and the high Gudauri bowl. In Stepantsminda the air is thin and the light changes by the minute, so every visit produces a different photograph. Whether you come for a day or stay the night, this is the Caucasus at its most iconic, and it never disappoints.

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.

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.

In the 12th century Queen Tamar's builders carved an entire city into a cliff above the Mtkvari: thirteen floors of dwellings, chapels, refectories and wine cellars, home to thousands of monks. An earthquake later sliced the mountain open, exposing the honeycomb you climb through today. Frescoes from Georgia's golden age still glow in the rock-cut Church of the Dormition. Walking its tunnels and stairways, with swallows wheeling over the valley below, feels like entering a legend that happens to be real.