David Gareja and Dashbashi Canyon Tour from Tbilisi (3 Days)

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.

At Dashbashi the Tsalka plateau suddenly tears open into a green canyon, and a diamond-shaped glass bridge, with a cafe suspended at its very centre, spans the void 240 metres across. Below, waterfalls slide over mossy basalt into a turquoise river, reachable by walking trails. The engineering is startling; the landscape more so. It is Georgia's newest wonder and already one of its most visited.