David Gareja and Kakheti Loop 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.

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.

Mtskheta is where Georgia became Christian in 337 AD, and it has never stopped being sacred. Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, burial place of kings, is said to hold the robe of Christ beneath its floor; on the cliff opposite, the 6th-century Jvari Monastery looks down on the meeting of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers, one of the country's defining views. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, twenty minutes from Tbilisi. No visit to Georgia is complete without them.