GEORGIA ON MY MIND

THE PARK’S 83,000 HECTARES ARE CHARACTERISED BY VAST EMPTINESS

Last summer I received an unsolicited phone call: “Would you like to visit us in Georgia?” asked the voice down the line. “Sure, I’ve always wanted to visit the US”, I replied. After a long pause, the reply came, “er, the country in the Caucasus, not the US state”. It may not have been the first place that popped into my head, but the chance to ride on Russia’s southern border was an intriguing prospect, and one I didn’t want to let slip through my fingers.

With butterflies in my stomach and full of excited expectation, I flew to Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, population 1.2 million. Since the 1980s, before perestroika and glasnost’s sweeping reforms, Georgia had been claiming independence. Nowadays, only the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not under Georgian control, and a strong Russian military presence remains there as a consequence.

Those areas are still out of bounds for tourists. So our trip took us further east to the Tusheti National Park, on the border with the Russian regions of Dagestan and Chechnya. The national park’s 83,000 hectares