Tracks to Trails Vlog
Track to Trail: A Rail and Hiking Journey from the Balkans to Georgia’s Caucasus. From the heart of the Balkans to the peaks of the Georgian Caucasus, this journey blends train travel and hiking to explore places where nature, culture, and slow travel meet. The vlog follows an off-the-beaten-path adventure, from green mountain villages [...]
Batumi to Dublin, via Istanbul
The last day always arrives like a thief — not with the clamour of a border crossing or the solemnity of a mountain pass, but with the quiet inevitability of an airport departure lounge. Batumi International Airport is a modest building of glass and faded ambitions, a liminal space where sea-salted dreams meet the fluorescent [...]
Batumi – Between Towers of Glass and Echoes of Empire
Batumi woke us not with the silence of the mountains, but with the restless murmur of a port city—ship horns in the distance, the clatter of early traffic, gulls hovering over the Black Sea. The air was thick, almost tropical, clinging to the skin like a second shirt. After the thin clarity of Mestia’s summits, this felt like [...]
Mestia to Batumi – From Towers to the Sea
In the high thin air of Mestia, the morning began with the feeling that we were standing at the edge of something old and unspeakably resilient. The mountains here still carry an aura of fortification: they do not just exist, they defend. Lorena and I took the ski lift, an improbable machine of cables and steel grafted onto this medieval [...]
Ushguli to Mestia – Stones, Ice and Shadows in Svaneti
The morning began in the rarefied air of Ushguli, a village that pretends to be timeless and almost succeeds. Horses whinnied in the distance, their breath clouding in the cold like restless spirits. Lorena and I rose early, stepping into a silence broken only by the faint trickle of the Enguri River, still swollen from the night’s [...]
Iprali to Ushguli – Between Glaciers and Ghosts of Villages
The last day of the trek has a deceptive gentleness to it. Twelve kilometres, a mere four hundred metres of ascent, five or six hours on the road. After the crucible of the Chkhunderi Pass and the delirium of rivers without bridges, it should have been easy. But endings have their own gravity, their own weight of expectation. From [...]
Adishi to Iprari – Of Horses, High Passes and Human Resilience
The third day of the trek—the day everyone warns you about—was always going to be both the most magnificent and the most merciless. From Adishi, the most picturesque of all the Svan villages, we set off under a pale morning sun, towers of stone and silence rising like ancestral markers behind us. Ahead lay twenty kilometres of trial and [...]
Lakhiri to Adeshi – The Heart of Svaneti
The second day of the trek was not simply a stage—it was an ordeal, and perhaps the most beautiful day of the entire journey. We left Lakhiri early, the village still wrapped in mist, and began the long ascent towards the ridges that guard the way to Adishi. The day of the trek unfolds as a journey deeper into the heart of Svaneti, where [...]
Mestia to Lakhiri – Into the High Caucasus
The morning in Mestia felt less like a beginning than a summons. The mountains loomed above the town in jagged silence, their peaks catching the first light like the edges of unsheathed swords. Beyond the valley, beyond the stone towers that have guarded Svaneti for centuries, the trail beckoned with the kind of inevitability that [...]
Tbilisi to Mestia – The Silkroad Express to Svaneti
The train left Tbilisi at 08:20 sharp, its whistle cutting through the already warming air. Georgian Railways, once a realm of Soviet rolling stock—those cavernous, rattling Russian carriages with bunks like iron coffins and curtains heavy with dust—has embraced a new era. The old night trains to Batumi, Yerevan, and even Zugdidi have [...]