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 revelation: glaciers, high passes, rivers without bridges, and the endless grammar of mountains.

The path wound through the Adishi Valley, the river a cold, fast-running ribbon of silver that eventually barred the way. The Enguri is no polite stream to be hopped across on stepping stones; it is a vast and merciless torrent fed by the glaciers above, deafening in its rush, implacable in its flow. There are no bridges here, only the resourcefulness of the locals, who lead their horses into the current and ferry trekkers across. For a handful of lari, you mount the animal’s back, clutching its mane as the water claws at your legs. It feels more like a rite of passage than a service.

Even so, not all can be managed from the saddle. On the shallower side, you dismount, strip off your boots, and wade through the icy water on foot. The shock of it is almost unbearable: liquid straight from the veins of a glacier, numbing your ankles and knees until you lose all sense of limb and balance. Sandals are not a luxury but a necessity here, a way to keep from slipping on stones slick with the river’s fury. Each step is both a risk and a triumph, the body jolted awake by the cold. On the far bank, breathless, you look back and realise that you have crossed not just a river but a threshold into something altogether more untamed.

From there, the trail turns upward, first a steady incline and then a punishing climb towards the Chkhunderi Pass at 2,655 metres. Under the noon sun, the heat is ferocious, sweat pouring from every pore, shirts clinging to skin. Then, as altitude rises, the world changes. The air grows thin, each breath like a negotiation. At three thousand metres the heat gives way to chill; the wind arrives sharp, metallic, slicing through fabric and bone. To be here is to feel every contradiction of the mountains—scorching and freezing, suffocating and liberating—within the span of an hour.

Lorena walked beside me, pale from the mild gastroenteritis that had tested her through the night. She never once suggested turning back. Her face was drawn but resolute, her steps careful but steady. Watching her climb, I felt a surge of admiration stronger than my own exhaustion. Shared hardship, I thought, can be its own form of love.

We were not alone on the trail. There was the Korean woman we had seen the day before, dressed head to toe in fabric, not a fraction of skin left exposed to the sun. She moved with quiet, measured determination, a silhouette of discipline against the alpine glare. Later, we encountered the Japanese traveller we had first met on a minibus between Zugdidi and Mestia. He was still in his sandals—thin straps, bare toes—and he had somehow covered nearly fifty kilometres of this brutal terrain in just two days. There was something almost absurd in his minimalism, and yet also profoundly heroic: proof that the mountains answer not to gear but to will.

At the summit, the Chkhunderi Pass opened like a revelation. Below us the valleys folded into one another in endless shades of green and grey. Before us, Mount Tetnuldi rose, immaculate and aloof, a pyramid of ice against an infinite sky. All the pain of ascent—the burning thighs, the cold wind, the thin air—melted away in that single, incandescent view.

The descent, of course, was no act of mercy. Steep, rocky, cruel on the knees, it dragged us down into the next valley where the river once again kept us company. By the time we reached Iprari the sun had long tilted westward. Our guesthouse, Elos, lay not in the village itself but three kilometres beyond, and our legs had already surrendered. Salvation came in the form of a rattling old car, whose driver ferried us the final stretch. Lorena collapsed into the seat with a smile that was half pain, half joy.

Elos Guesthouse welcomed us with a warmth as rich as its table. Dinner was a banquet: khachapuri oozing with molten cheese, stews fragrant and deep, bread warm from the oven, plates that seemed never to empty. Over food we spoke—haltingly, across the gulf of language—about what it means to be Svan. Our hosts told us of a culture older than the mountains themselves: a language distinct from Georgian, songs sung in polyphony like the voices of the peaks, the ancient craft of silver and gold, and the woollen felt hats that were more than clothing, but emblems of belonging.

Their religion, they explained, was not one thing but many, a braid of Orthodox Christianity and older beliefs: Zoroastrian fire, mountain spirits, the ancestral gods of snow and rock. Outside, the towers stood silent in the dusk, as they had for centuries—defensive, enduring, proud.

That night, as fatigue carried us into sleep, I felt not like a traveller who had passed through but like a witness, permitted for one fleeting day to glimpse a culture that persists—resilient, intricate, and fiercely alive—at the roof of the world.