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 vanished, replaced by gleaming Chinese models that arrive faster but with less romance. You gain punctuality, yes, and seats that recline at a mathematically engineered angle, but you lose the poetry of clattering into a station at dawn, groggy, wrapped in the half-dream of travel. Efficiency has its price, and sometimes that price is memory.

Still, the Tbilisi–Zugdidi train, dubbed by some the “Silk Road Express,” is comfortable enough to silence nostalgia for a few hours. We had booked two first-class seats, with air conditioning that felt less like a luxury and more like a necessity. The train snakes westwards, following the ancient arteries that once carried caravans instead of commuters, silk instead of smartphones. Villages flicker past, their balconies sagging under laundry, their courtyards shaded by walnut trees. At each stop, women appear on the platform selling sunflower seeds, pastries, plastic bottles of homemade kvas. The rhythm is slow, deliberate: Georgia at train speed.

By 15:08, Zugdidi. The station is functional, a little weary, like a place that knows it is only a threshold. Outside, the scramble begins: shared minibuses (marshrutkas) lined up, their drivers smoking, shouting, negotiating. There is no timetable, only the unwritten law of departure: when the seats are full, the engine growls, and you go.

The ride to Mestia is seven hours of serpentine ascent. Roads coil through the Caucasus like cables, every turn revealing another vertiginous drop, another scattering of stone houses, another roadside shack offering khachapuri or skewers of mtsvadi. The marshrutka lurches, brakes, accelerates—an automotive dance choreographed by potholes and cliffs. Somewhere along the way, the lowlands give way to the high, and the world narrows into valleys.

At last, Mestia. Capital of the Svaneti region, a place that feels more like a myth than a municipality. Here, the towers rise—medieval stone sentinels built by families not for vanity but survival. Invasions, blood feuds, avalanches: all answered by the architecture of defence. Each tower a story, each wall a reminder that remoteness was once both curse and protection. The Svan people, with their language distinct from Georgian, have carried their traditions like torches through centuries of isolation.

To arrive in Mestia at night is to step into a half-lit stage set: towers looming against the mountain dusk, roofs glinting with the last light, the air sharp and thin. The journey is over, but it feels more like a prologue. Tomorrow the trek begins, but tonight Mestia simply exists—fortified, stoic, improbable.