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 meltwater. Our destination: the ruins of Queen Tamar’s Summer Residence, the stone skeleton of a palace said to belong to the fabled monarch who ruled Georgia’s Golden Age with an iron will and an almost mythical charisma.

The trail wound past defensive towers, each one leaning slightly, like tired soldiers refusing to yield after centuries of storms. The ascent was deceptively gentle, the path tufted with wildflowers, but always the sense of Tamar’s gaze—a woman who reigned in the 12th century, commanding armies and poets alike. Standing among those broken walls, Lorena touched the moss-covered stones with a tenderness that startled me. “Imagine her here,” she whispered. “Waiting for news from battle, or perhaps watching the mountains turn purple at dusk.”

There is always something strangely intimate about ruins—they are less about what they once were and more about how much of ourselves we project into their absence. I thought of my own marriage, of journeys that carry us forward but also tether us to memory.

By early afternoon, we were back in Ushguli, sipping bitter coffee at Kafe Koshki before catching the shared minibus that would jolt us back to Mestia. The road, predictably, was chaos: hairpin turns clinging to cliffs, goats scattering in panic, drivers with the nerves of trapeze artists. When we finally descended into Mestia’s widening valley, the town felt almost cosmopolitan after the rough asceticism of Ushguli.

But there was little rest. By late afternoon, a local taxi whisked us up another valley, twenty euros buying us not only the ride but the patience of a driver who agreed to wait two hours while we wandered toward the Chalaadi Glacier. The journey was a theatre of thresholds. First a suspension bridge—the kind that makes you reconsider the sturdiness of rope and wood as metaphysical concepts. Lorena gripped the railing; I tried to look brave, though my stomach performed cartwheels. On the other side, the trail plunged into a dark pine forest where shafts of sunlight cut the silence like cathedral windows.

Then, the glacier itself—vast, hostile, shimmering like a broken mirror at the end of the valley. We approached carefully, scrambling over boulders slick with meltwater, hearing the occasional crack and groan as the ice shifted, alive in its own slow-breathing way. Standing there, so close to the frozen mouth of the Caucasus, I felt both exalted and diminished: a reminder that travel is not about conquering landscapes but about consenting to their scale.

We returned at dusk, our taxi waiting faithfully, Mestia already glowing with the soft orange of streetlamps. That evening, we sat in a quiet garden restaurant, the scent of grilled meat curling upwards into the cooling night. Platters of barbecue arrived—pork, chicken, and vegetables charred just enough to catch the smoke. Around us, other travellers murmured in half a dozen languages, a chorus of exhaustion and delight. Lorena and I ate slowly, our legs aching but our minds restless, as though each bite was another way of absorbing the day’s excess of history, danger, and beauty.

Travel is sometimes a litany of discomforts—bad roads, cold water, power cuts. But on nights like this, under the Svaneti stars, those discomforts dissolve into a kind of gratitude: for the ruins of a queen, for the improbable crossing of a bridge, for ice that still breathes, and for the presence of the person who chose to walk beside me through it all.