Two countries, one mountain range, eleven days

Arrive Tbilisi

Met at the airport and driven in, about twenty-five minutes. Most flights from Europe land at an unsociable hour, so nothing is scheduled for this day and the room is held from the night before wherever the rate allows it.

If you arrive in daylight, the walk to take is Rustaveli Avenue to Freedom Square and down into Sololaki, which is where the balconied houses are and where a fair number of them are being held up by scaffolding.

Tbilisi on foot

The old town in the morning: the Metekhi church on its rock above the Kura, the brick domes of the sulphur baths at Abanotubani, the mosque and the synagogue within a few minutes of each other, and the fortress on the ridge, reached by a cable car or by a steep twenty minutes.

The afternoon is the argument the city is having with itself. Nineteenth-century Tiflis, Soviet concrete and a good deal of new glass sit on the same streets, and not everyone here is pleased about the third of those. It ends at the Dry Bridge market, where Soviet medals, cameras and cutlery are sold by people who owned them.

Tbilisi into Kakheti

East across the Gombori range into the Alazani valley, with the Caucasus wall standing along the far side of it. Sighnaghi first, a walled hill town that was comprehensively restored in the 2000s and is either charming or overdone depending on the hour you arrive; go before the Tbilisi day trips and it is the former. Bodbe monastery is fifteen minutes below it.

On to Telavi and the valley floor for two nights. Allow about three hours of driving across the day, all of it on decent road.

The cellars, and how the wine is actually made

Two cellars, not five. The first is a family marani where the qvevri are buried to the neck in the floor and the wine ferments on skins and stalks through the winter, which is why Georgian white comes out amber and tastes like nothing in the French canon. The second is a modern estate working in steel and oak, because the interesting thing about Georgian wine right now is that both are being made a mile apart by people who argue about it.

Between them, Alaverdi cathedral on the plain and lunch at a table that will be too large. Supra rules apply: there is a toastmaster, the toasts have an order, and the correct response to a full glass is not to empty it every time.

Kakheti to Kazbegi on the Military Highway

The long drive of the journey and the best one. West out of the valley, then north on the road the Russians cut through the mountains in the nineteenth century: the fortress and churches at Ananuri above the Zhinvali reservoir, the ski town at Gudauri, and the Soviet friendship monument on its terrace above the valley, which is a mosaic drum on the edge of a very long drop.

Over the Jvari Pass and down to Stepantsminda, where the road continues to the Russian frontier and, for our purposes, ends. Allow five and a half hours with the stops. Lorries queue on the last stretch and there is no way round them.

Gergeti, and a valley

The Trinity church above Stepantsminda is the image every Georgian tourist board uses and it earns it. The track up is rutted and we take a local 4WD to the top and walk down, which is the right way round: an hour and a half of climbing in thin air before breakfast is a poor use of a mountain morning. Kazbek itself is behind the church and shows itself perhaps one morning in three, which is worth knowing before you build a photograph around it.

The afternoon takes one of two valleys. The Truso runs west past mineral springs, travertine terraces and abandoned towers, and is a flat walk in and back. Juta is higher, steeper and more of a mountain day. Your guide decides on the morning's weather rather than the day before.

Back down the highway, by way of Mtskheta

South again, and the same road looks different in the other direction. Mtskheta was the capital before Tbilisi was and is still the seat of the Georgian church: the Jvari monastery stands on a bare hill above the meeting of two rivers, and Svetitskhoveli cathedral sits in the town below it, inside its own wall.

Into Tbilisi in the late afternoon. This is a spare evening in a full itinerary and we leave it spare on purpose.

Into Armenia and the Debed gorge

An hour south to the border, the crossing on foot, and then the road turns up the Debed gorge. Sanahin and Haghpat stand a few kilometres apart on opposite sides of it, built when this was the northern edge of the Armenian kingdom, and they are the first thing that tells you the two countries are not continuous: dark stone, low doors, khachkars cut like lace and set into the walls, and almost nobody there.

The road climbs on to Dilijan, in the one properly forested corner of a country that is otherwise bare rock, and the night is spent there or on the shore of Lake Sevan a short drive further.

Lake Sevan, Garni and Geghard, then Yerevan

Sevanavank sits on what was an island until the lake was drained for irrigation and became a peninsula, and the steps up to it are the only exercise of the morning. The water is a colour that changes hour by hour and the lake is high enough that the wind off it is cold even in August.

South to Garni, a colonnaded temple on a spur above the Azat gorge and the only building of its kind left in the region, then up the valley to Geghard, where the inner chambers are not built at all but cut into the cliff. Someone will usually be singing in the deepest one, and the room does the rest. Into Yerevan for the last two nights.

Yerevan, and the plain below Ararat

The morning is Tsitsernakaberd, the genocide memorial on the hill above the city, and its museum. It is not a comfortable two hours and it is not optional in any honest reading of this country; nothing else in Yerevan makes sense without it. Afterwards, deliberately, the Matenadaran, which holds the manuscripts that survived, and lunch somewhere unhurried.

The afternoon goes to Khor Virap on the plain, a monastery on a low hill with Ararat filling the sky behind it, on the other side of a border that has been shut for decades. It is the single most Armenian view in Armenia and the reason is not architectural. Back for a last evening on the Cascade steps.

Depart Yerevan

Breakfast, then twenty minutes to Zvartnots. Most departures for Europe leave in the very early morning, so in practice this is a night flight out of day ten and we hold the room until you go.