Tusheti, Georgia: The Last Wild Place in Europe. By Benjamin Kemper
When fording a rushing
river in a 4x4, there are a few tricks to remember if you don’t want to die:
cross on the diagonal, never change gears in the water, and if you start
drifting downstream, throw open the doors - fast. “Water comes in, floating
stops, and the jeep can go out,” said Kartlos Chabashvili, my mountain guide. He was bracing me for
one of the most dangerous drives in
the world. The dirt track up and over the Greater Caucasus via the 9,300-foot
Abano Pass is plagued with avalanches, rock falls, and vodka-swilling mountain
men careening around switchbacks in Soviet trucks. But so be it—I was on my way
to Tusheti, a region in northeast Georgia whose
untamed alpine beauty, ancient stone towers, and elusive, mystical people were
by all accounts worth risking one’s life to visit.
I’d been visiting
Georgia twice a year since 2014, chasing down travel stories from
Tbilisi to the Black Sea coast, but Tusheti, which borders Chechnya and
Dagestan (both in the Russian Federation), had always been out of reach. The
region is so remote that the lone road in wasn’t finished until 1982; it’s
snowbound nine months of the year. Even at the height of summer, it takes six
hours of nauseous off-roading from the nearest town to reach the first
Tushetian hamlets, and once you’ve arrived, you can all but forget creature
comforts like cell service, internet, ATMs, and heat. But I was sold: The
promise of an off-the-grid adventure in one of the last truly wild corners of
Europe was too enticing to pass up.
That’s how I found
myself riding shotgun with Kartlos, a longtime friend and the founder of InterGeorgia Travel, lurching up hairpin
turns toward the Russian border as Lela Tataraidze’s “Ra
Lamazia Tusheti” (“How Beautiful Is Tusheti”) quavered over the stereo. Out
the window, the dusty farmscape of the Alazani Valley gave way to lush groves
of boxwood, birch, and pine. A sudden racket of unfamiliar bird calls in the
canopy reminded me I was in a protected national park. (Georgia may be smaller
than Ireland, but it boasts more endemic flora and fauna than any other
European country, barring Russia.) Here, in the 440-square-mile Tusheti
Protected Landscape, you might spy mountain goats, imperial eagles, brown
bears, and, if you’re lucky, rare indigenous species like the Caucasian black
grouse and East Caucasian tur, a goat-antelope with horns so enormous they look
like they belong on a triceratops. There are even occasional, if
uncorroborated, Persian leopard sightings... read more:
