Georgia Is an Adventure Paradise Where Hiking Meets Khachapuri
Where are the Caucasian snowcocks? For two hours, we’d been hunched over our telescopes, teeth chattering like jackhammers on the snowy slopes of the Greater Caucasus as we waited for the elusive gray gamebird to make an appearance. Awake since 4 a.m., our patience was wearing thin. “Chacha break!” shouted our guide, Dachi Shoshitashvili, whipping out an old water bottle filled with 140-proof Georgian moonshine.
Gut-warming shots before sunrise, an entire mountain to yourself, a bird guide who knows the Caucasus wilderness like his backyard (yet isn’t the least bit pedantic about it)—these are a few of the many perks of adventure travel in Georgia, which encompasses skiing, canyoning, parasailing, fly-fishing, RVing in refurbished Soviet vans, and much, much more… And we haven’t even talked about the prices yet.
For nearly a decade I’ve been visiting Georgia to report on everything from ancient winemaking traditions to blood-curdling ghost towns to the last truly wild place in Europe. But nothing prepared me for what I found when I started researching Georgian adventure travel: Here was a place where you could be jet-skiing in the Black Sea one day and heli-skiing down glaciated peaks the next—all in a country roughly the size of South Carolina. Georgia is one of Europe’s most intriguing outdoor destinations, and nobody seems to be talking about it.