Svaneti, Georgia: watchtower villages and a marshrutka with opinions

Western Georgia. The country. Not the state. I say this every time because the first question is always the state.

Svaneti is a region in the Caucasus that has been continuously inhabited for about four thousand years and has approximately zero cooking classes available for booking online. The main town is Mestia. You get there on a marshrutka from Zugdidi — 25 lari, four hours, a road that climbs through river gorges and seems to make active decisions about your comfort. The driver will not slow down. This is correct. The villages have medieval defensive towers, between eighty and a hundred and fifty of them still standing, built by families who needed somewhere to go when neighbors arrived with swords. They are not a backdrop. They are the whole point of the region existing.

Honest drawbacks: the guesthouses are basic. The WiFi is decorative. Hot water is a negotiation. In shoulder season the main street has more livestock than tourists, and one of the restaurants only serves what the family cooked that day, which means some nights you eat khinkali and some nights you eat whatever they felt like making. The altitude is real. The cell signal disappears for stretches that will feel long if you need them to feel short.

Which is exactly the point.