Tusheti

Over the past few years I’ve dragging my family around Easter Europe for our summer holidays to catch the last glimpses of traditional life held in aspic during the old communist rule.

Our quest was inspired by a trip to Hungary after the wall came down and many of the Soviet republics regained their independence while old Russia ground to an economic halt. We picked the thread up once again when our daughters, India and Iona were ready to leave the beach behind and embrace real adventures without a bucket and spade. 

First on the list was a trip to Romania riding in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania. We experienced an astonishing countryside and way of life not seen in the UK since before the First World War. This small but significant adventure whetted our appetite for more mountains and some serious riding. 

Next on the list was riding over the Balkans in Bulgaria. I had assumed such a trip would be relatively leisurely but it ended up as being more a test of stamina and determination, riding for up to eight hours a day with some of the longest rising trots one could expect to encounter.

With the Carpathians and Balkans under our belt and an ever increasing confidence in our ability, I managed to persuade my family into the idea of riding in the Caucuses in Georgia. On this occasion we knew what to expect and how to survive without the obligatory morning shower and general creature comforts associated with family holidays.

I knew Georgia was a fair distance from the UK and where I wanted us to travel was a place called Tusheti on the Dagestan and Chechen boarders. What I wasn’t ready for was the way of life we were going to experience as a family and how remote the region was in 2007. This travel account or Blog is an attempt to capture the magic we encountered during the summer of 2008 just weeks before Russia invaded Georgia.