Nine Towers and the Weather

• Mestia
• 09:15
• 15°C, overcast

The towers are the whole point and they take some getting used to. Four or five storeys of dry stone with no door at ground level, built so a family could go up a ladder and pull it in after them, and there are hundreds of them still standing in a place with about two thousand people. This one had a satellite dish bolted to the second floor.

eleventh century, roughly, and nobody in the village finds them interesting

• A basement off Seti Square, Mestia
• 20:50

Khinkali come by weight and by the dozen and you hold them by the twisted top, bite a hole, drink the broth first and then eat the rest. I got this wrong twice in public before someone at the next table demonstrated without saying anything. The knot at the top is not food. Everybody's plate has a pile of them.

• The track above Iprari
• 12:05
• 13°C, cloud on the tops

There is a jeep track and everyone takes it, and it costs about what a night in a guesthouse costs, and it takes two hours. Walking it takes four days through Zhabeshi and Adishi and a river crossing you do on horseback because the meltwater comes up past your knees by noon. I walked it. On the third afternoon it rained for five hours and I did not take the camera out once.

• Chazhashi, Ushguli
• 08:20
• 8°C, clear early, clouding by ten

Four hamlets at 2,100 metres, said to be the highest continuously inhabited village in Europe, and every second building is a tower. But you do not look at the towers for long, because the valley ends in the south wall of Shkhara, which is five thousand metres of ice sitting directly above the last house. Cows walk around in front of it entirely unbothered.