Hiking the Transcaucasian Trail from Armenia to Georgia: Lonely Planet

PanARMENIAN.Net - University of Bristol student Val Ismaili initially planned to spend his summer break hiking an established long-distance trail. Instead, he ended up becoming the first person to hike the Transcaucasian Trail across Armenia and Georgia — long before the route is even completed, Lonely Planet said in a story.

The 1500-kilometre, eight-week trek from Meghri, Armenia, to Batumi, Georgia, wasn’t easy.

“With something like the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States, you can plan in a really detailed way what you’ll be doing every few days, where you’ll take a rest, where you can resupply,” Ismaili told Lonely Planet News. “With something like this that no one had hiked yet, you never what is going to happen, where you will end up or how hard the terrain will be.”

Hiking in Armenia’s Syunik province, near the Iranian border, was “beautiful, one of my favourite parts of the whole trip, with birds and flowers and other plants I’d never seen before,” Ismaili said.

In Adjara, in south-western Georgia, he encountered traditional wooden homes where families live in cosy rooms above their livestock. He slept in an abandoned church in the middle of a forest, summited 3000-metre-high peaks, took in sweeping views from ridge tops and was welcomed into home after home.

“The hospitality was one of the most special parts. I’d heard about it, and there is a similar culture in Kosovo and Albania where my family is from, but I don’t think I fully understood the extent of it until I experienced it. There are not many shops along the TCT route but I didn’t go more than two days without being invited in by a shepherd. They would always offer me a meal, and then a bed, and then give me a care package of food to take along the next day. One family on a farm in the middle of nowhere went out as soon as I arrived to slaughter a goat for our dinner.”