The signboards were in Cyrillic but plastered with standard scenic photographs. Burly-looking men stood on the streets of Georgia selling tours, and the Russian buses were much cheaper than the English-speaking alternatives. So I bought a seat, opened Google Translate, and went sightseeing in a language I don’t speak.
Now here I was, heading towards Gergeti in the far north of the country, near the Russian border, surrounded by Russian tourists, and with a tour guide who spoke only limited English. I had plenty of time to think.
This wasn’t new. Over the previous months in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan, I had kept finding the same thing: the easiest and cheapest way to see a place was often to join the tour built for Russian speakers and translate my way through it. Although the Soviet Union was long gone, Russian remained a language of the tourist trade in these countries on Russia’s southern border. So much so that you would usually be greeted in a taxi with the Russian “privet”.
I was taking advantage of that tourism quirk myself. It’s hard to complain about a market while you’re enjoying its discount.
Georgia made the arrangement feel different. In Tbilisi, the main street was lined with fancy shops. The city felt cosmopolitan and completely normal, in the best possible sense: somewhere you could have a lovely time in the depths of a chic natural wine bar without spending a second thinking about geopolitics. Georgia seemed like a country moving forward.
But the road north, into the great Caucasus mountains, has a way of bringing the subject back.
South Ossetia lies just west of the route through Gudauri towards Gergeti. We weren’t going there, but the territory at the centre of the 2008 war sat just over the mountain, close enough to make this an interesting journey.
The 2008 South Ossetia war is complicated. After years of escalating tension, Georgia’s assault on Tskhinvali catalysed full-scale fighting with the northern bear. Russia sent in its army; tanks rolled over the border, and its troops pushed far beyond South Ossetia into the rest of Georgia. Russian forces remain in South Ossetia and Abkhazia today, occupying parts of Georgia.
As we head towards the Russian border, climbing into dark rain clouds, we arrive at a massive stone semicircle - the Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument. There is a bleak little joke in arriving there on a bus full of Russian visitors in a country that was previously at war and still remains partially occupied.
In retrospect, that war looks like a warning of what was to come in Ukraine. It was an early demonstration of how little protection a small country’s borders offer when a much larger neighbour decides its interests matter more.
And still, here was my bus. Russian tourists could buy a seat to the mountains and Georgia recorded nearly 1.6 million visitor trips from Russia in 2025. The scale is there. A Russian holidaymaker is not the Russian government. A shop taking their money is not voting for Moscow. People can resent the power to the north and still need to deal with the people coming from it.
At Gergeti, the church sits above Stepantsminda with Mkinvartsveri, Mount Kazbegi, rising behind it. This is the photograph I came north for. The mountain’s northern slope is in Russia.
The border is here; let’s hope it remains so.
