Bikepacking in Georgia - 2018

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Tanglefist
Posts: 152
Joined: Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:54 pm

Bikepacking in Georgia - 2018

Post by Tanglefist »

Not sure why I didn't post this at the time.

Myself and two friends, Robin and Elliot, rode from Kutaisi to the Borjomi National park. We fought headwinds along dusty back roads. We pushed up a big-ass mountain, had our primary route cut off by snow, rode down another way and then rode back to Kutaisi.

We should've gone later so we didn't get cut off by snow, and the route we pushed up the mountain was arduous but Georgia is a bikepacking or touring gem of a country. I don't understand why more Brits aren't heading that way.

Georgia is rad and Georgians are the best. We'd tour dirt roads through beautiful villages, laden with vineyards, get invited into family homes from impromptu drinking sessions, with almost zero shared language, just a lot of nodding, gesticulation. At the end of our first day cycling, we were invited into a family home for the tail-end of a already lengthy party. Food was stacked high in front of us, followed by rounds of enthusiastic toasting with Georgian wine.


My buddy's video (5 mins, better.);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fk-VQwrBtE

My video (2 mins, worse):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAXTeL78Bhc

We booked the trip with marginal planning, and quickly realised many of the routes would be cut off by snow. We crossed out fingers and attempted to get to a ridge that should have taken us from the north side of the Borjomi-Kharagauli national park to the south.

Snow blocked the way, so we dropped down into the heart of the park. Robin crashed, breaking the primary phone we were using for navigation. We had a back-up phone and managed to crash about 3 seconds away from a hikers hut we could stay in.

Escaping the park from the valley we ended up descending into involved river crossings. Many river crossings, which were ass deep and balls cold from the spring snow-melt. The bridges were pretty treacherous as well.

Then we rode back to Kutaisi through the villages and vinyards.


Gear


Standard bikepacking kit mostly, I used a homemade bar harness and frame bag with an Ortlieb saddle-bag in 'fuggin massive' because I'm paranoid about going lightweight. Robin used a homebrew framebag and alpkit everything else, Elliot was fully Alpkit.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the Ortlieb framebag, I barely noticed during a long and rapid descent. You've got to pack it tight to stop to flopping over - it's on the big side.

Me and Elliot shared an Alpkit 3-man Ordos. Slightly tricky set-up but no real issues. You've got to set up the inner first, which is a drawback.

We used a MSR petrol stove due to wide availability of fuel. For water we had both a filter and McNett's aqua venture drops.

Navigation


We used 2 offline maps programs - Offline Maps and all-in-one offline maps (made by Psyberia). You can preload a basic road map onto Offline maps, and get an opencyclingmaps with contours and paths on the all-in-one map app. You can select the area and detail for the all-in-one map app, which is handy since it saves data. The paths are pretty good, but the route we pushed up with marked as a dirt road, which is really wasn't. that's on me for not taking them with a larger dollop of salt.

Aerial photography is pretty poor show for Georgia- too much of the imagery is snowy, heavily forested or really blurry. Bing maps and google both had big blind spots. The best aerial stuff I found with on the Brouter website, which uses some 'ESRI' imagery. Seemed to be fairly complete and decent resolution, although this will presumably change.
Rasta
Posts: 398
Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2018 9:33 am
Location: Sussex & France.

Re: Bikepacking in Georgia - 2018

Post by Rasta »

:-bd

But I'm not going unless you post some pics :smile:
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Bearbonesnorm
Posts: 23904
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:53 pm
Location: my own little world

Re: Bikepacking in Georgia - 2018

Post by Bearbonesnorm »

So many great places to ride apart from the obvious :-bd
May the bridges you burn light your way
Teaman
Posts: 136
Joined: Sat Nov 28, 2020 10:10 am

Re: Bikepacking in Georgia - 2018

Post by Teaman »

Thanks for posting. I had also heard that the folk are super friendly 😁.
Also heard that it's a good place for a first time trip as what it's nice and rural, it's not hard to find accommodation or a shower if you need it.
shutupthepunx
Posts: 152
Joined: Thu Oct 10, 2019 6:01 pm

Re: Bikepacking in Georgia - 2018

Post by shutupthepunx »

hiked in borjomi NP 3 years ago. really beautiful! got return flights london to kutaisi for £80. also visted mestia/svaneti then and want to go back to cycle something similar to the route there on bikepacking.com
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