Jvari Pass and the Friendship Monument

Seven kilometres above Gudauri the Military Highway reaches its top, and just below the summit stands the strangest structure on the road: a semicircular concrete terrace hanging over the edge of the Devil's Valley, its inner wall covered in a tiled mural.

The Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument was built in 1983 for the two-hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Georgievsk, the 1783 agreement that placed the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti under Russian protection. The mural, by a team of Tbilisi artists, runs the length of the curve in bright tile and shows scenes from the two countries' histories with quotations from Rustaveli and Pushkin. Politically the monument has aged badly and Georgians have complicated feelings about it; visually it works, because behind the parapet the ground falls several hundred metres straight into a green bowl of a valley.

Jvari Pass itself, 2,379 metres, is a few kilometres further north and far less dramatic: a broad saddle with a marker, the watershed between the Aragvi running south and the Tergi running north. Around it stand the things that make the pass function — concrete avalanche galleries from the Soviet period, snow poles, and on the descent towards Kobi the travertine terraces and mineral springs, where iron-rich water has stained whole slopes orange.

This is the section of the Military Highway that closes. Between November and April the road over the pass is shut without warning in heavy snow, sometimes for hours, sometimes for two or three days, and lorries queue at Gudauri and Kobi. It is also where the weather changes: sun in Tbilisi, rain at Pasanauri and a whiteout here. A tunnel scheme now under construction is intended to bypass this stretch.