Khvamli Massif

Khvamli is recognisable from a great distance: a flat massif that looks cut off with a knife, its southern side falling in a wall some three hundred metres high. This is Cretaceous limestone, straddling the boundary of Tsageri and Tskaltubo municipalities, and it reaches 2,001 metres. Its profile is visible across the whole of lower Lechkhumi and out over the Imereti plain.

The form itself is worth understanding: Khvamli is a double cuesta — the limestone beds dip gently from one side and break off in a wall on the other, which is exactly what gives the massif its sliced silhouette. It also acts as a watershed between two valleys. In summer there are temporary shepherds' camps on the plateau, and they keep water in cisterns or carry it up, for precisely the reason you will need to carry your own.

Khvamli sits deep in the Georgian imagination. A 14th-century chronicle describes the royal treasury hidden here and names some of it — a famous chain of diamonds, a jewel cut in the shape of an anvil, a great pearl. A second tradition puts Amirani on this mountain, the Georgian counterpart of Prometheus, chained and tormented by a raven; Jules Verne borrowed the association for a novel. A third explains the Verdzistava spring, which stops and starts, by an immortal dragon living in the caves.

The caves are real enough. The most important of them, Tekenteri, lies at about 1,400 metres, and the way in is through the hollow trunk of a large beech tree. Sinkholes pit the plateau everywhere, and the system has never been fully surveyed.

The climb is easier than the mountain's face suggests. An asphalt road from Okureshi takes a car to almost 1,700 metres; from there it is two kilometres on foot and roughly 500 metres of ascent. The top is a near-level plateau, cropped short by sheep. On a clear day the Racha range and the Greater Caucasus stand to the east, and the Kolkheti lowland spreads out to the south.