Takhti-Tepha Mud Volcanoes

Takhti-Tepha means "flat hill" in Turkic, and the name is exact: a dry, cracked clay table in the southern part of Vashlovani where there is nothing but horizon and sun. Scattered across it are a few dozen small cones, the mud volcanoes.

They have nothing to do with real volcanoes. Gas trapped in the sediments below works its way upward, dragging water and clay with it, and what reaches the surface is a cold grey paste at roughly air temperature. Most cones are only a metre or two high; some are dry and set hard, while others burp slowly, raising a dome of mud that swells and splits. The sound is very quiet — you generally see a bubble before you hear it.

Bubbles come at intervals of a few seconds to a minute, so the sensible thing is to sit down and wait rather than walk from cone to cone. Water in some craters is saline and dries to a white crust around the rim; occasionally there is a thin oily film, which is unsurprising since the region sits at the edge of the Gare Kakheti oil field.

The setting matters as much as the craters. This is completely treeless country, pale brown and grey, with views running tens of kilometres to the mountains inside Azerbaijan and no building in sight. In April short grass greens the plateau and tulips flower in the hollows; by July everything is a single dusty tone and the heat is hard work.

Keep expectations proportionate: the crater field is about the size of a football pitch. What makes it worth the drive is that nothing else quite like it is reachable in Georgia, and that the silence out here is total.