Vashlovani National Park

Vashlovani shows you a Georgia that never appears on the postcards. South of Dedoplistskaro the ploughed fields thin out, the horizon flattens, and within twenty minutes you are in semi-desert: grey clay hills, salt-crusted gullies and scattered low trees that look more Anatolian than Caucasian.

The area has been protected since 1935 and became a national park in 2003. Its real value is a habitat that has almost vanished elsewhere in the South Caucasus — open arid woodland of wild pistachio and juniper, growing on slopes too dry for anything taller. The name comes from the wild apple trees that survive in the shaded gorges.

What you actually go to see:

• The Alesilebi badlands, where rain has carved the clay into fins, ridges and blunt teeth, and nothing grows at all

• Eagle Canyon, a rock gorge whose ledges hold nesting griffon and Egyptian vultures

• Pantishara, the main camp in a dry riverbed, with a ranger cabin, a well and enough shade to sit out midday

• Mijniskure, on the Alazani at the Azerbaijani border, where riverine tugai forest replaces the desert entirely

The wildlife list is unusual for Europe: striped hyena, wolf, lynx, wild boar, tortoises, Levantine vipers, and the largest concentration of vultures in Georgia. Goitered gazelle, extinct here for decades, has been reintroduced on the Eldari steppe and is occasionally seen.

Season dictates everything. April and May are green and full of flowers; July and August push past 40°C and bleach the whole landscape to bone; October is comfortable again and the light is long. After rain the clay tracks become genuinely impassable within an hour — this is not a caution added for form.