Eganistan

I’ve been travelling on my own for a little over three weeks now and the main factor determining my travel choices has been rain. I’d originally planned to head up to Kazbegi, due north of Tbilisi and near the border with Russia, for some mountain hiking in early July. But the weather forecast portended steady rain so I went south to Armenia for a week. On my return. Kazbegi was still looking rainy, while the Svaneti region in northwest Georgia looked a little less so. So I headed up to Svaneti for four days of hiking from the 13 th to the 16 th and then dashed over to Kazbegi in a single long day to catch the one rain-free day on the forecast on the 18 th . Looking at an old map in a museum in Yerevan, I was puzzled to see parts of the Caucasus region marked as “Albania” and “Iberia.” Apparently the ancients weren’t especially original in coming up with place names. The Greeks and Romans named an ancient kingdom focused in present-day Georgia the “Kingdom of Iberia” (maybe worth n...