We turned up at the airport for the flight (an 18 seater) to be told the weather at Mestia was too bad for the flight to go ahead. Oddly only 8 people turned up for the flight which made us wonder if the flight was really cancelled because it was uneconomical to fly less than half full.
This caused a minor drama as we had all of our accomodation booked for the next 4 nights.
Fortunately one of our fellow cancellees was a Georgian woman who took control of the situation and managed to organise seats for the 8 of us on a coach to a town called Zugdidi in the West of the country. Once there she then organised 2 cars to take us on the 4 hour drive to Mestia.
It was well after 9pm before we arrived and Paul and I then wandered around some unlit, unpaved and unsignposted streets in Mestia looking for our guesthouse.
In total we had 2 and a bit days to explore Mestia.
The town had an excellent museum with a really good collection of, amongst other things, old church icons.
A couple of hours drive above Mestia is a lovely spot with a few (tiny) lakes and some lovely views:
Later we organised a car to take us about 3 hours east on a very poor dirt road to the town of Ushguli.
A medieval town in every sense - if you took away the cars and power poles you would feel very much like you were in a 14th Century village - complete with mud and filth strewn streets with pigs and cows wandering around.
It was set in an extremely scenic environment. We spent a couple of days here before heading briefly back to Mestia for our return flight to Tbilisi (which was fortunately flying that day.) A less than one hour flight was infinitely preferable to the 10 hours it took by road.
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