Woke up to clear blue skies today and spent a good few minutes in the morning celebrating how dry all our gear was. After a week camping in the rain we could really enjoy packing our gear away dry and not soaked through. 

 
Yesterday evening we had turned off the main road running East to Azerbaijan from Tbilisi and today we would be heading north, over a pass and to the foot of the Greater Caucuses. From there we would follow the mountains east along an apparently quieter and more scenic road to another border with Azerbaijan.

  
The morning was clear and crisp, if only a little chilly and we had ride up and over numerous hills as we approached the pass we had to cross today. Very quickly we left the flat farmland and entered sparsely populated hilly country. This place is probably beautiful in summer or autumn but now in early winter the foliage was an almost all the same dull shade of brown.

  
 

 
We stopped for an early lunch just before the pass. The pass itself was not that steep and was a pretty fun climb and as with most mountain ascents, well worth the effort when we got to the top and got to look back, the way we came laid out behind us and the Greater Caucus mountain range out in front.

 

  
    
   
A long descent then down the other side to the town of Telavi, passing lots of development work going on outside it the town. This region that we just crossed into is supposedly the most famous of all Georgian wine regions and small hotels and winery’s are being built all over the place to accompany the handful at exist already.
Dinner in Telavi, a surprisingly pretty town once you get into it. Picked up a few supplies here before heading out just as it began to get dark. We stumbled across an orchard on the outskirts that provided us a prefect camp spot for the night. Tuckered out after the climb over the pass so went to bed almost immediately.