A Day on the Wild Aragvi
The Aragvi starts as snowmelt somewhere above Gudauri and arrives at Zhinvali reservoir as the fastest thing in the region. In between there is a stretch that makes a very good day out.
You leave Tbilisi at eight. By half past nine you are standing on gravel at the edge of the Aragvi with a helmet in your hand, and the water is a colour that does not look real — a hard mineral turquoise that comes from glacier flour, not from any kind of algae.
It is also, and there is no gentle way to say this, extremely cold.
What the river is like
The commercial section runs class II–III depending on the month. In May and early June, on full meltwater, it is pushy and continuous and genuinely exciting. By late July it has dropped enough that the rapids become discrete, technical and forgiving — which is the version most people should want for their first time.
The whole run is about twelve kilometres and takes two to three hours on the water, with a stop halfway on a gravel bar where somebody has always brought bread, cheese and tomatoes.
Who it works for
Anyone who can swim and follow instructions in a boat. We have taken twelve-year-olds and we have taken a seventy-one-year-old who had never held a paddle. There is no fitness requirement worth mentioning; you paddle in bursts of thirty seconds and float in between.
What it does require is a willingness to get completely wet, which sounds obvious until somebody arrives in the clothes they intended to wear to dinner.
What to bring
- Clothes you can soak — quick-dry, not cotton
- A full change of clothes for afterwards, left in the van
- Shoes that strap on: sandals with a heel strap or old trainers
- Sunscreen (the reflection off the water does the work)
- Nothing in your pockets. Nothing. Phones live in the dry bag.
The rest of the day
Rafting finishes around one. That leaves the afternoon, and the afternoon is the reason we run this as a full-day trip rather than a half: Ananuri fortress sits fifteen minutes downstream, on a promontory above the reservoir, and it is one of the few monuments in the country you can walk around with nobody else in it if you get there at the right hour.
Cold river in the morning, warm stone in the afternoon. It is a good shape for a day.
From Ananuri it is another hour back to Tbilisi, or forty minutes onward to Gudauri if you are heading up the Military Highway — which is what we usually recommend, because it turns a day trip into the first day of a route.
Rafting runs from May to early October. Outside that window the flow is either too high to be sensible or too low to be fun. If you want it built into a longer trip, tell us on the enquiry form and we will place it where it fits.
