Georgia's Svan Towers

I'd been wanting to go to Georgia for about a decade, ever since I'd first seen the Svan Towers in a National Geographic mag. Finally it all came together: car, photographer, guide and plan.

The photographer had to be Mark Riccioni. Ever since we'd first talked about Georgia, he'd sent me clips of Toyota Land Cruisers overlanding through the extraordinary Caucuses mountains. When Toyota agreed to lend us a Land Cruiser 250 for the story, everything fell into place - not least Guro Alapishvili, the guide who agreed to come and show us around his astonishing back yard.

The North Caucuses form Georgia's boundary with Russia. Wanting a flavour of the local political scene we decided to stop en route to Svaneti at the disputed Abkhazia border to get a sense of things. Wrong decision. We were stopped and questioned by the Georgian border police, the car was searched and, for a brief but nerve-wracking few minutes, our passports were confiscated. Then suddenly we were told to go away and not come back. We left.

Spend a day or two in Georgia and you won't understand it. You'll look at the poverty, the slow pace of life, the decrepit Soviet-era buildings and infrastructure and write it off as another state struggling to adapt to the 21st century. But then you start to tune in. To the hospitality. To the pride. To the food. To the culture. To the sense of community.

Tbilisi aside, it's not yet fully on the tourist trail and lovely though Tbilisi is, it - like so many capital cities - is a diluted taste of Georgia. Outside, in the smaller towns and villages, you are far more immersed. Mestia, gateway to the isolated Svaneti region in the north west, was our base and from there we just explored.

And for that there's nothing quite like a Land Cruiser. When you're halfway up the Latpari Pass, churning through snow, shale and mud, sliding off the side of the road and knowing you're going to have to retreat, you want a car that'll look after you. It might be slow and the ride on the rough side, but in adversity you need something you can rely on. That it also got us up the slopes of Tetnuldi ski resort and over the Zagari Pass where, surrounded by 5000m peaks, you're amongst some of the greatest driving scenery on earth, can't be underestimated either.

And then there were the Svan towers themselves. Built as shelter from the hostile forces of weather, invaders and rival families, some are nearly a thousand years old. Ushguli, now a world heritage site, shows them at their truest. As foreboding, impregnable family fortresses. Walking between them is like setting foot into World of Warcraft.

Go to Georgia. Stop in a backwater village and find a guesthouse. I guarantee you will be brilliantly looked after, and the food will blow you away. Step outside and discover the rest of it, a country that was the birthplace of both wine and Stalin. I don't know what that says about the place, but I do know it makes it worth visiting.

To read more about this trip, search out issue 404 of BBC TopGear magazine, or search the topgear.com website