In Stepantsminda, we found a guest-house with a view and a friendly hostess. We rejected the first landlady due to her cold manner and the various rules pasted up inside the front door. One gave a police number to call if anyone was sighted smoking an e-cigarette. We said we’d be back in ten minutes. She said: ‘but you haven’t asked me the price yet.’ You can’t price a lack of welcome.

No meals were included at the second, which sent Sarah into a temporary hanic. The Lonely Planet claimed there were no restaurants in town and she envisaged us living off scraps from the fast food joints near the centre of the townlet. But the Lonely Planet was speaking untruths. There were many more restaurants than mealtimes.

Our hostess, Tamari, offered us coffee from the large glittering kitchen at our disposal and later gifted us wine when she spotted us drinking our own. If we had walked in with a pig, she would have happily roasted it for us.

The next morning, we took the direct route to Gergeti Trinity Church. The ascent appeared to require a steep climb up the rocks – safe for the rational able-bodied, but the steepness and the unsighted drop just over the ridge scared me. We had made the mistake of thinking there was only one way up. The church was reputed to have held the cradle of Jesus and the tent of Abraham. It was also said to be the mountain upon which Prometheus daily had his liver ripped out by an eagle sent by Zeus as punishment for gifting mankind fire. (This may account for the surfeit of liver on Georgian menus. He was a titan after all.)

In the church, the usual waxy smell melded with the mumbling supplicants stretching out their hands, while a man with a sheep on a rope hoped to charge us for photos, and the devoted fearfully crossed themselves with superstitious zeal. In this more photogenic of spots, my camera chose not to work. The longer and winding path back proved far more enjoyable than the climb.

The previous night, we shared our wine with two New Zealanders wending their way home after several years in London. Being antipodean, they are going via Turkey and Georgia. He is a nice lawyer, she researches cures into horrible diseases.

I was almost devoured by a giant bear-dog this morning while seeking sunshine in the back garden. Happily, it was on a chain that almost broke as the beast leapt towards my throat. Tamari was by my side, nervously and fruitlessly trying to coax it tame, while equally prepared to administer the last rites. I wasn’t wearing my glasses so initially thought it was a very large statue. I chose instead to read my book on a small patch of sunlit lawn around the front.

Later, we came across a cow-dog, which was expertly and very firmly guiding a small herd of cows to pastures new. It resembled a mongrel Saint Bernard who had gone over to the other side, or one of the mean older dogs in White Fang. We waited quietly at the side of the road till they had passed.

Crazy drivers are as much a staple in the Caucasus as the parallel world of dogs. The most pointlessly life-threatening was he who drove us up through the high passes to Kazbegi at an average speed of around 20mph faster than felt safe. Sarah and another woman had a word with him during one of the breaks. Sarah used Google Translate to show him something pithy and terse like ‘Please drive more slowly’. He laughed as if it was the strangest thing he’d ever heard.

The driver on the way down was so much more restrained that we found ourselves enjoying the staggering views of the High Caucasus. On the way up, we had imagined becoming part of the view. But back in the outskirts, some incident too minor to understand or explain riled the driver so much that he began to rant and drive in the more usual psychopathic national manner. Happily, his destructive tendencies were reduced in effect by the close city traffic. Obviously, this only incensed him more, but there’s only so much damage a man can do to his passengers when accelerating into small spaces. Some might argue this point, but it’s relative to taking a blind corner at 70mph around a cliff edge.

The prize perhaps belongs to our final long-distance driver who fetched us from Tiblisi to Kutaisi shortly afterwards. Sarah was initially delighted to see his vehicle had working safety belts. Although she was aware that he spent much of the journey phoning his friends, I didn’t alert her to him sending texts, checking emails, and watching videos during the low periods when his friends weren’t picking up. One video described how to construct a barbecue in your garden; the other featured some men pushing a car off the side of a hill. He watched that one twice. I took pictures in case our journey ended up in court. In response to these provocations, Sarah drank wine or beer whenever it was available to buy during the loo breaks – something that seemed to amuse, surprise and disgust the locals.

She believed we had a good chance to die on the roads of Georgia – a belief she supported by texting her friends from our potential last resting point on the journey up. At the same spectacular viewing point, young enthusiastic women swarmed around us touting hang-gliding excursions from a nearby peak. Our nerves were too frazzled to take them seriously. Perhaps they thought the journey up had hardened us to near-death experiences. Over dinner the previous night, I had described Sarah’s worries about the drivers as ‘a bit melodramatic’. This proved to be a mistake. She was quite firm in her rebuttal.

A few days earlier, we had tipped our one calm and safe long-distance driver the equivalent of 50p on top of a fare costing no more than a couple of quid. He was completely non-plussed before almost dissolving into tears when he realised we were neither mistaken in our intentions nor clinically insane.

Otherwise, our return to Kutaisi completed a gentle symmetry for our trip. We dined at the restaurant of a thousand dogs, met a French couple who thought Brexit was a splendid idea, and a well-travelled Hamburgian who charmed us as we worked through the gears of the food and wine one last time. That night in our pleasant, friendly family-run hotel, I found myself unable to read beyond a paragraph of my book. My weary but contented body finally gave in to the accumulated exhaustion.