I started at the dry bridge at 07:20 with a bread roll in one hand, which is the right way into this part of the city: you meet the slope while the stone is still cool and the sulphur steam is the only thing moving. The loop took me 45 minutes at an easy pace, with two stops for photographs and one for the steps that drop straight down to the river.
Where the walk actually starts
The obvious start is the bathhouse street below the hill, but that puts the climb at the end, when the sun sits on the stone. I go the other way: up from the bridge, along the ridge, then down through the lanes to the water. The whole loop measures about 2.4 kilometres, and the difference between the two directions is roughly 60 metres of climbing, which I feel in my calves rather than my lungs.
Doing it backwards also changes what I see first. From the top the quarter reads as a grid of tin roofs, and only later do the lanes underneath resolve into doorways, taps and staircases worn into shallow bowls. I walked the reverse route on the second morning and the same streets felt like a different neighbourhood.
Two things come out of starting high. I get the shape of the valley in one look, with the ridge, the baths and the river in the same frame, and I save the steepest 40 metres for the part of the morning when my legs are still fresh. The descent at the end is a pleasure rather than a negotiation with a map.
The pipes are the map
Sulphur comes up warm here and the quarter is plumbed for it: rusted lines run along the walls, cross the lanes on brackets and vanish into doorways, and they tell me where the baths are before any sign does. I followed one for 300 metres until it turned into a courtyard I would have walked straight past.
Where a pipe is bolted to a wall you can also read the age of the wall. On the newest stretch the brackets are galvanised and set into fresh mortar; two lanes over the same line hangs off iron pins that predate the paint under them. Nobody advertises any of this, and it costs nothing to notice.
What the baths cost and when
The public room cost me 5 GEL when I paid at 08:10, and the private rooms are priced by the hour rather than by the person. The trade is worth naming before anyone books: a private room with a window runs about 25 GEL and the water is yours alone, while the shared hall is warm, loud and full of men who have been coming since before I was born.
I use the shared one unless I am travelling with somebody who objects to the noise. The water sits at 43 degrees by the gauge on the wall, which is hot enough that ten minutes is the honest limit and the second visit of the day is always shorter than the first.
Where it gets quiet
Between 11:00 and 13:00 the coaches reach the ridge and the lanes below the baths fill up. The quiet hours are the two after dawn and the hour before dinner, and the light is kinder then as well, because the pale stone goes flat and white under a midday sun.
My second pass at 18:00 gave me the courtyard empty and one old man hosing the steps who told me the temperature has not moved in thirty years. He also told me which door to use after dark, since the lane above the baths has no lamp and the cut stone holds the water.
The stairs down to the river
Between the baths and the water there are 90 steps, countable from the top, and they are the part of the loop that decides what shoes I wear. Halfway down the sulphur runs into the channel in a warm line you can see through the cold water, which is the only place on the walk where the temperature difference is visible rather than something I read on a gauge.
The bridge at the bottom puts me on the far bank for the return, a further 800 metres at flat grade, and it is the calmest stretch of the morning because nothing uphill is left in it. Total time from the dry bridge back to the dry bridge came to 45 minutes, and I did it three times in four days without getting bored of the route.
What I would change next time
I would start half an hour later, because the bakery on the corner opens at 07:00 and I missed the first tray. I would also wear the shoes with grip: the lanes are cut stone polished by fifty years of feet, and the shortcut down to the river stays slippery wherever the steam settles on it.
Everything else on the loop costs nothing, which in a capital city is the detail I keep repeating to myself. The 2.4 kilometres, the 60 metres of climb and the 5 GEL ticket added up to the morning I remember best from a week of otherwise ordinary walking.