They passed the Gudauri ski resort, which looked like a drab construction site lost in the mist, and then the Russian-Georgian friendship mural at the highest point in the path, which had been made in 1983 to celebrate the long relationship between the two countries, and ignored by every Georgian since.

They started to descend again and it wasn’t long before they broke through the dense cloud into a wide, lush valley. This was the landscape that had so inspired Russian writers from Lermontov and Tolstoy to Pushkin and Gorky: rich green valleys linking rugged mountains that reached for a dramatic cobalt sky.

The sun danced off a reservoir nearby, bringing an even greater majesty and grandeur to the landscape. Kate and Julie stared out in silence all the way down to the village of Kazbegi, or Stepantsminda, as it had been renamed, which had the air of a modern-day Klondike, mining the new gold rush that was international tourism.

They swung off the main road, past guesthouses, cafés and tin-roofed shacks with market gardens, and roared on up the hill to a long wooden building that appeared to have been newly restored. ‘Check in here,’ Mikhail said, as they came to a halt at its entrance. ‘I will pick you up later. Do not switch your phones on. I will find you.’

Kate and Julie got out and walked into one of the strangest places Kate had ever seen. It turned out to be the sister establishment to the Tbilisi hotel they’d stayed in, a former Intourist site that had been the subject of a dramatic makeover to turn it into a kind of Soho House in the Caucasus. Only the Intourist poster by the lift – Welcome to the Soviet Union – had survived its past, as the interior was an open, stylish expanse of wood and leather all the way up to the bar at the far end of the room. Large brass binoculars on stands by the floor-to-ceiling windows gave guests the chance to gaze up at the wonders of Mount Kazbegi, which towered high above its surroundings on the far side of the valley.

Kate and Julie agreed to share a room, but went straight out to order coffee on the wide wooden deck in front of the hotel. They sat in silence for a while, watching the clientele, who seemed to represent a rainbow coalition of different nationalities, from the blond Norwegian family sitting next to them to a large group of Chinese tourists and two Iranian women in the niqab. If Georgia had always been a melting pot, it seemed determined to turn that heritage into the widest possible flow of visitors and tourist dollars.

‘Is it too early for cocktails?’ Julie asked.

‘Yes.’