While attention in the US was focused on Michelle Obama's convention speech yesterday, another aspiring first lady was heading for Georgia.

Cindy McCain, the wife of the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, flew to Tbilisi for a meeting with the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

McCain was also due to visit Georgian soldiers wounded in the brief conflict with Russia over the breakaway South Ossetia region.

She is travelling with the UN's World Food Programme on a trip first reported by Time magazine.

The wealthy beer heiress told the magazine that overseas missions were an "important part of what I'm about, what makes me tick".

The McCain campaign said the timing of the trip, which coincided with the Democratic national convention in Denver, was a coincidence.

"She's on the phone with the World Food Programme; he's on the phone with Saakashvili," the McCain adviser Nicolle Wallace told Time.

"It was a great picture of what they'll be like in the White House."

McCain told the magazine she was concerned about landmine proliferation in Georgia.

Since the conflict, earlier this month, Georgia has been a favoured destination for US politicians, especially those involved in the presidential campaign.

Barack Obama's vice-presidential nominee, the foreign policy expert Joseph Biden, travelled there before being named on the ticket. The current vice president, Dick Cheney, will go there next week.

Both Obama and McCain have denounced the Russian incursion into its neighbour's territory, although McCain's rhetoric was markedly more aggressive.

He has sought to use the conflict, which broke out while Obama was on holiday in Hawaii, to emphasise his foreign policy credentials.

"Senator McCain has talked for years about the dangers of Russian policies in the way they conduct themselves and undermine the sovereignty of their neighbours," the McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann told the Washington Post earlier this month.

Russia was today continuing to defy the west by recognising the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia.

Moscow has pulled back most of its forces from Georgia but is keeping troops in a large buffer zone around the breakaway regions, claiming they are needed to guarantee security.