With vehicle insurance in hand and a Georgian stamp featuring a nice little boat in each of our passports, we headed to Tblisi by following the coast north. This was where we got our glimpse of the madness of Georgian traffic and drivers.
You see them here, you see them there, you see them overtake with oncoming traffic having to swerve to avoid them and merely flashing their lights to say “here I am, get out of my way!” On roads that could almost be two lanes, road users decide they most definitely are, only going down to one lane when the show lane suddenly becomes an unofficial car park for a shop.
Unsure of the speed limits we took an average of what everyone else was doing and subtracted a few kph for safety, meaning that anyone deciding to be in the upper half was overtaking Stan with only a few feet in front and behind.
After turning East we came upon a roadside cafe touting free WiFi and food. While we got over our 3 day internet drought ordered what we thought was a national delicacy formed of a doughy pouch filled with meat and veg tied together with a top knot. What we got instead was a kind of fried cheese pizza. Once we had our fill of Georgian cheese bread and social media updates, we headed off down the road that would take us to Tblisi.
The middle leg was uneventful apart from a horse that has been hit by a truck, and many cows roaming free on/by the road that seemed nonplussed about the passing traffic. As the evening wore on we started counting down the kilometres left to go, and occasionally spotting names of far off places on the signs like Baku, our destination three days later on.
Coming in from the north the buildings started getting taller and the adverts more elaborate, pretty soon we were driving on a multi lane highway through the city centre. Batumi drivers have nothing on Tblisi drivers when it comes to making up lanes and filling spaces in traffic. With a lot of experience of driving in Italy and Vietnam, Katie was unfazed by the constantly changing roads and honking horns of our fellow road users.
Our hostel was in a little street in the old part of town and a part that is almost entirely one-way streets. On the second pass along the main cobbled road a man in a dirty Hi-Vis jacket spotted we were looking for a parking space and he directed us down a mostly empty site street he had cordened off. We paid for two days parking (£7 equivilant) and loaded up with bags to find the hostel.
We’d contacted the hostel at the roadside cafe to say we would only be staying the following night, but later decided to press on to Tblisi in one go. We rocked up to their reception around 11pm and hoped they would have three spare beds for the night.
They did!
They also had a small selection of local wine and beer and a lovely balcony looking over the valley that Tblisi sits in. So after a long day of waiting on a boat and then driving most of the way across Georgia, we paused for a bit with a drink and a view before retiring to bed.
Team Yes We Khan 