Arrival in Tbilisi - First impressions of Georgia

We left out hostel in Istanbul on a hot, sticky Friday morning with all our bags and headed for the airport for our flight to Georgia. The flight was a little delayed though we were never told why. Turkish airlines were being as useless as ever. They'd been rude and superior on the way to Istanbul but this time they were incompetent too. On the plane one of the air hostesses kept fiddling around in an overhead compartment and ended up dropping some spare seatbelts on a passengers head! Luckily the pilots weren't as careless and managed to go land us safely at Tbilisi airport in Georgia despite a fair bit of turbulence.


Rowan almost didn't make it into the country. The woman at passport control spent a long time staring suspiciously at his passport photo then back at him. After more than five minutes she got a friend to come and have a look, there was some serious debate then they finally let him pass. Maybe I shouldn't have encouraged him to try and grow that little beard - makes him look like a vagrant!

Would you let this man into YOUR country? I didn't think so!

After the rather zealous, but still smiling and good honoured passport control ladies, we went to pick up our bags. Everyone from our flight was crowded around the tiny baggage carousel that was clearly a relic from an earlier time and wasn't made to cope with larger flights. This was the first odd experience we had at Georgia's "international" airport. We also found ourselves to be two of only a handful of international tourists at the airport and we really stuck out. It felt like being back in South Korea again!


There were no signs or information about transport into the town centre to be found in the airport which was confusing. It was really hot and dry and we were just stood outside the airport with all our bags in the dust feeling a bit lost. Amusingly, we noticed that the road from the airport to the city centre was called George W. Bush Avenue! Tbilisi, probably the only city in the world to name something after that warmongering scumbag. 


We hunted around for the train station we'd read about in our guide book and finally found a strange, gold plated, snail shell shaped modern looking building across the car park in front of the airport. I wandered in to ask about trains and made my first attempt at speaking Georgian (I've been attempting to learn the language for the last 4 weeks or so). I looked confused and said "matarebelli" which means train and the uniformed guy said yes. It seemed I was in the right place and there was one due to arrive in 15 minutes which was lucky as there were only 6 or 7 a day! A good omen, I felt!

Tbilisi airport's shiny new train station. Great, if you can find it! (picture from skyscrapercity.com)

The station was weird, a place caught in amber, suspended in time. It was a bright modern building that had clearly been recently built but it felt forgotten and abandoned, like an old deserted fairground with tumbleweeds blowing through, only occasionally disturbed by a passing train. We were the only two passengers waiting and were outnumbered by the three bored looking staff members who watched us curiously. We mimed asking where we should pay, in the station or on the train, and the uniformed guy made the international sign for a train - miming pulling a train whistle and going " woo woo"!


In contrast with gleaming new station, the train was one if the most ancient looking specimens I'd seen outside of a museum. It had big cushiony seats and moved at a speed just above walking pace. e paid a little old woman conductor the 0.50 lari fare each (about 25p). She spoke to us in Russian but upon seeing our confusion tried swapping to a bit of German! We passed through some pretty derelict looking scenery o the way to the centre. It took us about 25 or 30 minutes. None of the train stations had any signs so we had no idea where we were going. Even the main city train station "Voksal" where we were going was lacking any form of identification - we just asked around and got off where everyone else did. Finding the metro was equally confusing but we eventually made it to Marjanishvilli Metro station, the nearest station to our hostel, the Bonney Tbilisi. 


The hostel was located in a grand old building with marble in the hallway. We were greeted by a chilled out Iranian guy with perfect English called Parham who was friends with the owner. He gave a us a brief tour of the hostel and we chose beds in one of the big airy dorm rooms. The place was virtually empty so we had the room to ourselves that first night. The spacious rooms were a welcome change from the cramped dorm we'd been staying in Istanbul. The Bonney also had a very grand bathroom covered in blue tiles, like our own little Blue Mosque! 

Our airy dorm room in  the lovely Bonney Tbilisi hostel. It's a really nice chilled place and we even got to sleep in single beds rather than bunk beds!

The blue tiled bathroom at the Bonney Tbilisi hostel. Fit for a king or a sultan!

After a drinking some beer with Parham and swapping stories with him and a nice Finnish couple who were also staying there we headed out for our first taste of khachapuri, Georgian cheesy bread! We bought two from a friendly woman in a kiosk (a common sight here) and it was just as good as I'd hoped and cheap to boot. 

Me buying two different types of khachapuri from the same kiosk as the one we got ours from on that first night. The woman there is really friendly and put up with my truly terrible Georgian and my accidental attempts at paying her in Turkish lira!

After filling up on cheesy bread and cheap beer we tried our best to get some sleep despite the extreme heat that left us covered in sweat. Stupidly, we hadn't realised that the air-con in our dorm room actually worked, we just had to ask the staff to turn it on., We'd assumed it was ornamental!