Farewell from Georgia

We leave Tbilisi at the unseemly hour of 5.00 am tomorrow morning, so this is our final post.

We spent a lovely last day sampling the sulphur baths which involved booking our own little changing room and bath and hanging out in stinky hot water for an hour.

We also visited the Botanical Gardens (a must for Sue in each place we visit) and enjoyed the best explanation we’ve seen for excluding pets from such places:

And this is as close as we got to the ‘Mother of Georgia’ statue which stands above the city:

Now that we have given our hire car back, we thought we could share a little about the experience of driving. Our guidebook tells us that only 10 per cent of Georgia’s cars are under 10 years old and nearly fifty per cent are over 20 years old. It certainly looks as if Western Europe’s second hand and written-off cars come here to die. To say that the driving is aggressive, undisciplined and exceedingly macho is to underplay things somewhat. The ‘excessive urgency’ of other drivers (our guidebook’s phrase), particularly on blind bends and roads with single white lines down the middle, is a fair description.

Our car hire experiences reflected this with a few novel adventures. Europcar were unable to give us the first car we had booked because it had been in an accident and had yet to be repaired. The replacement – which appeared to be fine – had us on tenterhooks from the start when the lights for the tyre pressure came on, and we then had to try and discover how to get the tyres pumped up: no easy matter in the south-west of the country. (No, you don’t go to a garage and no, you can’t expect a tyre shop to have an air compressor.)

Our second car was also a replacement because the car we’d booked hadn’t been returned – so this time we were given a car which had obviously been in an accident – see this extract from the video we took when we got the car – it doesn’t show you the smashed mirror on the other side which was, apparently, legal to drive with:

We realise that this must have been true because our car was nothing compared to the other cars on the road – no bumpers, no bonnets, bits stuck together with tape:

And then we had our own incident – no photos though! We had to take a detour in the remote Pankisi Valley because the town centre was being dug up and we ended up driving along a narrow street. I slowed down and moved over to the right as a large truck came towards me when suddenly the car lurched in a weird way. Sue opened her door and shrieked because the front tyre was hanging over a channel at the side of the road which had been hidden by shadow.

We got out the car in what felt like the middle of nowhere – and panicked. Within two minutes, another car drew up – a guy got out with his wife and kid, saw what happened and he started stopping other cars. Within two more minutes, he had gathered a group of ten bearded young men, all looking very serious, who basically rocked the car back onto the road and then all drove off as if this kind of thing happened every day. Indeed, it must ….

So – only drive in Georgia if you and your passengers have nerves of steel and absolutely no desire to win on the road! We live to tell the tale.

As relief from all that, here are some more cartoons from the streets of Tbilisi as we enjoyed our day in the backstreets: