Cha-cha-cha Crash! (Last Day in Sakartvelo)

I'm in a wine shop in Tbilisi, with a silhouette of Pushkin on the door. 

There's a speech bubble emanating from his cut-out visage, saying something profound and poetic about the unparalleled joys of the fermented grape. And inside, a friend of the owner is pouring me samples while explaining the business to me.

It's one of those little wine shops that's more the product of passion than of a profit motive, so the story is quite an enjoyable one to hear. But the conversation soon turns to graver themes. 

See, I'm recovering from the shock of the car accident which I was in today, and my host is recovering from 27 years of total estrangement from his family and every single person he knew during his childhood.

Before I go into that, however, I invite you to go grab a glass of red. 'Cause I need to talk to you about a subject which is uppermost in the mind of everyone who visits this sainted land of Sakartvelo: 

I need to talk to you about wine.

To set the scene: a few days ago, on the same day I went to the Stalin Museum, I also spent a couple of hours in a place called Uplistikhe, perched above the fast-flowing and correct-pronunciation-defying River Mtkvari.

Uplistikhe is an ancient stone city, ranging up the side of a large hill. These days it's mostly inhabited by lizards, but two or three millennia ago, it offered all the necessary elements of a fabulous night out in the ancient world.

Lizard in The Sun Temple

Uplistikhe, Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

The heathen citizens who lived up here left a ruin that clearly illustrates their appreciation for ‘the good life’. The city’s main centre of worship, a temple to the Sun Goddess, sits near the top of Uplistikhe and features a huge open area large enough to be a dancefloor (which it may well have been), with a pit in the middle for sacrifices. You could start your evening there – or, if that wasn’t your thing, you could take in an early show at the public theatre, carved completely out of rock with a huge Grecian arch over the stage and a mountain view behind it (visible even from the cheap seats).

Ancient 'Tandyr' Oven

Uplistikhe, Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

After that it would probably be dinner time, so you’d head to one of the outdoor dining areas, where deep, teardrop-shaped tandyrs (those ovens invented in Eurasia, which eventually gave us tandoori chicken and naan bread after the design migrated along the Silk Road to India) were carved into the ground.

You might also stop in at the pharmacy – which has little rock shelves to hold different herbs and other medicines – and grab something to help you through the following morning’s hangover.

Next to the pharmacy is a 2,000-year-old wine press, where you could watch the grapes being trampled and the skins being compressed to make chacha (something like grappa, but stronger). 

Finally you'd probably head up to the library area and common hall, where stone bookshelves held reading material for you to enjoy while you sipped your wine on comfortable animal skins or relaxed in a warm communal bath – provided, that is, the bath itself wasn’t filled with surplus wine.

I’m not kidding; this place was the luxury resort of ancient stone cities. And, as always in Sakartvelo, the wine was central to the culture. When they say that grapes are sacred here, they mean it.

Main Hall and Bath Area (Library Shelves on The Right)

Uplistikhe, Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

Personally, I’ve already enjoyed a glass or two at several of the little Georgian restaurants that are generously dotted around Tbilisi’s Old Town and inner city.

I've also visited Kakheti, the main wine-growing region, where I learned the difference between a Saperavi and a Mukuzani (both made from the potently purple-coloured Saperavi grape, but one fermented with the skins still on and therefore incredibly rich and 'earthy'). There, after staying with a babushka who greeted me with a cake and a karaf of 65% proof homemade chacha, I got horribly drunk over lunch the next day, while listening to local vintners chatting with a visiting British wine critic.

Signaghi's Old Town & Caucas Mountains

Kakheti Region, Sakartvelo, 08.04.15

The British guy slooshed the local produce around his mouth thoughtfully before dumping it into a spitoon. I, on the other hand, did no such thing. Every drop of the white, the red and the amber (yes, they have a third colour in Sakartvelo) went straight into my thankful bloodstream.

But the spectre of road travel in this country hung heavily over that journey, as it has with every other I've taken this week. The minibus ride to Kakheti had been harrowing, and the return leg was far, far worse. Massive potholes on the highway compounded the threat of a head-on collision, which was already high thanks to drivers' impatience and the almost complete lack of passing lanes. It was a nightmare.

A couple of days later, i.e. early this morning, I found myself sitting in the front passenger seat of a car in central Tbilisi, waiting for the driver to deal with documentation and get us underway.

Kakheti's 'Amber Wines'

Signaghi, Sakartvelo, 08.04.15

By "us", I mean myself and the two Russian women in the back seat. We were headed for a place called Kazbegi, high in the Caucases mountains, and the driver was to be our Russian-speaking guide.

About ten minutes into the journey, as we were flying along one of Tbilisi's arterial roads, a van suddenly tried to cut us off. The driver didn't notice, and kept his foot on the accelerator. The van consequently side-swiped us, making contact right at the point where I was sitting. Had the impact been much harder, it could've led to a far more serious outcome for me. Luckily, though, I was fine.

Our driver then used his horn, indicating to the van that it should stop. But the van driver had other ideas: he swerved left, pulling out directly into oncoming traffic and causing cars to scatter around him. 

One can only guess that this was a ploy to get away from us and avoid insurance payouts – the rationale was probably "Well, that guy isn't going to follow me into a stream of cars coming the other way, now, is he?" But that turned out to be wrong, and what happened next shocked us all.

Our driver, without giving it a second thought, pulled left into the oncoming traffic lane, preparing to chase the van along the wrong side of a busy highway.

At this point, myself and the two Russians all yelled at the guy simultaneously. "Get his license number, and just stop!", was the general message.

Fortunately for us, the driver decided to follow this advice. He took a photo of the van's license plate, then pulled down a side street, rolled to a stop, got out and called the tour company.

I decided this was enough for me. Tbilisi's Old Town, with its cafes and bars, cobbled streets, and kooky 19th Century wooden houses (see pics below), is an incredibly chilled-out and pleasant place to puddle around in. Sakartvelo's highways, on the other hand, are a cauldron of terror. So I tried to open my door and get out.

The door decided not to co-operate; it was firmly stuck.

Hmmm.

I climbed over the gear stick, explaining to the Russian ladies that I wasn't keen to continue the excursion, on account of the psychopathic driving in this country. They agreed. "I've never seen such a thing in all my life!", one of them said – and you know when Russians say that, it's time to get off the roads immediately!

So I wished them a fabulous day, gave a similar explanation to the driver, and started in on the 45-minute walk back into the centre.

This may sound like an experience that would sour you a little on the country you're visiting. But in Sakartvelo, you can't feel sour for long. The locals are just too nice.

Long before I'd even arrived at the 'Peace Bridge' – a space-age landmark which announces that you're nearing Old Tbilisi – I'd received a gushingly apologetic phone call from the tour company. "We're SOOOOOO sorry", said the girl on the phone. "You must come in and get your money back!"

The 'Peace Bridge'

Tbilisi, Sakartvelo, 10.04.15

She then went on to apologise for the behaviour of every single driver in the whole of Sakartvelo.

When I got to the company's office, the two customer service people there apologised some more and handed me the money. I told them I hadn't expected a refund, since it was my decision not to continue and the accident hadn't been their driver's fault. But they insisted, saying they just hoped I hadn't been left with a negative impression of their country.

I re-assured them that I really liked their country and everything was fine. And leaving aside the roads, what I said was true ... possibly even understated a little :-)

(Note to Turkish Fucking Airlines: THIS is what customer service looks like, you retarded bunch of asshats.)

Anyway ...

Around 12 hours later, in the little wine shop, we'd moved on from an amazing selection of wine (of which I'd committed to buying one bottle) to the chacha. 

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the alcohol content of this stuff can range up to 65%. It's the kind of drink about which you'd imagine there are stories in circulation, involving people losing their sight and/or their legs and/or their minds.

19th Century Wooden House #1

Tbilisi, Sakartvelo, 05.04.15

As he poured a second shot for each of us, the shop guy (who we'll call 'Mikheil') continued the abbreviated version of his life story. I'd asked him if he was from Tbilisi, and he'd said "No, but I've lived here most of my life". His home town was called Sukhumi, which is the capital of the 'breakaway region' of Abkhazia.

You might remember that Russian presidential seat-warmer Dmitry Medvedev sent his boss's army down here in 2008, arguing that ethnic Russians living in some parts of Sakartvelo were under threat – the same justification Putin has since used in Ukraine. The result was that two slices of the country were hewn off and turned into new republics, named Abkhazia and South Ossetia respectively.

Sukhumi, Abkhazia's capital, was a Black Sea resort town back in the day, and arguably one of the prettiest towns in the entire USSR. The elite Soviet political class used to spend their vacations there, strolling along the crescent moon-shaped beach and taking dips in the deep-blue water of Sukhumi's harbour, as hills and mist-covered mountains loomed atmospherically behind the city.

19th Century Wooden House #2

Tbilisi, Sakartvelo, 07.04.15

Tensions between the people living there and those in present-day Sakartvelo have run high for decades, and Putin and Medvedev are far from being the first political leaders to wade into the conflict. Boris Yeltsin, for example, loudly and relentlessly supported the Georgians throughout his presidency, placing all kinds of restrictions on the Abkhaz which increased their frustration. And running through a list of his predecessors, you find similarly partisan views.

Ordinary people like my new acquaintance Mikheil were, as usual, caught in the middle of the political foodfight.

This is how Mikheil came to be in Tbilisi: during one of the many periods when tensions seemed ready to boil over, he and one other family member fled Sukhumi and ended up here. Since then, he's been unable to get a visa to go back. 

This means that Mikheil hasn't seen most of his family for three decades. And you could tell, when he talked about it, that his sense of loss was still imminent.

Despite my sympathy, though, I couldn't stay in the wine shop much longer. Tonight was my last night in Sakartvelo, and also the beginning of Easter. My 'host family' had invited me to attend midnight mass with them, and although I'm not religious, it was something I didn't want to miss. I also needed to get a couple of hours sleep, because my flight back to Istanbul was at 7am.

So I told Mikheil I had to go, to which he said "Already?". 

He'd clearly intended to keep pouring me free samples until one or both of us fell on the floor!

I never made it to midnight mass, and neither did my hosts. Instead, I sat with 'host mother' Nana and and her daughters Tatia and Salome, enjoying a delicious end-of-lent supper, accompanied (since this is Sakartvelo) by generous amounts of full-bodied Saperavi wine. Nana and Salome then disappeared, and I sat with Tatia, discussing art, religion, politics and love until it was clear that if I didn't sleep soon, I wouldn't have time to sleep at all.

About three hours later, I leapt out of the shower and finished packing my new wheelie bag – a task made slightly easier by the fact that we'd drunk one of the bottles of wine which I'd intended to squeeze into it! 

As I wrapped the last bottle, the taxi arrived; perfect timing for the airport, but also a sad moment because it meant "Farewell Tbilisi".

Of course, with so much still to see in Sakartvelo, I'm sure this won't be the final farewell. Next time, though, I'm gonna do my best to stay away from those terrifying roads ... ;-)

Stalin's Telephones

Today I stood in the little one-room house where the 20th Century's greatest mass-murder, Joseph Stalin, was born and lived as a child. 

It was cold, it was simple, and it was entirely 'ordinary' ... which of course, considering the man who grew up here, makes it a rather chilling place to visit.

It also reminded me of something which has always struck me as one of the weirdest facts of the 20th Century: namely the fact that Stalin, inheritor of the Bolshevik Revolution and co-architect of the Cold War, was not Russian. Not only that, but he was Georgian – in other words, not even close to being Russian.

Stalin's Boyhood House

Gori, Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

The Georgians are a Kavkaz (Caucasian) people, like the Chechens, Armenians, Dagestanis and several others. Kavkaz folk are 100% ethnically unrelated to Slavic peoples (barring some intermarriage, of course). They live near a lot of Slavs, true, but to say that this makes them similar would be like saying that France's proximity to the UK demonstrates that French people are virtually English.

In the USSR, you had a majority Russian population as well as other closely-related races like Byelorussians, Ukrainians etc. If Stalin had been, say, Byelorussian, that would've been noteworthy but not incredibly strange; but to hand over the entire USSR to a Georgian ... well, almost as random as appointing an Argentinian guy from the Falklands as the King of Thailand. 

On top of that, Georgia itself was not an entirely willing participant in the great Soviet project. There was quite a bit of state-sanctioned murder and repression here in the 1920s and '30s, to try and get rid of the country's intelligentsia and aristocracy. They had to be eliminated, because they weren't at all keen on being a part of the Union of Republics.

So for all those reasons, I find it extremely odd that the Russian people even 'let' Stalin rule them in the first place.

Even weirder, from a western perspective, are some of the attitudes towards him today in former Soviet countries. You've got a bunch of people who despise Stalin because of his murderous behaviour, but you've also got many others who point to his achievements – which, let's face it, were considerable. (As Winston Churchill allegedly put it, Uncle Jo "took the country with the wooden plough, and left it with nuclear power".)

In other people's minds, his credentials as a great moderniser don't even begin to make up for the disastrous Five-Year Plans, and the mass executions, and the gulags, and the sinister Cult of Personality, and all the other things we associate with Comrade Stalin.

I've heard both sides of this argument from various people in different settings, and occasionally even seen proponents of the two viewpoints face off against each other. The occasion that sticks most vividly in my memory happened in a Moscow classroom in 2006, when four or five of my students ganged up on one of their classmates called Alla, after she claimed that Stalin was the greatest leader Russia had ever had and that they needed a man like him today to fix the country's problems.

However, for obvious reasons, this conflict of ideas is perhaps at its rawest in Georgia.

Stalin was born in a town called Gori, about 80kms from Tbilisi, and his birthplace is kind of a 'must-see' for tourists in Georgia. The house pictured above is now covered by a monumental structure which somewhat resembles a grand mausoleum, and behind it is the Stalin Museum.

I travelled to Gori with a local driver and two Irishmen. Once at the museum, the three of us joined a guided tour, given in English. It was lucky that we did, because the museum was a mass of biographical detail, organised in somewhat mysterious ways. 

There were photos of Stalin with other world leaders, pics of people I didn't recognise who turned out to be his family members (including a few living ones), lots and lots of newspaper clippings in Russian, and a great profusion of personal belongings and objects of state, like ceremonial sashes and swords and the like.

Sultan Josef

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

There was also a room devoted to the gifts which Stalin received from other Heads of State. Two Polish guys in our tour group were, I think, a little taken aback to see the beautifully-crafted tableware which their government had presented to Uncle Jo back in the day; Stalin was one of the chief military commanders in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-21, the object of which was to completely absorb Poland into the Bolshevik state. But these were far from being exceptional – there were trinkets here from all over the world.

My personal favourite was Stalin's face on a Turkish carpet. Erdoğan, Turkey's current president and a man who's attempting to cultivate a kind of 'latter-day Sultan' personality cult around himself, may just die of envy if he saw it ;-)

Also rather striking were several portraits, like this one of Stalin visiting his mother 'Keke' shortly before she died. Like the endless photos of Stalin with children, which issued more or less continuously from the Kremlin during his reign, this painting is obviously intended as propaganda. The straightforward 'attentive son' expression on his face here doesn't reflect the complexity of Stalin's and Keke's relationship at all.

The Dutiful Son

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

When Stalin was growing up, he defended his mother many times from his violently abusive father, who beat both of them regularly. And Keke was devoted to her son – who she described as a "sensitive child" – taking several beatings for him. Both she and Stalin himself expected him to enter the priesthood; in fact, he tried to do so before becoming a 'revolutionary' (for which we can actually read 'bank robber and violent criminal who terrorised Tbilisi' – but that's a whole other story). 

After the revolution, though, Stalin installed Keke in one tiny room in a Caucasian palace, and assigned his NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria to ensure she was cared for. Stalin had very little contact with her, though he sent her occasional letters from Moscow, and apparently these were quite affectionate. 

But when they met in 1935, two years before she died, Keke is reported to have taken her son to task. She asked him "Do you know who you are now?" – implying that he'd become a monster – and when he replied that he was "sort of like a tsar", she told him that he "would have been better off becoming a priest".

Like Churchill, she was probably right about Stalin too.

By far the most striking thing about this museum, though, is the complete absence of any discussion about Stalin's character as a person or as a leader. The guide simply takes visitors through, explains who's who in all the photos, offers biographical details about various people in Stalin's life ("So-and-so was born in 19-such-and-such, got married in 19-blahty-blah, and moved to Moscow soon after that"), and points out documents he signed, gifts he was given and so on. It's strictly factual – no commentary at all.

One Victim Among Millions

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

The only part of the museum that makes any attempt to reflect on Stalin's legacy is a small, recently-opened room on the lower level (well away from the main exhibits), where little triangular pieces of paper are stapled onto a semi-transparent curtain on one wall. On each piece of paper is written the name of someone who died in Stalin's purges in Georgia. 

Then, around the corner from that, there's a little prison cell, about which the guide matter-of-factly says sth like "This is typical of the kind of prison cell which was used to house political prisoners during Soviet times", before hurriedly moving on.

Long after the tour was over, while myself and the two Irish guys were having dinner in Tbilisi, we discussed possible reasons why the tour guide was so coy. 

Could the people of Gori be proud of the local boy who, having been born the poor son of a shoe-maker, rose to become possibly the world's most powerful man? Maybe. That's a theory widely advanced, and as I said before, there are plenty of people in the world who choose to turn the focus away from Stalin's cruelty and towards his achievements.

Another possibility is that the subject matter is just too controversial, and the guides don't want to get involved in discussions that are very likely to turn nasty. Perhaps in the early days of the museum's existence, they got stuck in the crossfire as guests with differing views bickered over Stalin's contribution to the 20th Century and to the USSR, and they decided it would be better if those discussions happened elsewhere.

Or thirdly: because this was the English-speaking tour, the guide may have simply felt that the complexities would be too difficult to explain to foreigners with no background knowledge of the different views regarding Stalin which exist in ex-Soviet countries.

Whatever the reason, though, the experience was quite a strange one.

Strangest of all, though, was the replica of Stalin's Kremlin office that had been set up in one room of the museum. They had his original desk, his original stationery well, and most amazingly, his original telephones – one black and one white.

Coiled Serpents. Altars of Death

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

As I stared at these mute objects, resting innocuously on top of Stalin's desk, I thought of the Ted Hughes poem Do Not Pick Up The Telephone, in which the poet likens his phone to (among other things) a coiled serpent ready to spring and an 'altar of death'. And I thought about how many death sentences must have been spoken into these two phones that I was looking at. Obviously it's impossible to put a number on that, but if you could, it would surely be huge.

Later I went back and read the poem. Here are two bits that sprang out at me, the first addressed to the reader and the second directly to Hughes' telephone:

"Do not think your future is yours, it waits upon ... the secret police of the telephone"

And

"you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone"

I always found this a powerful and frightening poem. Now, looking at the photo above, it seems doubly so.

I also remembered the Russian journalist Masha Gessen remarking that, when she went to meet Putin in his Kremlin office, she noticed that he had two telephones on his desk. "Just like Stalin did", I thought. In Putin's case, though, one of them was an old-fashioned KGB phone, identifiable by the fact there were no numbers on it.

*shudder*

Creepy.

That night I thought I might be woken up by nightmares of telephones screeching death wishes at me. It didn't happen ... for which I choose to thank the calming properties of Georgian wine, and the knock-you-out-cold properties of the 50-65% proof spirit known here as 'chacha'. More about chacha later ... but for now, suffice it to say that I felt fortunate to get a good night's sleep after staring down two of the deadliest phones that have ever existed.

See you :-)

Anthony.

Crazy-Ass Taxi World

One of these days, I swear I’m going to write a book about taxis. Or rather, not about the machines themselves, but about the experiences one can have in them.

A case in point: tonight I arrived in Tbilisi, capital city of the Republic of Georgia. And within half an hour of touching down, I was in Crazy-Ass Taxi World once again. 

Before we get to that, though: the actual name of this country is Sakartvelo, and how that got squeezed and prodded and mangled into Georgia I have no clue. But then, the radical anglicisation of country names is a phenomenon that often mystifies me. I mean, how did Daehan Minguk mutate into 'South Korea', for example? 

You see what I mean. 

Personally, I think we should’ve retained the word Sakartvelo in English, for three reasons:

a) it’s just a great word; 

b) when a person says "I'm going to Georgia", there are at least two places they could be talking about; and

c) The George we're dealing with here is none other than that grand-standing asshat who slayed the dragon. I'm not a big fan of his, as you'll discover in this rant about Prague.

But anyway ... Sakartvelo/what-we-bizarrely-call-Georgia is the ninth former Soviet republic that I’ve either visited or lived in or both. And out of all of them, it's the one with by far the best reputation. In fact, it has one of the best reputations of any country I can think of; I’ve never once met a person who’s been here and come away feeling anything less than rapturous about it. 

Given this unbroken stream of glowing recommendations, I’ve been meaning to get my ass here for ages. So I’m really quite excited to have finally relocated said ass to said republic.

Unfortunately, the holiday didn't kick off in ideal circumstances: the flight in was terrifying. Intense crosswinds forced the pilots to do a go-around (or maybe two, I’m not entirely sure), before finally bringing us in for a wild and rather precarious landing at Tbilisi international airport. A couple of times we went into freefall, losing what I’d judge to be around 100 metres (though when I say “judge”, what I really mean is “guess blindly, bringing exactly zero aeronautical expertise to bear on the matter"). 

The pity of that is, for me, freefall is actually a lot of fun, provided you can remove the PSDE (Possible Sudden Death Element) from it. If I’d been able to see half an hour into the future, so as to know that the landing would turn out ok, I could’ve relaxed up there and enjoyed that whole ‘stepping down off the clouds' sensation. 

Sadly, though, my powers of prognostication are not what they could be.  

On the up side, I had the pleasure of spending what I thought may have been my last moments on Earth with a very friendly and smiley Georgian woman called Nino, named (I congratulated myself on knowing) after the saint who brought Christianity here from the cave churches of Cappadocia some time around the 4th Century CE. 

I don’t know what the original Nino was like – probably quite dour and preachy, I’d imagine – but this Nino was quite a beauty, with a face that reminded me of a young Deborah Harry, only slightly more eastern-looking, if you can picture that. 

Despite the woolly pink top she was wearing, her naturally black, shoulder-length hair and her blood red lipstick – which she kept nervously re-applying as our Turkish Airlines 737-800 veered around the sky like a bee after its sixth gin & tonic – added a mildly gothic touch to her appearance. 

Most strikingly, though, Nino had a voice woven from pure silk; the kind of voice that makes you want to engage a person in conversation purely for the joy of hearing them speak. At one point, the thought actually flickered through my mind that if the plane started to plummet and it became obvious that we weren’t gonna make the runway, I should just lean in and kiss her.  

*ahem*

Sorry ... huge tangent there. 

(And btw, I almost certainly wouldn’t have done that. Even when looking directly into the face of death, I’m far too much of a ‘gentleman’ for my own good. Stupid me!)

So finally the pilots get us on the ground, and Nino and I part company at the baggage carousel. She goes off to stay with her family in some rural and no doubt picturesque region of Sakartvelo, where at least one vineyard-covered hillside is always within view, and where flush-cheeked women burst into polyphonic song as they climb the mountain slopes to milk their goats above the treeline. 

(If you’re wondering why I mentioned the polyphonic song there, have a look at this wonderful video, recorded by three-and-a-half Georgian women on their smartphone a couple of years back. It went viral at the time, and rightly so – regardless of your tastes, there's a pretty good chance it will blow you away and maybe even move you a little: 

So about two minutes post-Nino, a familiar-looking wheelie bag goes past me on the carousel, but when I inspect it more closely, I realise it can’t be mine. Four hours earlier in Istanbul, I’d put my bag on the check-in conveyor in near-perfect condition. This one, though it’s definitely the same brand and the same model, looks like it’s survived a mortar attack.

Another few minutes drag by, and all the passengers have left. The beaten, torn and apparently-slightly-melted wheelie bag comes around again on the carousel, and I think “Holy crap – it IS mine! What the hell have they done to it?!?” 

I take my poor bag off the carousel and try to stand it up. It falls over and lies prone on the white concrete tiles of the baggage reclaim area, looking feeble and dejected. I try to open it, but the zipper has been mashed. So I lift the wretched creature up by its handle and carry it to the Lost & Found desk. 

After a long wait, they advise me to take my enquiry to the on-site office of TFA (Turkish Fucking Airlines). 

(Note: that expletive is now an official part of their company name. Ok, not really – but it should be.) 

I think “Ok, fine, but I’m going to smoke first.”.

I go outside into the freezing, whipping wind. Immediately, I’m accosted by taxi drivers. The first one seems drunk. The second one is more alert, but perhaps a bit too alert – he borders on pushy and annoying.

Hoping to shake him off, I explain that I’ve got stuff to do before leaving the airport, and I’ll come back out when I’m done. But he has a better idea: he follows me back inside the arrivals hall (neatly side-stepping the security check – guess they recognise him there), to help me out. Of course, this is a time-honoured taxi drivers' trick: make yourself useful to your prospective passenger, so that they feel they ‘owe’ you, and then re-open negotiations in a far stronger position. 

Back inside, nothing goes especially well. The TFA office is closed, the ATM won’t take my main card (but it takes another card – phew!), and the information people advise me that I can probably speak to a TFA representative if I hang around until 1am.

Yeah, right.  

After almost two years ‘in country’, I've had time to acquaint myself with the nature of Turkish customer service. Your typical customer service rep is a rigorously-trained smiling machine. They smile, and they smile; their smiles appear to be looped like hold music, until the appropriate moment in your sob story arrives and they effortlessly switch to looking concerned and empathetic and absolutely determined to assist in any way they can.

And yet, in spite of all that, it’s quite clear that the person who coined the expression “Like getting blood from a stone” had never asked a Turkish customer service representative to change a faulty item. If he had, he would’ve known that making a lump of rock bleed is child’s play by comparison.

Plus it's 11pm, I've been travelling all day, and this is the first day of my holiday, damn it!

So at this point, I basically give up on TFA. The taxi driver is still there, and he’s helped me with some translations, so I give up on shaking him off as well. It’s obvious that he’s gonna be my ride into town tonight, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

We walk around to the back of the airport building, and he points to his car, a black Mercedes. It’s as black inside as it is out – all vinyl seats and shiny black buttons with mystifying hieroglyphs on them, supposedly indicating their functions. But the car smells of smoke and sweat and disrepair, and one of the rear-view mirrors has been completely destroyed – and I mean completely. There’s nothing but a tangle of wires and electrical tape sticking out of the driver’s side of the car, like the stump that might protrude from a robot’s shoulder if you ripped its arm off.  

He puts the key into the ignition, and says in Russian “What the hell?” Then to me, in English, “All the passwords changed”. 

For a moment nothing happens, and it seems like the ride is over. But somehow, he manages to override whatever system it is that’s preventing the car from starting (it seems to be related to a message on the dashboard display, saying the car is 7,800kms overdue for a service), and we proceed to the toll booth at the entrance to the airport car park.

The woman inside the booth asks the driver for 5 Georgian Lari (about $2), and the driver – who by now has introduced himself as “George” – winds down the window and remonstrates with her. Amazingly, she relents and lets us go. But then we’ve got another problem: the window won’t wind back up!

George instructs me to hold down one of the hieroglyphically-marked buttons, and as I do so, he puts one foot outside the car and a hand on either side of the glass pane. He shoves the window back into place by force – an action which, apparently, is somehow facilitated by my button-pressing.

And then we take off into the city ... at a million frikkin’ miles an hour.

George steers with his knees, using both hands to retrieve his tablet from the back seat. His brother has just called him, and he decides that answering the call is more important than retaining firm control over the steering wheel. 

“Yep”, I think, “No doubt about it. I’m definitely back in the Soviet space!”

I ask George what I should see while I’m in Tbilisi, and he starts talking but falters because of the language barrier. He then apologises for his English, and says “I can explain in Russian, but in English, I don’t know the words”. I tell him that I understand a little Russian, but I emphasise the  "a little” part, because I haven't had much practice in recent times.  

George says “If you only have a little, you probably won’t follow me” (which makes me warm to him a little, because too many Russian-speakers – just like their English-speaking counterparts – hear you speak three words of their language and immediately assume that they can communicate to you like they would to a native speaker). 

Then he starts talking – and I understand almost every word he says. He’s a clear, cogent speaker; his style is direct and simple, which, when you’re a foreigner in the Russosphere, makes him worth his weight in gold.  

A little while later, he apologises for his English again. I say (in Russian) “George, I used to live in Kazakhstan and I learned Russian there, but these days ...”

“Ah, you have no practice?”

“Yeah, no practice. So it’s great for me to have this chance to hear Russian. But I’ve forgotten lots of words, so be patient.”

Feeling encouraged by my desire to listen, George proceeds to give me a potted history of Sakartvelo in about two thousand words. We talk about Nino (the original one, not the cute one on the plane) and Cappadocia, the King who founded Tbilisi, how the city got its name (it’s a myth involving said king, along with a pheasant brought back from the dead by the magical healing powers of the warm springs in the area), the architecture, the influence of the Russians and the Persians and the Azeris, and a whole bunch of other stuff you’d normally have to pay a tour guide for. It was awesome.

Meanwhile, his driving hadn’t got any less scary.

So, after speeding down three-lane highways for about 20 minutes, using all the lanes available, and swerving suddenly down a couple of exit roads, George stops the car across the road from a late-night currency exchange place. “Give me your money”, he says.

If this was my first visit to an ex-Sov, I’d probably assume I was being robbed at this point. But I know from past experience what’s happening here.

See, despite that fact that the 'former Soviet space' covers something like one sixth of the world’s landmass and encompasses (as you might expect) an incredible degree of cultural, geographical, ethnic and religious diversity, there are at least a few details that are near-universal within it. One of them is that nobody ever seems to have any change.

George is no exception, and what's more, he knows that the ATM at the airport only dispenses 100 Lari notes. The ride costs 50. So he takes my crisp 100 to the exchange window, where the woman unceremoniously tells him to go away. She doesn’t have change either.

“Suka!” he says as he gets back into the car.

(This is literally Russian for “Bitch!”, but it’s a much stronger insult.) We take off again, hoping that my hotel will be able to break a hundred.

Then suddenly we’re in the city centre, and first impressions are flooding in through the window. They're quite overwhelming! There’s a 5th Century fortress floodlit on a hill, overlooking medieval walls. There are 19th Century merchant houses and gigantic Stalin-era brutalist hulks; there’s beauty, there’s decay (plenty of it!), there are wide expansive boulevards and poky, ancient lanes, and there’s an overriding feeling of exoticism about the whole place.

Whizzing through it as we are, I feel my heart in my throat again – but this time it’s all good. I’m gonna have so much fun getting to grips with this city!

I’m sure anyone who’s travelled widely has experienced this at least once: the 'first blush’ of seeing a new and mysterious place through the window of a taxi, and knowing that the days to come are going to reveal some fabulous secrets. Filtering those initial moments through the lens of a mad taxi driver – who seems likely to either a) kill you, b) ensure that your first hour remains among the most memorable you spend here, or c) possibly both – can be truly exhilarating.

And that’s why I’m going to write a book about taxis.

It’s going to be a compilation, though. So start thinking about your chapter now.

Bye!