Here we are! Arriving in Georgia! I thought a good place to start would be with my first evening and what I thought of Tbilisi on first impressions.
I was there for Traverse 24, a conference and networking event for travel creators. I’ve had my eye on it for a few years and always been inclined to feel like I’m a small-time hobbyist who absolutely should not be among the pros (the first tour on Tuesday kind of confirmed this feeling…) but I wanted to go to Tbilisi and when I looked at the speakers, I started to realise the pros I was comparing myself to are the people on the stage, not the people in the audience. Besides, I had a second stream, a newborn baby YouTube channel and whatever your follower count, if you’re making videos, you can definitely call yourself a creator. Yeah, I know, if you’ve been blogging twice a week for eight years, you’re a creator too. It’s about creation, not about how much money you’re making from it.
“Traverse” means I was there for the conference over the weekend but they also put on pre-conference “midweek experiences”, post-conference longer trips, casual Q&A and networking meetups and a drinks/party event every evening, all included in the ticket prices. Most of the midweek tours were run by the Georgian tourist board with their intention being that this small army of travel creators would put Georgia on the world’s tourism map. Flights, accommodation, transport pass, sulphur baths and trips to the supermarket were on me; everything else was included. So that’s where we’re starting, with me coming in to Tbilisi International Airport late Monday afternoon.
If they want to bring tourists to Georgia, someone’s going to have to take a look at flights. Tbilisi International is far more active by night than by day. There are no direct flights from the UK. Istanbul is the easiest change but about 90% of flights from the west get in between 1am and 4am. I spent two weeks fretting over how not to arrive in a strange place in the middle of the night and two days examining options with a spreadsheet before settling on a lunchtime flight from Cyprus. Unfortunately, to get to Larnaca in time for that flight, I needed to be there the night before, so I arrived the night before that so it felt less like I’d spent on a hotel just to sit and wait for a plane. Make a mini weekend of it. Adapt halfway to the time difference.
Thus at 5.30pm, Tbilisi International was really quiet. I’d done my research but was still relieved I hadn’t missed anything vital like the need for a visa and got through no problem. There was literally no one at baggage reclaim – I was on hand luggage because of my colourful arrangements for getting home again – and there I was in Arrivals.
I planned to get the bus. I knew exactly how to do that, thanks to this blog post from Wander-Lush, who lives there. I won’t repeat the details but in short, buy a transport ticket from the Bank of Georgia kiosk, put a subscription on it at the automatic machine, go outside to the end and get on bus 337, press card to reader and get carried to Tbilisi. As I was getting my bearings and finding the kiosk, I was hassled for a taxi (“No.” “OK. In 15 minutes, maybe.” “No.”) but that happens at any airport. I wasn’t expecting the kiosk to be cash-only but otherwise it all went as described.
The first real surprise was the dogs. There were dogs outside the airport. I didn’t really take it in at this point but once I was on the bus, a large, grubby and very polite canine gentleman came to visit me. I assumed he belonged to someone until he was chased off. Twice. Turns out Georgia has a bit of a stray dog problem. I think it’s fairly well-known that this is a thing in Romania but here it is in Georgia too. Georgian dogs are better. They have a yellow tag in their ear and that means they’re vaccinated against rabies, dewormed and flea-treated. They could all do with a bath but they’re otherwise quite respectable animals. People routinely leave out food for them and I never saw one that looked thin or mangy. They’re almost more like communal dogs than strays, and they’re all very good-natured. I saw plenty of aggression in the Romanian strays. Not a hint of it in Georgia. They’ll come and touch your leg ever so gently with their noses and then stand there quietly, tail wagging, while you scratch their ears.
Second was the setting of Tbilisi. The route to the city is along a highway that makes a hairpin turn and descends into a narrow valley where the city sprawls along the banks of the river and the sides of the mountain, and somehow you can’t see it until you’re pretty much in it – and this is at 7pm, when it’s dark and the whole place is glowing. According to Wander Lush, the bus would take me to the central station, from where I’d take the metro four stops south – unless I noticed Liberty Square, in which case I’d jump off early and it would only be one metro stop. Following the route on my phone, it dawned on me that the only way to get from the blue dot to Liberty Square was through my nearest metro station. Surely? Yep. Jump off at Avlabari, no metro stops needed. Thanks, Tbilisi, that literally couldn’t have been any easier.
It was a five minute walk to my hotel. I spotted a patch of rubble, a suspected bombsite or gas explosion, on the way, looked at the map, went “…I’m going to overlook this, aren’t I?” Yes, I was. I was next door. The hotel occupied the fourth floor and although it sells itself on its views across the river from the breakfast room, I was indeed at the back overlooking the bombsite. I also had a glimpse of the TV tower and funicular around the building’s essential services and could look back up to the big hotel complex at the top of the city from the other end of my balcony. It was a pretty good room, although it had a giant step into the room, onto the balcony and up and back down into the bathroom. It’s a miracle I never fell over any of them in the course of the next six days. I had a large shower and a big fridge (that thing hummed and clattered all night) and I was quite impressed with the room – and later, with the location. The street needs some work. If I was a developer, I’d buy the bombsite and build a fancy little boutique hotel there. Five minutes from the metro and endless bus connections, ten minutes from the Old Town? Ideal!
But I still had things to do. I needed food and I wanted to go to the big supermarket one metro stop north at Liberty Square. There were plenty of mini Spars and Carrefours but for stocking up, the nearest big one was Georgian brand Goodwill. I had to tackle the metro.
No problem! I’d dealt with the transport card and 7-day subscription at the airport so I bee- booped in and went down the escalator. Yes, very ex-Soviet, right down to the little old lady in the box at the bottom. There’s a big sign in Georgian and English listing the stops with arrows pointing to the right platform. Again, really couldn’t be easier. When it arrived, the metro train was pretty much what I’d travelled on in Kyiv and in Russia but it had USB chargers by the doors. Never saw anyone using them but it was a nice touch. Returning was the same – Tbilisi has two short metro lines that cross in just one place and if the three stations I saw are indicative of the whole lot, they’re all much the same. Very underdecorated. If you want to make Georgia a tourist hotspot, you could do worse than turning those blank canvases into underground art, like in Stockholm and Moscow.
Liberty Square’s shopping centre was a shopping centre. The big supermarket, unsurprisingly, turned up on the bottom floor. Not the biggest mall supermarket I’ve ever been in but it supplied most of the basics. Local Carrefour for crusty bread but to be fair, it was 8pm by now and maybe that would have been different twelve hours later.
So my first impression of Tbilisi was that getting around is pretty easy, a glimpse of lots of pretty lights, the first proper food I’d had in two days (I’ll tell you about Cyprus much later) and a feeling that I was looking forward to getting to know this place by daylight.
Coming up next: a sulphur bath is a Tbilisi staple and you bet I had a few goes.