Day 15 Tblisi Georgia. Marshrutka Minibus Madness

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Day 15 Tblisi Georgia. We survive a five hour marshrutka minibus ride and visit old memories.



The Cascade Hotel Yerevan is spot-on, we reserve a further two nights for our return from Georgia before our flight back to Paris.



A woman driver booked by the hotel takes us to the marshrutka bus station sited below the Genocide Museum. We’re more than an hour early for our reservation but there is a seven seater ready to go with our final two places filling the bus.

So the adventure to Tblisi begins.

A middle aged Chinese HR manager shares our back seat. In front is a retired Canadian/Armenian couple, an Armenian old guy, and by the 35 year old driver and a 73 year old American from Seattle.

Our pilot drives at 100km per hour whenever possible, even in residential areas. 50/60km per hour is the legal limit. He travels the route daily so he knows where the speed cameras and places for police cars to hide. His technique is to tail-gate each vehicle that gets in his way, one metre behind at 80 kmph seems his safety limit, then he juts out into the oncoming lane and drops a gear, whether or not there is anyone approaching.

The American man shuts his eyes and prays. I take the philosophical approach. If he does this daily and survives, the odds are low that this is the journey that he writes off his vehicle.

We stop in a very smart bakery / café. The break is overly long, but the driver is trying to get off with the Chinese woman using a Siri phone translation into Chinese text and is so insistent that he seems to have lost track of time.

The border is straightforward enough.

It’s 1hr 30mins from there to Tblisi and we arrive 15.00hrs.

The bus base in Tblisi turns out to be very close to our hotel but the taxi driver finds it difficult to find despite our sat nav advice. We could have walked but this is the oldest part of Tblisi with cobbled streets and difficult terrain for wheeling cases, so I think we made the best decision.



Old Tblisi Five Rooms is our hôtel. We’re at the top of the three storey building with a view of the Public Services Building, one of many organic looking pieces of modern architecture in Tblisi with a white pancake roofs covering glass. We’re very close to everything, excellent.



So, after some bread, tomato, cucumber and a cup of tea in our room we head out to find old haunts. We were here in 2016.

The Ryke Park is where I first started to gather my photo collection of municipal gardeners at work. It happens in every city in the world but Newcastle upon Tyne, my home city......... (I exaggerate).

With spades and hoes, they were just finishing planting Ryke Park in 2016. It’s now a green paradise with hedging and dedicated ares for leisure and sculptures.

Over the Freedom Foot Bridge and a walk around the back streets and lanes to the Arab Baths. Nearly everywhere has been renovated in seven years.

We failed to find our 2016 hôtel for old times sake, but settle in the Blue Fox Bar for a glass of Georgian wine. Marion opts for an Amber Wine with three frozen grapes in the bottom of the glass.

The signature feature of the Tblisi old buildings is fretwork on wooden balconies which tack on to the side of red terracotta brickwork. The Blue Fox is a good example with duck egg blue paintwork.

We walk along to Restaurant Alley and eat Khachapuri and salad with a bottle of Natural Red Wine, the restaurant’s speciality. In France it would be called Bio, in Britain, Organic. The ‘Natural’ tag may refer to the Georgian traditions of slow fermentation in terracotta in the earth. It was 3x as expensive as the best restaurant wine we had in Armenia and not quite as good....... but still a bit special.



To bed.

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