Today has been my favourite day of the holiday, I know I said that yesterday, but today has surpassed it. It was a tour west again, this time to see mostly abandoned Soviet architecture in Chiatura, plus some unusual places of interest. Our wonderful guide was Sally, plus we had a driver and just two other tourists, a couple from Amsterdam, Hanukah and Sasha who were very interesting. As always, the traffic was bad in Tbilisi, this is because of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine resulting in 60,000 Russians moving to Georgia to get away from the war. It’s not just about avoiding fighting, but because all living conditions for the Russian people have vastly declined with the worldwide sanctions and their bank accounts are suspended. Georgia is a good place for them as it’s ... read more

Today was a relaxation day, one to recharge after all the recent day trips, ready for more tomorrow. Some years ago, I’d planned our itinerary for our self tour around Japan, ensuring not a minute was wasted. By the last few days, I was sitting in a park in Tokyo, absolutely exhausted and looking forward to the flight home so I could sit still for hours. It was awful feeling like that, when in a place as exciting as Tokyo, so since I’ve always tried to ensure we have chill days. It is meant to be a holiday after all! So no alarms were set and we didn’t leave the accommodation until around 10.30! It’s a nice enough place, but not somewhere we’d want to hang around at all day.My plan was too have a slow ... read more

Today we had a self proclaimed friendly guide, Gorba and a very safe driver, Archie who can speak English but chooses not to. Koba certainly was very friendly and talkative. He also is an artist and created drawings for each of us whilst in the moving vehicle. We may laugh now, but in 10 years they’ll be worth €300 each. Our vehicle for the day was an 8 seater 4-wheel drive and we certainly needed it when later we were off road in the Causcasus mountains. The other tourists were Pavel from Poland, Alex from Russia and a couple I thought were from the UK, but it turned out that the guy only sounded English but was from India. Gorba was quick to point out that we’re all friends and that no one was responsible for ... read more

Today was our second day trip and it started at 7am with a very different company than yesterday, the guide was more of a driver than guide. Apparently he has been a truck driver in Coventry, they must have given a collective sigh of relief when he left. There were only five tourists, so we were in a six seater car, one guy was in the front (Oleg), plus a couple who live in Dubai, the lady, Darli is from Burma and the guy from Algeria, I think his name is Mahmoud. Oleg and driver-guide were chatting in Russian, everyone in Georgia learns Russian and English in school and I think our driver-guide maybe skipped many of the English classes but turned up to Russian. The sun was shining as we drove through brown and green ... read more

Having spent a lot of wedge on the 24 hour Hop On Hop Off bus yesterday, we were determined to do more hopping today before time ran out. We meant to get off at Rose Revolution Square (named after a recent revolution that spilled no blood) but it was unnoticeable and we got off somewhere on Kote Marjanishvili St, as it looked interesting. But it wasn’t that interesting, in fact we came across our first McDonalds. We had previously noted that there weren’t many American food chains in Tbilisi, but I guess the old town was the wrong area for that. However there’s lots of Georgian eateries in old town, which I hope means that’s what tourists want as opposed to the things they can get back home easily. Walking down to the Dry Bridge Market, ... read more