General: Georgia

Before I start I feel compelled to issue this caveat. I do know that the political situation in Georgia is currently a little uneasy and I would understand that some readers might be put off by this. When I visited earlier this year, I experienced no problems although tourists are advised to be careful in certain areas in the eastern part of the country in the Caucauses. I hope that readers will read my review with an open mind. Georgia is safe for ...
...mainly some research before you go - I would not let the current events stop me from going back - even today.



Georgia is a small country tucked away between Europe and Asia. Until the beginning of the 1990s it was part of the Soviet Union, these days it is often at loggerheads with the nation that invested so much in it. Readers may recall events last winter when the Russia cut off gas supplies to Georgia in a row over ... more

Before I start I feel compelled to issue this caveat. I do know that the political situation in Georgia is currently a little uneasy and I would understand that some readers might be put off by this. When I visited earlier this year, I experienced no problems although tourists are advised to be careful in certain areas in the eastern part of the country in the Caucauses. I hope that readers will read my review with an open mind. Georgia is safe for tourists and so long as basic precautions are taken - mainly some research before you go - I would not let the current events stop me from going back - even today.

Georgia is a small country tucked away between Europe and Asia. Until the beginning of the 1990s it was part of the Soviet Union, these days it is often at loggerheads with the nation that invested so much in it. Readers may recall events last winter when the Russia cut off gas supplies to Georgia in a row over the huge amount of money the Russian power companies said Georgia owed them. Not content to just let Georgia go, the Russians have supported a breakaway state, Abkhazia, in the north west corner of Georgia and are embroiled in an ongoing war with rebels hiding out in the Caucuses which form the eastern border between Russia and Georgia.

Georgia, on the other hand, is keen to look to the west and has thrown its lot in with Europe and the United States. This is in contrast to its neighbours Armenia and Azerbaijan; Azerbaijan has been able pretty much to look after itself since it has vast reserves of oil an Armenia, with little to speak of in terms of industry or agriculture has maintained a firm friendship with Russia which keeps it afloat financially.

To understand Georgia, its people and, essentially, why its like it is, it is important to have at least a little knowledge of how it broke away from the Soviet Union. For many decades, Georgians actually fared better than most Soviet citizens because the land is so fertile and the Georgians are expert farmers. Even given the hardships caused by collectivization that saw many peasants suffer, Georgians still enjoyed a relatively high standard of living in terms of health and nutrition.

However, Georgia did have some industry but all of it was created in the Soviet era and it relied on raw materials that came from other parts of the Soviet Union. Therefore, when Georgia declared itself independent of the Soviet Union it found itself left with factories that could not produce anything because they had no materials with which to work and no wealth of its own to acquire them since everything had been going into a "collective pot". Furthermore, the poor goods were no match for the items which were being made elsewhere in the world on better and more modern machinery. It is hardly surprising that scrap dealing is the biggest industry in Georgia today; everywhere you travel you see disused factories and scrapyards, curious relics of a past that was never great to start with.

The Soviet past is also the reason that most people who have a garden or at least some outdoor space grow some of their own food; in an economy where people are badly paid and goods are scarce and expensive, it pays to have a means of provding for yourself and having someting to trade with others for the things you can't make yourself. Even on the waste ground below blacks of shabby flats, at least two or three peole will have a pig tethered with a length of ragged rope. In country villages, enterprising people set up trestle tables on the verge outside their houses selling homemade cheeses, fruit drinks (sold in any old bottle they can find) or even a whole skinned pig, hanging from a tree - one member of the family cuts off whatever people want until there is nothing left. Best of all is the area we named "Bread Boulevard" - a stretch of road bewteen the cities of Kutaisi and Batumi where there are about thirty women who have constructed little huts made of woven branches, each own containing a bread oven; when the bread is ready, the women stand at the side of the road waving these foot-long loaves at the passing cars. Our minivan driver slammed on the brakes to buy one which was passed through the window, it smelled delicious, though perhaps not worth going through the windscreen for.

Looking back on my time in Georgia this summer, it is the people I remember most. Introducing these wonderful characters is the perfect way to give an overview of a fascinating country.

TRANSPORT - BETTY ON THE JETTY

Betty (proabably not her real name, though who knows?) is the delightful lady who works in the ticket office at the ferry port at Poti; she sells tickets for the boat which sails to Sochi in Russia three times each week. She speaks no English - just Russian and Georgian. She also doesn't understand that if you tried your best to learn Russian before you come away you generally want to try to use it; instead she mimes for you to wait while she telephones someone she knows who speaks English. He doesn't work at the ferry port; she just knows him. From this point the phone is repeatedly passed back and forth through a tiny hatch until you have the information you came for. When she replaces the telephone with a flourish, its easy to see that Betty is delighted with her efforts.

Two days later when you arrive to buy your ticket, Betty greets you like an old friend and tells the other would-be sailors - who have been waiting for hours to buy their tickets - to move out of the way. You can protest as much as you want, Betty wants you to get preferential treatment. When the people in the queue hear the story from Betty, they dutifully move out of the way and will not hear your abject apologies for this queue-jumping.

This is typical of Georgia; unlike some of the other former Soviet countries, people are generally at ease with foreigners and will try to communicate even if you don't have a language in common. In Ukraine, for example, people in cafes and shops frequently pretend they can't see you so that they don't have to talk to you - even young people!

Having bought the tickets, Betty then gestured for use to take our rucksacks to the door to her office and she would watch them for us until the boat docked. Once again everyone else moved out of the way and once again we felt a but guilty because everyone else was dragging their numerous belongings around the terminal building. There is no left luggage area.

Georgia's public transport system looks, at first glance, fairly chaotic. However, it is cheap and every journey is an adventure. Although you might wonder how you are going to get from A to B when you see how many people are waiting for the bus and you can't make a reservation, you will get there. Only in the capital do you find conventional buses; elsewhere a "bus" is a minvan - not a minibus, you understand, but a converted van into which the owner has fixed whatever seats he can find. Your luggage may be squeezed under your seat or - if you're in an especially plush vehicle, the owner may have built a shelve in the the headspace.

As a tourist you'll be treated well - in effect this means that everyone has to make room for you and if you have a travelling companion the other passengers will be told by the driver to move so you can sit togther - protesting will fall on deaf ears. Beong a tourist, though does not guarantee priority service at the "motorway service station" where the coast to capital service stops; here its each one for himself. Thankfully this small wooden hut has food already laid out tapas style and you point to whatever takes your fancy. the driver doesn't even need to order; the waitress knows every driver on the route and gets his plates ready as he's turning off the motorway.

I say motorway and the Georgians do refer to this bumpy, potholed route as a motorway, but to western Europeans it really is in name only. You will be thrown all over the place, probably bang your head on the overhead shelves and feel quickly queasy in vehicles which seem never to have had functioning suspension. Still it's all part of the fun and brings you closer to your fellow passengers - usually into their laps!

You could consider going by train but nearly all services are night trains and its more enjoyable to see the scenery than to miss it in a sleeping car. We made one journey by train, overnight from the capital, Tbilisi, to Yerevan, capital of neighbouring Armenia. For travelling short distances, its far easier to use minivans.

They say that all roads lead to Rome - that may be true in Italy but in Georgia they lead to Tbilisi; anyone wishing to see more than just the capital will , no doubt, be doing some back tracking since it is virtually impossible to get anywhere without going through Tbilisi.

Bus stations are, on the whole, chaotic places which will terrify the first-time user. However, if you look helpless, someone will adopt you and help you find a vehicle bound for your chosen destination. There aren't really set timetables, buses leave when they are full or when the driver thinks there are no more fares in the offing.

Don't even consider hiring a car; it just isn't worth it. Best leave a seasoned driver to contend with the white-knuckle ride that is the Georgian highway system!

THE MAD LADY OF GORI - out and about

As I have already said, Georgians are usually willing to communicate with foreigners. Even more so if they have even a msattering of a foreign language; often they will tell you what languages they speak in the hope that even if you are not a native speaker, you may be able to hold a conversation in that language.

That is how we met Frau Gori (again not here real name, I should think); she lives opposite a great little restaurant in the centre of Gori - a spooky town best known as the birthplace of Stalin! None of the ladies who run the restaurant speak anything other than Georgian so they invited us into the kitchen for a mime and point session. It worked rather well but as we waited for our meal to be served, one of the staff took up the telephone and seconds later Frau Gori arrived. Nearer eighty than seventy, this frail old lady spoke excellent German and had come over to make sure we were happy and had everything we wanted. She was great company and we had fun chatting to her as she told us what its like to live such a notorious town.

The next morning we were browsing in the local market before we headed out of town to see a cave city. I was busy looking at soemthing when my partner nudged me to tell me that the lady standing next to him wanted to talk to me. She was perhaps between forty and fifty, had long coppery, curly hair and wore long flowing black clothes. In her hand she held a small transistor radio that, in hindsight, I am convinced was controlled by Old Nick himself.

"How do you from?!" she demanded of me in a rather frightening way. Now, I had two choices here; either she meant "Where are you from?" or "How do you do?" I had to decide quickly and plumped for the latter - people in this part of the world who have learned English from fairly ancient text books often use old-fashioned expresions so I thought this could be the case. Of course, I was wrong.

"Do you SPEAK English?" she spluttered, almost apoplectic with disgust. I tried to make amends but she didn't want to know, she just turned to my other half who she obviously considered to be in possession of a firmer grasp of the English language and demanded to know our origins. She wasn't impressed though and wandered off; we simply shrugged and continued our browsing.

A few minutes later we heard a terrible cackle - something between a crow's call and a scream. We looked about but couldn't place it. A minute or so later it came again. this time we looked up and saw the lady we'd been speaking to across the market, on the other side of the stalls we were looking at. We looked at each other and raised our eyebrows, each thinking we'd clearly had a lucky escape. But again and again we heard the cry and each time we quickened our pace. Eventually she appeared at the top of an aisle, exactly where we were heading; we turned on our heels but so did she. We hid behind a street lottery machine (another story) but she spotted us. Then we spotted two soldiers examining carrots (really!) and decided to station ourselves next to them for safety. However, when they heard the cackle, they looked up, horror stricken, cast down the carrots and sped off. Either this woman was known or Gorgian soldiers aren't over endowed with courage (I tend to think the former is closer to the truth). Eventually we managed to lose her by hiding in a disused kiosk but it was a close thing. I tell the story not purely as a warning, but to illustrate that Georgians really do want to meet foreign tourists.

Generally, though, the people who do want to talk to you want to help you. Of course, a fair number include making money as part of their remit but it is usually in the nicest of ways. So when you visit the cave city outside Gori, there are a couple of locals sitting by the entrance who start chatting to you with a view to being paid as a guide; they speak several languages, know everything about the caves and usually have no other income. The caves site has no formal guides so its a good idea to take up an offer.

Similarly, in Tbilisi, we were several times approached by young people who wanted to chat as we sat in cafes or in parks. After a whie it transpired that they wanted to offer their services as guides. They were never pushy and just wanted to help tourists, improve their own langauge skills and may be make a bit of money too. In the city this is usually fine; if travelling in the mountain regions, though, its best to use an accredited guide who knows the terrain and the political situation. Tourism is still pretty much in its infancy in Georgia and much of the work is done on a one to one level. Public transport is geared only to the needs of locals and rarely passes the sorts of places would want to see. However, by negotiating with taxi drivers you can usually get to where you want to go at good prices. Teaming up with an American staying at the same place as us, we hired a driver for a whole morning who took us to four sites we wouldn't otherwise have been able to get to.

These individuals are usually more flexible and imaginative than people who work in an official capacity. When we visited the country house of a notable nineteenth century aristocratic family, the two middle-aged ladies in charge of the place didn't have any change and seemed not inclined to find any. Instead they tried to insist we buy a leaflet that otherwise was available for nothing on the desk. We stood our ground and they were forced to rifle through their handbags in search of the change. Customer service is still an alien concept in Georgia with staff being unwilling to attempt to help you in any way if you do not have a good grasp of Georgian; a sense of humour is a must and if all else fails look lost and a passer by will often help.

Official tour guides are usually a complete waste of time but required because of the rules; usually middle-aged women who have been walking the dusty corridors of some badly lit museum for most of their working life, they make no effort to disguise their boredom. At the Stalin museum in Gori, one lady marched us through a room of interesting looking exhibits and planted us in front of Stalin's death-mask, saying "Photo, photo!" Since all the captions were in Georgian nd Russian, She assumed that none of the exhbits would be of interest to us and decided what she thought we would want to see instead. Having a good knowledge of twentieth century Russian history I was a little annoyed - I would have been perfectly able to use that knowledge along wth the smattering of Russian I have to piece together the exhibits. However, post-Soviet middle-aged ladies always know best!

It's not all musuems though. Georgia has some wonderful countryside which can be enjoyed without a guide; in the south of the country wine-making predominates and everywhere you will be plied with Georgian wine - it's terrible really, quite an ordeal! Ruined churches and monasteries abound in the south too, some with wonderful frescoes. Several of the monasteries have re-opened and are slowly being restored to their former beauty; you can visit them but men should not wear shorts and women will have toput a wraparound skirt thing on over trousers (these are supplied as you enter). The town of Borjormi is well worth a visit - it's well known as the home of the most popular mineral water in the Soviet Union. Active types will want to head to the Caucausus and have a crack at Mount Kazbeg - Georgia's most popular beer is named after it and is more my style, but a large number of tourists to Georgia go for the mountaineering. This is an activity that requires a guide since the unstable political situation is centred on this area. Georgia has a small and not especially appealing coastline on the Black Sea; sadly its best resort, Sokhumi, is now out of bounds unless one travels into Abkhazia and to do that one must first go into Russia and then back on yourself. Travel to Abkhazia also requires a letter of invitiation from a resident of Abkhazia.

VALENTINA - Eating and Drinking

Valentina is a waitress; not just any old waitress though. She works in a traditional Georgian restaurant which comprises a series of wooden sheds. Private dining is common in this part of the world. Most restaurants have curtained off booths where you can eat away from the gaze of others; nosy tourists like me, though, are torn between the thrill of dining in such a secret hideaway and wanting to watch what's going on elsewhere with my fellow diners.

Valentina's restaurant is in Tbilisi and is one of the most popular in the city, especially with foreigners and Tblisi has many of these in the form of NGO workers rather than tourists. Valentina is always desptached to deal with the foreigners and she does it in a no nonsense manner. There is no menu but Valentina "will be human menu". Everything she does is done briskly and impatiently but she gets the job done and you can't help feeling just a bit affectionate towards her, trying to break her with a joke. Valentina, though, is a consummate professional; she is there to serve traditional Georgian fare which is as simple and direct as her style.

Georgian food is hearty and comforting; the choice is often limited, not because there is a lack of produce, but because Georgians just do not have a particularly varied cuisine. Stews are common - the best being one which consists of lamb and green plums and most dishes are centred around meat. There are a few vegetarian dishes such as the classic aubergine strips stuffed with walnut paste and beetroot served with walnut paste, otherwise vegetarians have to settle for amasing a selection of items from the starters section. Fish is more vaired on the coast but tends to be sturgeon only inland.

Street food is limited to "khachapuri" - basically a cheese pastry which comes in lots of different forms, sometimes flaky pastry, sometimes a soft and chewy doughy bun filled with stretchy rubbery cheese. Another way to stave off the hunger pangs is to spend a few pence on a cone of roasted sunflower seeds; old ladies can be found selling these on every corner and serve them pages from old novels. They are really addictive and pavements everywhere are strewn with the discarded husks.

Georgian beer is good and cheap but my preference is for Baltika, the Russian beer which comes in nine types and is just as cheap. Georgian wine is rather sweet and not to everyone's taste; however, if you stay in someone's home you will have to try it and you do learn to get used to it. Wine-making is Georgia's biggest earner and people all over the former Soviet Union swear by it.

GEORGHE GIORGHADZE - ACCOMMODATION

Georghe and his family let out the top floor of their beautiful house in Kutaisi. He has three daughters who all speak English (and French and German and Russian) and a wife and mother who make delicious meals. For about £8.00 a night you have bed, breakfast and a feast of an evening meal. In the evening, Georghe and the girls will teach you Georgian board and card games; at weekends the whole family will come along on a trip out and Georghe will act as your guide. On the downside, Georghe does like to get out the photograph album and name each and every person who has ever stayed with them.

Georgians are very hospitable and a homestay is the perfect way to experience some real Georgian life. Just what you get for your moeny will be outlined at the start; don't hand over any money until you've seen the accommodation and understand what is included. At Georghe's the shower was downstairs and had to be lit by grandad when you wanted to use it, you then had to call him to turn it off when you were finished. The toilet was outside and in a brick built kiosk on the roof!

At Mrs Tushivilli's in Telavi, we had a rather grand bathroom to ourselves and the family didn't spend much time with us althought they were always happy to help us out with any questions on things like transport. Here it was a little more expensive but there is less competition.

Hotels run the gamut from unadulterated luxury in Tbilisi with all the big international chains to grubby little places by the sea. Best of all are the former state run hotels which are slowly being restored. The finest is in Gori where we seemed to be the only people staying. Our room had been refurbished and had a beautful balcony which looked out onto the main square (and Stalin's railway carriage!) = a bargain at around £14.00 for two people.

OVERALL

Georgia is a country which really deserves more visitors than it gets; however its poor infrastructure means that it can't currently cope with the demands that would create. We found that the official provisions made for tourists are rather poor and Georgia has yet to get out of the Soviet style of provision which was geared towards group travel.

Unofficial guides and private accommodation are much more flexible and offer more to individual visitors but I appreciate that many people are unsure about taking on a private guide, either because they are suspicious of the motives or because they suffer from the British horror of "paying staff". We certainly felt a bit unsure about it at first but grew to see that these enterpising people are simply trying to improve their lives and build up a business.

Georgia has plenty to offer the active and cultured tourist but its not the place to go if you like it all laid out before you. Even engaging a guide entails some groundwork - how much to pay, what you'll get for your money, will they stay overnight, will you pay for thier accommodation and meals and so on. Travelling independently in Georgia requires patience and humour; if you don't have these commodities in abundance Georgia is not for you.

PRACTICALITIES

The Georgian currency is the Lari - the exchange rate fluctuates around 4 Lari to the Pound. In Tbilisi and other major towns you can withdraw money from ATMs (assuming you have Mastercard or Cirrus facility). It is wise to carry some Dollars to change in case of lack of ATM or other emergency. Travel is laughably cheap and you can cross the country for about £8.00. Food is cheap outside the capital and accommodation is reasonable though price does not always reflect quality.

Strangely enough, the language is Georgian and most people also speak Russian. The Georgian alphabet is unique and virtually indecipherable unless you devote some major study to it. Signs are often in Russian and in Latin script which helps immensely. Anyone who speaks German will be at an advantage but English is fast becoming more widely spoken.

Georgia is not easy to get to. We entered from Turkey which is about the easiest land border to use if you do not arrive by air (no budget carriers serve Georgia as yet!). You can't enter from Russia by land because of the ongoing problems in Abkhazia and can only arrive from Russia by sea (I've taken the ferry and do NOT recommend it).

No visa is required for EU citizens staying less than three months. Americans, Australians and citizens of other countries should check the requirements.

And after all that, if you have read all of this award yourself a well deserved E!

 

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