Dali
After my Bosnian travel nightmare last year, I wasn't looking forward to more of the same on my way to the Caucasus. There are people I know who believe that such 'adventures' are an essential part of my travels - like the bubbles in bubbly - but I'm not too sure about that. In an effort to prove them wrong, I'd booked my flight on the more respectable Lufthansa and had arrived at the airport a good 4 hours before my flight to camp out at the departures lounge so I was reasonably confident I was going to be able to board my flight.
I did board my flight, which was delayed for such a long time that I got to hang out with the Singapore women's inline hockey team who just so happened to be at T2, Heathrow en route to Bilbao for the World Championships - I'd spotted them, amazingly enough, by the proliferation of Team Singapore track suits that flooded the waiting room. Unable to determine which sport they played by observation (definitely not swimmers - too small, not netballers/basketballers - too short, not runners - wrong build), I had to satisfy my curiosity by asking somebody what it was they played. A bizarre conversation (I thought everyone was in secondary school when most of the team were pushing 30; they thought I was at least 25 when I'm 21 - sport must keep people young. Apparently I wasn't the only one who was misled - the taxi driver who drove them to Changi asked a few of them whether they wanted to study arts or science in secondary school; my experience with public transport - by age 12, bus drivers began asking me for my student pass and by secondary school all taxi drivers were convinced I was either in university or working) and several games of chor tai tee later, the gate for my flight was finally announced. I bid my newfound friends goodbye, promised to visit them at their Tampines training ground and made my way to the gate. The plane finally took off more than an hour late. With my scheduled time (45 minutes) in transit now in negative territory, it seemed that I was destined to miss my connecting flight to Tbilisi from Munich.
Roused from my sleep on the plane by an ebullient Kiwi woman determined to harass the air crew into ensuring she got to Tbilisi, things began to look up. Steph is incredibly well-travelled, a consequence of working on design in the developing world. She is also what Singaporeans would call a kancheong spider, the exact kind of person one needs to get someone who's down with the flu and severely sleep-deprived, i.e. me, across the entire length of Munich airport departures, rucksack and all, within 5 minutes. Our companion: a lovely Canadian guy who turned out to be the chap whose message on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum I had considered replying to - small world.
Tbilisi airport wasn't the Soviet monolith I'd expected, but a newly-built gleaming modern building that looked more like Charles De Gaulle in France or the controversial new airport in Bangkok than Moscow airport or depressing Heathrow. Assailed by the (welcome) heat as I stepped off the plane, it seemed that the most eventful bit of this little jaunt from London was going to be that mad sprint in Germany - even the visa queue was very short.
It was too early to rejoice, of course. For a start, it took more than an hour to get my visa - they cleared two flights worth of passengers before the four people in the visa line finally got through. In the words of the Russian woman I was with, softened probably, from years of living in London, "Nothing works here - it's so illogical!". Her husband looked suspiciously like a Russian millionaire. Perhaps it was their British passports and expensive clothes, well, expensive everything. I found their conversation about her 'occupation' particularly amusing.
"I'm unemployed," she said matter-of-factly.
"No, you're a housewife," he said.
"No, I'm unemployed," she repeated.
"Housewife."
"Unemployed."
He took the form from her and wrote 'housewife'.
She laughed.
My bags also failed to arrive. Steph rounded up the troops, i.e. the people who'd arrived from London, and got us all to fill out forms. Turns out the other people who'd come from London were an American couple who'd just spent the last 1.5 years cycling around Europe and Asia. Asked about their plans for the night (it was 0330 h Georgian time), they replied they were probably going to camp outside the airport. "After all, that's what we did in West China, we camped by the tarmac, it made sense at the time".
My lovely Georgian hosts had been waiting patiently for me the entire time. I explained my situation to the only one of the group who spoke English, Miro, as they led me to the car-park. Our transport was an old mashrutska (minivan) which had a broken windscreen and smelt like a truckload of post-outfield NS men. It was a fully functional vehicle, however, and I sat in wonder as they drove through Tbilisi, a city which could afford to pay its civil servants a mere US$100 a month but somehow found the money to bathe all its major historical monuments in neon light all night long.
I was to stay at the house of the director of Temi, just off the main street of the city. After the magnificent facades of Parliament, city council, the Rustaveli Theatre and opera house, crumbling walls and broken squat toilet separated from the makeshift kitchen by a threadbare cloth wasn't quite what I'd expected. The ancient but perfectly-preserved Soviet car parked outside should have suggested otherwise - like so many other things with beautiful facades in this country, it didn't work any more. Or did it?
