moustache and grey, slicked-back hair that curled around the collar of a black polo-neck jumper.
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. ‘How much?’
He gobbed off at me and of course I didn’t understand a word. Most of it sounded like Swahili, with the odd click and guttural embellishment here and there.
He remembered to turn on his headlights while he was talking, and we picked out a 110 hardtop Land Rover parked at the roadside. It was unmistakably Brit military; dull green, with MoD plates.
The driver had left his wagon and was leaning against the wing. Bulked out with a blue waterproof jacket, shaved head, stonewashed jeans and very smart, still sparklingly clean Nikes, he had to be American. Maybe he was dropping off or collecting ‘advisers’ for the Partnership for Peace programme.
I was still none the wiser about the fare as we followed a wide dual carriageway towards the city centre, just over ten miles away. I only knew that because of what I picked up off the web. There were no road signs at all, just billboard scaffold over the road that had probably once carried posters celebrating the wonders of communism. Now they seemed to be saying the same sort of thing about Coke and Sony.
As we reached the outskirts of the city, drab concrete apartment blocks sprang up on each side of the road. They’d been given a recent lick of paint, but not in any colour you’d have chosen sober. Some of the giant cubes were green, some purple. One was yellow.
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting, good roads and fresh paint. To cap it all, even at this time of the morning, in the dark, there were women out sweeping the road with the sort of brooms that Harry Potter played Quidditch on.
A convoy of olive-green military trucks towing artillery pieces passed us, going the other way, as we came into the city proper. I knew Tbilisi lay at the foot of three massive, steeply inclined hills. The river Mtkvari ran through it, north to south. We were entering from the flatter ground to the east.
As it became more built up, so did the number of dogs. They were everywhere, if not loose and pissing against every car within reach, then on a leash and being treated to their early morning walkies.
A blue-and-white was blocking the way. The two guys inside the shiny new VW Passat had their heads down for a nap; by the look of things, they’d got a bit tired running stripy police tape from each wing mirror to the wall on either side. My grey-haired friend peered through his screen, cursed and hung a right.
The smoothly surfaced road immediately gave way to a minefield of water-filled potholes big enough to hide a bus in. My driver joined all the others slaloming from side to side to avoid them. I wasn’t sure how some of them managed it, without any headlights.
This was more like the Georgia I’d been expecting. Maybe the tourist board didn’t want to deprive the punters of the authentic gulag experience, and the police were there to make sure there was no chance of us missing it. At least there were a few road signs now, in Russian Cyrillic and a language I supposed was Georgian, though the words looked more like rows of twisted paperclips.
The taxi driver crossed himself every time we passed a church. I couldn’t tell if it was out of respect, or alongside a prayer of thanks for surviving the manic driving of his fellow countrymen and the Jurassic-scale potholes.
We crossed the Mtkvari, the fastest – and brownest – river I’d ever seen, to the west bank and the city centre. The Marriott was on the main drag, another stretch of flat, freshly laid tarmac that paralleled the river. It looked every bit as big and impersonal as any I’d stayed in, though I could see it was one of the newest and smartest in the chain before I’d even got out of the cab.
Chandeliers the size of hot-air balloons hung from the ceiling of an atrium eighty feet high. Everyone inside looked as though they’d just stepped out of an Armani
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. ‘How much?’
He gobbed off at me and of course I didn’t understand a word. Most of it sounded like Swahili, with the odd click and guttural embellishment here and there.
He remembered to turn on his headlights while he was talking, and we picked out a 110 hardtop Land Rover parked at the roadside. It was unmistakably Brit military; dull green, with MoD plates.
The driver had left his wagon and was leaning against the wing. Bulked out with a blue waterproof jacket, shaved head, stonewashed jeans and very smart, still sparklingly clean Nikes, he had to be American. Maybe he was dropping off or collecting ‘advisers’ for the Partnership for Peace programme.
I was still none the wiser about the fare as we followed a wide dual carriageway towards the city centre, just over ten miles away. I only knew that because of what I picked up off the web. There were no road signs at all, just billboard scaffold over the road that had probably once carried posters celebrating the wonders of communism. Now they seemed to be saying the same sort of thing about Coke and Sony.
As we reached the outskirts of the city, drab concrete apartment blocks sprang up on each side of the road. They’d been given a recent lick of paint, but not in any colour you’d have chosen sober. Some of the giant cubes were green, some purple. One was yellow.
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting, good roads and fresh paint. To cap it all, even at this time of the morning, in the dark, there were women out sweeping the road with the sort of brooms that Harry Potter played Quidditch on.
A convoy of olive-green military trucks towing artillery pieces passed us, going the other way, as we came into the city proper. I knew Tbilisi lay at the foot of three massive, steeply inclined hills. The river Mtkvari ran through it, north to south. We were entering from the flatter ground to the east.
As it became more built up, so did the number of dogs. They were everywhere, if not loose and pissing against every car within reach, then on a leash and being treated to their early morning walkies.
A blue-and-white was blocking the way. The two guys inside the shiny new VW Passat had their heads down for a nap; by the look of things, they’d got a bit tired running stripy police tape from each wing mirror to the wall on either side. My grey-haired friend peered through his screen, cursed and hung a right.
The smoothly surfaced road immediately gave way to a minefield of water-filled potholes big enough to hide a bus in. My driver joined all the others slaloming from side to side to avoid them. I wasn’t sure how some of them managed it, without any headlights.
This was more like the Georgia I’d been expecting. Maybe the tourist board didn’t want to deprive the punters of the authentic gulag experience, and the police were there to make sure there was no chance of us missing it. At least there were a few road signs now, in Russian Cyrillic and a language I supposed was Georgian, though the words looked more like rows of twisted paperclips.
The taxi driver crossed himself every time we passed a church. I couldn’t tell if it was out of respect, or alongside a prayer of thanks for surviving the manic driving of his fellow countrymen and the Jurassic-scale potholes.
We crossed the Mtkvari, the fastest – and brownest – river I’d ever seen, to the west bank and the city centre. The Marriott was on the main drag, another stretch of flat, freshly laid tarmac that paralleled the river. It looked every bit as big and impersonal as any I’d stayed in, though I could see it was one of the newest and smartest in the chain before I’d even got out of the cab.
Chandeliers the size of hot-air balloons hung from the ceiling of an atrium eighty feet high. Everyone inside looked as though they’d just stepped out of an Armani
Similar Books
