thousand years.
I’d never been in the fortress before, which is sort of amazing considering it’s the oldest thing in the region that isn’t me. But most of the time when I was in Tbilisi I was down in the city either stopping to trade or passing through with goods, and if doing that ever landed me in the fortress it would have meant I had done something terribly wrong. So I was glad the first time I saw it up close was when Tchekhy directed me to the top of one of the towers.
There were some nice public walking paths that led from the city to the historic sites like Narikala, and I didn’t take any of them, which was really too bad because finding a decent pair of hiking boots had proven impossible, and that was what I needed.
Buying new clothes had been the first step. Just like Mirella, I had to try and go native, and that meant changing all of my clothing from head to toe, including my shoes. Anything less than that would have been unacceptable, not just because the possibility existed that I might be recognized because of my footwear, but because electronic tracking devices are real things that exist somewhere. This being true, Tchekhy assumed that they were definitely attached to my person and had to be shed before I could do anything else.
Getting out of the hotel room without anybody knowing I’d left was challenging, too, because even if I dressed in different clothing it wasn’t going to be hard figuring out who I was if I was the only guy entering or leaving the room. We were also several floors up with no fire escape, so there was really only one way in or out.
But it turns out if you order enough food from room service—and I always stay in hotels with room service because people bringing food to your bedroom is really the best thing about hotels, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—they send a big rolling cart, and you can ask them to leave it if you’re nice enough about it. And if you order all that food right when the kitchen closes you can keep the cart all night.
So at around six the next morning, Mirella pushed the cart to the elevator, took it down a couple of flights, and left it in a hallway. She then returned to the room and complained loudly to me about having to do that. She had to yell because that was the only way she could be heard over the shower that I was surely standing in at the time. Then she closed the hotel room door. An hour later a staff member found the strangely heavy cart in the hallway and wheeled it down to the kitchen, and that’s when I got out and left the building through the staff entrance.
For the next three hours I wandered the streets of Tbilisi, picking up different bits of clothing along the way while speaking half-decent Georgian—spending lari instead of US dollars—and doing everything I could to shake anybody who might still be following. Then I took to the hillside and climbed up to the fortress the hard way: through the woods. It was easily the most unpleasant way to get there, but I’m used to walking through forests so it wasn’t as awful as it could have been. And it was a decent way to guarantee nobody was following me on foot.
The section I’d been directed to find was one that had been closed off due to safety concerns. I was inclined to trust the warning signs, since even the parts of the place that were considered safe looked like they were a loud sneeze away from collapsing. As I stepped over the low barricade and climbed the narrow steps to a particularly alarming tower, I could only hope my friend knew more about the stability of the place than whoever owned the signs did.
The view was really nice. I was alone for more than an hour, looking at the city and wondering what it must have been like for one of the caliph’s soldiers to stand in that spot waiting for an attack that probably never came. The fortress was impregnable for the time, but you didn’t have to attack the fortress to win the city so it didn’t matter much.
I’d never been in the fortress before, which is sort of amazing considering it’s the oldest thing in the region that isn’t me. But most of the time when I was in Tbilisi I was down in the city either stopping to trade or passing through with goods, and if doing that ever landed me in the fortress it would have meant I had done something terribly wrong. So I was glad the first time I saw it up close was when Tchekhy directed me to the top of one of the towers.
There were some nice public walking paths that led from the city to the historic sites like Narikala, and I didn’t take any of them, which was really too bad because finding a decent pair of hiking boots had proven impossible, and that was what I needed.
Buying new clothes had been the first step. Just like Mirella, I had to try and go native, and that meant changing all of my clothing from head to toe, including my shoes. Anything less than that would have been unacceptable, not just because the possibility existed that I might be recognized because of my footwear, but because electronic tracking devices are real things that exist somewhere. This being true, Tchekhy assumed that they were definitely attached to my person and had to be shed before I could do anything else.
Getting out of the hotel room without anybody knowing I’d left was challenging, too, because even if I dressed in different clothing it wasn’t going to be hard figuring out who I was if I was the only guy entering or leaving the room. We were also several floors up with no fire escape, so there was really only one way in or out.
But it turns out if you order enough food from room service—and I always stay in hotels with room service because people bringing food to your bedroom is really the best thing about hotels, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—they send a big rolling cart, and you can ask them to leave it if you’re nice enough about it. And if you order all that food right when the kitchen closes you can keep the cart all night.
So at around six the next morning, Mirella pushed the cart to the elevator, took it down a couple of flights, and left it in a hallway. She then returned to the room and complained loudly to me about having to do that. She had to yell because that was the only way she could be heard over the shower that I was surely standing in at the time. Then she closed the hotel room door. An hour later a staff member found the strangely heavy cart in the hallway and wheeled it down to the kitchen, and that’s when I got out and left the building through the staff entrance.
For the next three hours I wandered the streets of Tbilisi, picking up different bits of clothing along the way while speaking half-decent Georgian—spending lari instead of US dollars—and doing everything I could to shake anybody who might still be following. Then I took to the hillside and climbed up to the fortress the hard way: through the woods. It was easily the most unpleasant way to get there, but I’m used to walking through forests so it wasn’t as awful as it could have been. And it was a decent way to guarantee nobody was following me on foot.
The section I’d been directed to find was one that had been closed off due to safety concerns. I was inclined to trust the warning signs, since even the parts of the place that were considered safe looked like they were a loud sneeze away from collapsing. As I stepped over the low barricade and climbed the narrow steps to a particularly alarming tower, I could only hope my friend knew more about the stability of the place than whoever owned the signs did.
The view was really nice. I was alone for more than an hour, looking at the city and wondering what it must have been like for one of the caliph’s soldiers to stand in that spot waiting for an attack that probably never came. The fortress was impregnable for the time, but you didn’t have to attack the fortress to win the city so it didn’t matter much.
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