“You will have to give me just one passport,” the officer at the passport-control desk of Tbilisi airport’s departure terminal barked at me.
“But this is actually a single passport. The previous passport is just stapled together since it has active visas on it,” I replied, opening the current passport at the front page that needed to be scanned.
“You just don’t understand, do you? I can’t check the passport if it’s stapled together. You open the passports right now or get out of the line and don’t waste my time!”
He was really getting into his stride now.
I endeavoured to extricate my new passport from the iron grip of the staples and handed it over. He studied it closely and came to precisely the conclusion I knew he would.
“I don’t see any Georgian visa here. What visa are you travelling on?”
“The visa is in my old passport. I have an American visa.”
“You have a what…?”
” If you have an American visa, you are free to enter Georgia without a Georgian one”, I explained, fervently hoping that the gentleman behind the passport-control desk knew this. His expression changed. He began flipping through the pages.
“I don’t see any Georgian entry stamp. Where is it?”
… Georgia rarely settles for the first impression: inconvenience gives way to kindness, fog to mountains, and suspicion to hospitality.
Well, of course I could not help him search for it, since he still had my passport.
Beside him sat a slightly elderly lady servicing another queue. Our conversation had become richly endowed with feeling and had evidently attracted her attention. She reached across, took my passport from him and, with a few practised flips, found the stamp. A reluctant squeak of metal hitting paper followed as my immigration officer stamped me out of Georgia.
It was my final encounter on Georgian soil, and curiously emblematic of much that had preceded it: deliberate cussedness confounded by unexpected kindness.
The beginning had not been too auspicious either. It had been a relief to leave Kolkata, heaving with the delirious Durga Puja crowd and reeling from an unprecedented late-September cloudburst. We landed in Tbilisi in fine fettle, only to discover that the airport Wi-Fi upon which our carefully researched transport arrangements depended did not work.
Two young women, whom we guessed might be from India, noticed our predicament. They were Indian medical students and readily offered their phones as Wi-Fi hotspots, while warning us against the taxi drivers circling outside. Within minutes, we had booked a Bolt.
Georgia had begun with an inconvenience and been corrected by strangers.
The pattern would repeat.
Near our hotel in Tbilisi we encountered Khachapuri for the first time, sold through a slit in a wall by an elderly woman who knew hardly any English but was an eager communicator. We bought happily and ate even more happily.
That evening produced the opposite discovery. Across the street we ate what would remain our worst meal in Georgia. The Khinkali possessed a monumental mound of dough in the centre and proved considerably tougher on the jaw than the delicate Tibetan momos familiar to us. The Khachapuri was obnoxiously salted. The warning signs had been there: hardly any locals were eating inside and the menu insisted on calling Adjarian Khachapuri “Achapuri” Khachapuri.
We should have turned on our heels and run for our lives.
…On the Georgian Military Road, the fog concealed almost everything – until it lifted for a few minutes and revealed why the journey mattered.
But every Khinkali has a Badrijani lining. It was there that we discovered the scrumptious eggplant-and-walnut rolls we would order again and again throughout the country.
Our hotel supplied another lesson. We arrived before check-in and were told the room would be ready shortly. We returned after two. It was not.
After another half-hour on the lobby sofa, I asked again. Instead of an explanation, the receptionist requested full payment for both nights. I insisted upon seeing the room first. With some chagrin, he hauled himself upstairs and, on the way, educated me in the important principle that visitors should not expect a room to be ready *at* the stated check-in time, merely sometime after it.
Being thus enriched by this knowledge, and finding the room finally ready, I agreed to pay.
The initial energetic interactions notwithstanding, the hotel turned out to be not bad at all. That, too, would become familiar: Georgia repeatedly made a first impression and then proceeded to argue against it.
We returned to Tbilisi twice during the journey, each time finding another version of it. Ancient ramparts looked across the river towards the modern city. Exquisite balconies clung to dilapidated buildings. Graffiti appeared beside old masonry; traffic snarls dissolved around serene churches; Khachapuri survived quite comfortably beside whatever food happened to be fashionable that week.
The city resisted being tidied into one period or one character. The more we returned to it, the less our first conclusions seemed adequate.
But the Caucasus was calling us northwards.
I don’t know where Google sources its weather data for Kazbegi, but it was obviously, patently wrong. As our ten-year-old Subaru Crosstrek wound upwards from Gudauri towards Jvari Pass, the highest point on the Georgian Military Road, we were sucked into a vortex of swirling fog. The road disappeared ahead of us.
Coming from India, we are not accustomed to driving on snow, and Google’s predictions of snow and sub-zero temperatures had almost caused us to abandon the idea of renting a car. Instead, the old Subaru was doing famously.
…In Stepantsminda, hospitality needed almost no common language: an elderly host simply climbed the stairs and made room for a family of strangers.
The fog devoured the road but also disposed of the forecast.
What had looked beforehand like a questionable decision was becoming one of the most memorable drives of my life.
Near Gudauri stands the Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument, built during Soviet times to celebrate precisely what its name suggests. Elsewhere in Georgia we had already encountered rather less affectionate contemporary opinions of Russia.
When we began trudging towards the monument, however, politics itself seemed to have disappeared. The enormous structure was merely a shimmering silhouette inside dense fog, its outline barely visible – almost a metaphor for the relationship it was built to celebrate.
As we drew nearer, the colours of its mural emerged from the greyness. We had spent three Lari on parking and were surely not going to allow a puny fog to deprive us of some well-earned selfies.
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Then, just as we were preparing to leave, something shifted.
The fog lifted in one swoop.
Weak afternoon sunlight broke through for only a few minutes, but it was enough. Below us, the Devil’s Valley appeared in autumn colours – green, yellow and rust descending towards turquoise water, cloud still pouring between the mountains.
Then the fog dropped the curtain again.
We found our way back to the Subaru and continued towards Jvari Pass, the car hugging curves whose presence we sometimes guessed more than saw. The Russian border lay forty kilometres ahead. Before it was Stepantsminda, where we would spend the night.
…For an Indian family arriving from Kolkata, Georgia felt strange in unexpected ways – and familiar in places where comparison seemed least likely.
By dusk, drizzle had returned.
Google directed us into a narrow lane and announced, with the confidence of the omniscient goddess of the roads, “You have arrived.”
We appeared to have arrived at somebody’s house.
There was no sign, no board and nothing resembling a hotel. My wife and son went to investigate while I remained with the car. Minutes passed. Through the rear-view mirror, I eventually saw a small child approaching with a strangely familiar gait.
The figure came nearer and grew larger.
My son is eighteen and over five feet nine inches tall. He had merely looked like a small child standing at the bottom of the slope.
Restored to his full dimensions, he reported that the anonymous house was indeed the Red Stone Guest House.
Inside, my wife was engaged in a supreme effort to converse with a large elderly gentleman. She had printouts in English; he had Russian. Neither possessed much of what the other required.
What he lacked in English, however, he made up for with gestures and warmth. His knees plainly troubled him, yet he slowly climbed the stairs, shuffled along the balcony and installed us in a room while talking animatedly throughout. We understood virtually nothing. He might as well have been talking to the blankets and towels instead of about them.
A younger woman soon arrived, spoke good English, looked at the illuminated window upstairs and informed us that we had been put in the wrong room.
…The further they travelled through Sakartvelo, the less reliable their first conclusions became.
We were moved opposite, into what she cheerfully called “our pink room”.
“All our guests from India just love pink,” she giggled.
I cannot vouch for the colour preferences of my fellow countrymen.
I could vouch for the warmth. There were layers of blankets against the twenty-five-degree difference from Kolkata, comfortable beds and a heater that seemed to radiate something of our hosts themselves. Remembering our arrival at the hotel in Tbilisi, I wondered whether I ought to pay immediately.
Nobody asked.
It was only the following morning, after breakfast, that I raised the matter myself.
And breakfast supplied one more small Georgian reversal. Its pièce de résistance was Khachapuri filled, of all things, with the humble potato. It was the best Khachapuri we ate in Georgia. Coming from an inveterate meat-lover, this is praise of the highest order.
That morning I stepped onto the balcony and stopped.
The misty, marauding mountains of the previous evening had changed character completely. Sunlight had lifted the murk. Stepantsminda lay below us at the foot of Mount Kazbek, while what at first looked like confetti across the mountains revealed itself as snow. Beyond that immense natural fencing of stone lay Russia.
Above us, on a steep slope of grass, shrubs and rock, stood Gergeti Trinity Church.
…The road disappears into fog, strangers overcome language, and every confident first impression eventually requires revision.
The previous night the mountains had enclosed us. By morning they had opened the country.
Georgia had done it again.
We drove up to Gergeti after breakfast. The road that had been described to us beforehand as an ordeal proved considerably less dramatic than expected. At the church, scaffolding interrupted the medieval stone, dogs wandered about and horses grazed nearby. We sat for a while on the steps looking across the valley.
Soon we would descend again: past Stepantsminda, Gudauri and Ananuri, then eastwards towards the vineyards of Kakheti.
By then I had become rather less confident in advance conclusions about Georgia.
The country seemed happiest when contradicting them.
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