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As many of you have known for some time, we have spent this years’ holidays in beautiful Georgia. For those not quite aware of where Georgia is and how long and rich history it has, here is a link to Wikipedia.
This is one of a few posts I have decided to share with you, mainly because Georgia is a country of such a beautiful and interesting nature and historic sights… and with its society and common life–full of contrasts. So, these writings are supposed to help you decide whether it is worth exploring more… In our opinion, it definitely is!
So, let us start from the beginning. We began our journey on 26th July 2018, driving from Sherborne (SW of England) to our friends’ house, not far from London Gatwick. Having spent about an hour there, we took a taxi to get to the airport to fly off to Riga (Latvia). The flight was pretty much uneventful so the next leg was to fly from Riga to Tbilisi (Georgia). This time the plane was smaller and I really appreciated the information being displayed on a tiny overhead monitors, showing our exact GPS location, temperature outside and some other details. I could read from there that the lowest temperature we had outside was -52C and the highest… well, read on!
It was about 3:30am Georgian local time, when the plane started to approach the airport and I was meticulously observing how the temperature was beginning to rise. At the altitude of about 800m the air temperature was already +33C and when we landed a few minutes later the temperature was +37C and it was early in the morning… As a side note, the first stationary aeroplane I spotted was from MyWay Airlines, and I found it as a rather funny name! No offence but it seemed like someone really was looking for a good name but definitely lacked in invention.
We managed to find our hold luggage pretty quickly and were lucky to have our kind uncle who greeted us there and took all of us to an apartment in Tbilisi where we were supposed to stay for about a week, until our next planned trip to Kutaisi and Batumi was about to take place.
Yes, living in the capital of Georgia is interesting. If you are keen on cold showers, the temperature of cold water is way above 20C, probably close to 23C and often more… Also the water pressure is very very low as the water is transported through very old underground pipes, so only low pressure can keep water delivery at bay. We have experienced two water cuts during our stay at Tbilisi, one lasted nearly 24 hours and the other about 12 hours.
Effectively, if you would like to use a Cold Shower Enhancer, especially in some older places of Tbilisi, just forget about it… The water pressure is barely enough to take a normal shower, not to mention coping with additional constraints like the CSE. And, as you can see in the following picture, I have managed to squeeze my CSE into the hold luggage but… I have not been able to use it.
Anyway, here are quite a few photos from our stay at Tbilisi and the next parts of this blog will cover Kutaisi, Batumi and Mount Kazbek, respectively. They have been put into a photo gallery so, if you want to, you can click on each of them to see the picture in closer detail.
And, although the photo gallery below also includes pictures from the time when we got back from Batumi to Tbilisi, for the sake of keeping the pictures from one place in one part of the blog, here is Tbilisi (as I see it) in photographs.
If you would rather prefer to see the gallery in a in an un-embedded new tab or window, please click HERE for Tbilisi or HERE for Kakheti. These display the gallery in a much nicer and easier to view way 🙂
If you like the lovely pictures, share freely with others on Facebook or other social media, and hopefully you also like the following parts of our Georgia adventure… Watch this space!