I like to make travel difficult as possible. While I wouldn’t typically openly admit to this, the behavioral patterns I engage in leading up to and while on trips says otherwise. I like really involved, complicated travel plans that often leave me tired, hungry, whiny, or some combination of the three. I wasn’t thinking about my propensity for tantrums when I made my plans to travel from Istanbul to Tbilisi during Christmas Eve night, followed by another trip leg to Kazbegi on the following Christmas day.
I should say that I am lucky to still be in a relationship after this megatron of a travel day. Let me run everything down for you – in case you’re interested in recreating this monster trip for yourself.
Scene 1: Final day in Istanbul, December 24, 2014. This was actually probably my favorite day in Istanbul. We took the T1 tram line to the end of the road at Kabataş, after which we caught a bus to Ortaköy.
Ortaköy turned out to be Istanbul’s saving grace for us – it was laid back, there weren’t many tourists, and was home to what I think is the city’s most picturesque mosque. For proof, see below.
After putzing around the area, we return to the Grand Bazaar to buy some final gifts for my niece back home, and then have a lovely dinner back by our Airbnb in Galata.
Things start to get difficult when we had to stay up past 10pm to get to Ataturk to catch our flight to Tbilisi. Luckily, the public transportation system in Istanbul is reliable and easy to navigate, if not a bit overcrowded.
Scene 2: Istanbul Ataturk International Airport. We check in around 10:30pm to the AtlasJet counter. AtlasJet is Turkey’s national low cost carrier, and it was a bit dodgy. We killed time before our 11:30pm boarding time by eating halal Sbarro (New York’s finest) and shopping duty free (souvenirs are, sadly, prohibitively expensive at the airport). The backstory to flying AtlasJet is that, while we originally had tickets to fly on Turkish Airlines, I decided early on in planning stages that we needed to spend more time in Georgia and Armenia, and therefore needed to push our flight earlier. $600 flight cancellation fee later, and an additional $70pp for the new flight on Dodgy Airlines, and we had it taken care of!
The check-in gate gave us our first cultural foray into what was to come. Lots of fur and loud, loud heels for the ladies, and men shaped like cannonballs in snug black leather jackets. If not for being so dead tired by this point, I think my primary emotion would have been excitement.
Scene 3: Arrival to Tbilisi International Airport. 3:30am, Christmas Day, 2015. Most all international flights into Tbilisi land in the middle of the night. We unload and are ferried through immigration, where along with passport stamps, we are given two bottles of Georgian wine. If I still drank alcohol, it would have been welcome at this point. As it is 3:30am, and buses to the city don’t run into Tbilisi proper until 7am, we hunker down for a few hours. Stale smoke hangs in the air, and lights flicker on the oddly modern Christmas tree in the airport entry hall. I am harassed by several taxi drivers wanting to take me into the city – thankfully, the Georgian I’ve been studying for the past three months buys me some credibility, and they lay off.
While David is passed out, I scamper around every corner of the airport, changing money and buying postcard stamps. Even though I haven’t slept in 24 hours or so, I am not tired anymore. On the contrary, I am wide awake – in sensory overload from being in a place that is foreign in every way to my Yankee sensibilities.
Scene 4: Airport to Didube, 7:30am, Christmas Day. In the three hours between landing and the running of bus lines, David has slept and I have manically rummaged through the entire airport. We board the bus with few people, and as it winds its way through the still-sleeping Tbilisi, it gradually picks up more people. The bus is old and run-down, and likely hasn’t seen its share of Pacific Northwest hippie gay guys, but it suits us just fine. It trundles into town slowly, and those riding it look about as happy as if they were off to work in a coal mine. Here it’s not Christmas yet, because the Georgian Orthodox church operates on the Julian calendar, Christmas instead falls in the first or second week of January.
Still, as we pull into the city, the signs of Christmas are everywhere, from the large lighting display in Freedom Square to the illuminated banners strung above Rustaveli, the main thoroughfare through Old Town. We pause for a moment in the empty Freedom Square to take pictures before trundling our bags to the metro station named for the square. The descent into the Tbilisi metro seems to take forever, down loudly rumbling, industrial escalators. I am told conflicting accounts that they were built so deep in order to act as a nuclear bunker during the Cold War – I’m not certain it’s true, but it’s the story I stick to when I tell my parents and anyone else willing to listen to my stories of wanderlust.
Coming up: Will we make it to Kazbegi? Will David continue sleeping while my sleep deprivation causes me to act irriationally? What will I purchase from that roadside stall on the hairpin curves leading up to Guaduri? Wait, HOW CLOSE were we to Chechnya?
