Megaliths and the Backroad to Vardzia

Prehistoric monuments, medieval cave cities and castles, canyons, and a hot springs. That was our three day quest that we had set, with very limited success. The team was my Latvian friend, his eleven-year-old son, and myself, crammed into the front seats of his utility van. It had been a relatively cool summer, so with the sun shining as we set off from my apartment, it looked like the perfect start to the trip.

Day 1: Edzana Canyon, Paravani Megaliths, and Akhalkalaki

Our first stop was a canyon. The back route from Tbilisi (Ortachala) to Manglisi was a surprisingly good road. Ortachala itself is a weird neighborhood: The site of one of the main bus stations in Tbilisi, it sits completely disconnected from the metro network, though still accessible by city bus and marshrutka. I remember first being there, when it was mainly just a row of brothels for arriving Armenians, Turks, Azeris, and Persians, with a crumbling, post-apocalyptic Soviet bus station as a centerpiece. The area has improved a lot since that time, with a couple of modern hotel towers rising up above the mess, but our first “megalith” was indeed that crumbling concrete massif our van idled by. It’s also definitely one of the better routes out of town to skip the traffic, so there was that too.

As we got halfway towards Manglisi, we picked up a hitchhiker en route, who was headed to that village. He was a hippie from Germany who gladly hopped into the back of the van. He was on his way back to the village—a popular site for Tbiliselis to have a summer home—where he had apparently left his hat. As a hat man myself, I had the feels for him, so we brought him all the way to the house. And then our first real discovery that though there aren’t many roads in the country side, Google seems positive that there’s a network of roads webbing across the Georgian hinterlands. There isn’t. There really is just one road.

As we followed the route out of town, the road quickly deteriorated into literally nothing. No problem, we’ll just turn around and get out, and then head down another road that did the same thing. Damn you, Manglisi! But wait, this WAS the main road!

So, onto that dirt avenue snaking through the hills we went. The road improved again, though it would prove to be quite patchy all the way to Akhalkalaki (due to a strange selection of road works). The road though, is good enough for any car to make the trip.

Tsalka, Edzana, and Dashbashi

Tsalka is a quaint village close to a large lake that seems completely undiscovered by tourists (even by Georgian tourists), and looks to be a great place for fishing (indeed, you can find a place or two to rent boats) and for just buying fish and grilling it up. It was settled in the early 1800s by Greeks living in Anatolia who were fleeing Turkish persecution after the Greeks had sided with Russia in the Russo-Turkish War. They were taken in by the then Russian Empire and allowed to settle in this scenic steppe. After the Georgian Independence of 1991, and all the chaos that ensued, most of the ethnic Greeks packed up and went to their motherland who was offering free citizenship to those who could prove Greek descent. They've left behind a lot of ruined houses, a crumbling Greek Orthodox Church, and a little Greek restaurant called Pontia.

We turned off just ahead of Tsalka to Dashbashi Canyon.

Edzana Canyon (as it's real name is) is a fairly large and scenic feature itself, with vertical cliffs, and waterfalls (and even its own 11th century church!). The area seems mostly undiscovered, but does seem to have a few hiking outlets (at the very least, a trail that goes down to the canyon). It certainly hasn’t got any of the love from the government that Okatse Canyon has, which might be a good thing really, as leaving places for more rugged hiking should be of some interest for the government as well (though some marked trails where you don’t have the feeling that you’re trespassing is also good).

Dashbashi River and St. George Church

The Dashbashi River is far below, carving its way through the Edzana Canyon. Down below are beautiful waterfalls, and clean, clear water—perfect for swimming on a hot day. Only an hour and a half to two hours from Tbilisi by car, it makes for a great day trip with friends or family. There is a trail that leads down to the swimming hole and back up.

Probably most notably, at the top of the trail is a beergarden. Enjoy!

You can get to Tsalka by marshrutka (from Samgori) or an achingly slow electric train from Station’s Square (I haven’t taken this route and am not one hundred percent confident that it actually exists, despite the officially posted time tables). From Tsalka to the canyon, you’d have to hire a taxi. I’m guessing to get him to drive you there and wait for you would be about 10-20 lari. Cheaper if you know the kartuli.

Paravani Lake and Poka Village

After leaving the canyon and exiting Tsalka, hail started slamming down on our car, acting as a kind of heavy hi-hats for the electronic music blaring out of my friend’s bluetooth speaker. While his kid was trying to show me the rudiments of Candy Crush Family Fun Pack for All! or whatever, I was trying to peer through the mid-July ice storm and see the strange houses that made up Poka Village. They were low lying, stone, with earthen rooftops. A kind of house that I had never seen in Georgia before. This trend, as well as building brick fences from manure (which I imagine they used for heating fuel in the winter), seemed to be a pretty common trend in this nearly untouched region of Georgia.

Shitty fences; in winter it's used for heating fuel

When the hail cleared it, it quickly melted, and as it melted, people emerged out on the streets, all with staves of dead fish swaying in the wind. Tables were suddenly set up, as though the sunlight from the parting clouds acted as a kind of magic ray that split through a shadowy shroud to reveal poker tables of produce and fish. People, eager for a sale, snapping to attention with each glance, and as you move on, the puppet strings fall and they collapse in disappointment.

Paravani Lake and Poka village

Poka—which means “See you!” in Russian, and I’m not sure its Georgian roots—looked to be the remnants of a Soviet resort town, long forgotten, with huge Soviet block apartments once occupied by always ready camps of red scarfed Pioneers, surrounded by those small stone and earthen huts, something quite out of a movie that takes place some time after World War III. Go off the main road of Poka and you make way towards two megaliths: Abuli and Shaori.

Abuli and Shaori Fortress

The two fortresses are so old and lost in time that no one really knows who built them or why they were built. Just that they were apparently there, probably built during the Bronze Age. As the Caucasus was fairly rich in copper ores, a prehistoric civilization once flourished here, building dozens of megaliths across the landscape some time around the 3rd millennium BC. As there was no writing though, we literally have only the stones they left behind.

Following an ancient cobblestone road that's still visible on Google maps

Road, steppe, and mountains

Shaori and Abuli are two such places. Massive stacks of rocks, organized for some purpose (shelter, worship, war, who knows?). Abuli is slightly closer to the lake, while Shaori is a bit of a drive. They are both doable as a day trip from Tbilisi, but there are some caveats.

One, you need a vehicle that can handle off road, or you need to be prepared for a bit of a hike (4 hours round trip, maybe?). We didn’t make Shaori, but it seems like it would be a shorter hike.

Just $20 first two days at teepublic

When we left Poka, the weather was patchy. Sometimes drizzles, sometimes sunny sky. It definitely wasn’t good hiking weather with a kid whose favorite distraction in life was Candy Crush. It was also curiously cold for mid-July, and I had chosen a light, summertime t-shirt.

We decided to drive. Google maps said there was a road there. We started driving the route. The road seemed to not have been used in about 1000 years (curiously there’s a modern maintained road from Takhcha to Akhalkalaki that is NOT on Google maps, go figure). It was a grown over cobblestone path, which I guess was used only by the shepherds driving out their sheep. This was a very popular place for grazing, but nothing else (as such, beware of dogs!). The cobbled road made for curiously easy driving in our utility van, with only a few difficult problems that my friend handed with surprising ease. Finally we made it to the hiking point, where we were planning on parking the car and walking the rest, but the mountain on which the megalith was on had disappeared. Completely covered in clouds. And not only that, thunder was rumbling from one peak to the next, right across the valley, with winds whipping along so hard I wondered if the van wouldn’t topple over.

Not exactly an offroading vehicle...

Group conference. Do we admit defeat and come back another day, or go for it?

We admitted defeat and kept driving.

one of the rare sights of the peak

The route got more and more difficult, and more and more often I had to get out and guide the utility van, but eventually we emerged at the village of Takhcha, yet another one of those curious hamlets of earthen roofs and shit fences. We were now entering Armenian territory (that is to say, the ethnic group was becoming more Armenian than Georgian, but still in Georgia). The language was changing now, from Georgian to a casual Russian, and more signs were in Armenian. Not that we had much experience of all this squeezing through the shit fences of Takhcha, but yeah.

From Takhcha was easy sailing. It would completely be doable (and a wonderful hike) to park your car in Takhcha and hike to the two megaliths. I estimate you’d need about 8 hours total for such a trek. I think the most enjoyable variation would be to park in Poka or the lakeside village at the crossroads between Shaori and Abuli and hike them each from there (unless you have an off road car). The terrain is this strange, high altitude grass steppe (though the altitude isn’t really that high, but it feels high). There are rocks and boulders spread throughout, making it absolutely no problem to even build your own megalith. Have fun!

Akhalkalaki and the Gold Café

From Takhcha to Akhalkalaki was a nice, fairly modern road that at times drove through some random, quite scenic medieval looking villages until finally coming out of the valleys to Akahkalaki, the sprawling “Armenian capital” of South Georgia, and indeed, the town itself looks drastically more like Gumri or Yerevan than it does anywhere in Georgia. There’s this kind of darker stone block used in Armenian construction that gives it that very characteristic look and feel. The town is built on an easy to navigate grid, and full of casinos and cafes. It had a kind of ghost town feeling though, since as we walked around there was literally no one there but a few stray dogs. One guy did emerge to stand around as I used the ATM, so either that was bad timing or just weird. The silence though was altogether foreign to the usual Georgian situation, which usually has men just standing around on street corners, chatting and eating sunflower seeds. None of that in the center city of Akhalkalaki. But in general, a handsome city.

We stopped at the highest rated café in town, the Gold Café. Sounds fancy. Basically a gigantic empty room with four tables. Because of the vast size, the walls looked barren despite having to broadswords hanging on one and two animal heads on the other. The staff was friendly enough. The food was nothing to brag about, nor was the price. It was all a bit meh-tastic. The khachapuri is gigantic though, so go easy when ordering that. They speak Georgian, Armenian, and Russian, but I think they had a copy of the menu in English, but you know, khachapuri is “khachapuri” in any language, so just order that.

The town of Akhalkalaki

There’s also the ruins of a 9th century fortress at the end of the main road, but we were running short on time and wanted to get on to a hotel near Vardzia, so we didn’t have time to make it. I would love to go and stop by though, as it’s pretty much an untouched archaeological-site-to-be.

Check out the next post as I continue on to Vardzia and later for Borjomi! Make sure to sign up for emails below and don't miss a blog.

#touristicsites #hiking

Arriving in Tbilisi

It is a rare occasion that the visitor flies into the Tbilisi airport at a reasonable hour. Most flights inexplicably come in at around two or three in the morning, and many people have many theories on this odd occurrence and strategy. Most of us just assume it has something to do with when the flights are cheapest leaving Europe, and others believe it’s got to do with some sort of conspiracy around TAV, the Turkish airport operator that basically owns the Tbilisi airport due to various development deals (I assume the former, as flights into Kutaisi also follow this moonlighting pattern). Whatever it may be, consider yourself blessed if you land while the sun is up and you don’t have to purchase an extra night at a hotel just to catch up on your sleep.

pulled off the official Tbilisi Airport page

Depending on the mood of the ruling regime, you might be greeted by the passport control with a small bottle of wine (or you might not, so don’t expect any such treats). For Europeans and Americans, this is all a pretty easy process, just show up and smile, offer a “gamarjoba” (“hello” in Georgian) and they’ll wave you right through with barely a glance at your papers. My wife, a Georgian herself, often takes two or three times longer than I do. But then, most of the passport controllers are women, and they do tend to have a thing for tall handsome men like myself. If you’re not tall and handsome, or if you’re coming from a country full of otherwise brown people, make sure your papers are in super order (but let’s be honest, you probably know that already). If you’re Russian, just say “Zdravstvoite” and they’ll still try to please you, never mind your country actively supports two illegal breakaway regimes carving off a fifth of Georgia. But do keep that reality in mind while traveling around. Nobody considers you saviors here, in the full Russian sense of the word, you are "occupants". And don't be offended, I'd give the same bit of advice to any American traveling to Farah in Afghanistan.

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You go down the escalator and then get to wait around a baggage claim. There are only a few, so you don’t have to worry about running around finding the right one, but as there are about twenty flights coming in at the same time at two in the morning, there is often an awkward amount of people waiting around on the same claim. The claim works usually pretty well, but often hits some snags. This is your first step into a country that relies nearly entirely on improvisation over planning, so if you run into a delay at this point, don’t worry about it. Just shake it off and smile. Welcome to Georgia.

waiting for friends and family to arrive

The lobby is a useful place. It used to be crowded with taxi drivers, but the government recently scared them off and forced them to give newcomers a bit of breathing room, so now they wait outside. This is your chance to pick up a SIM card (assuming your phone is unlocked… this is your best option for communication in Georgia, telecom fees and mobile internet fees are dirt cheap, so it's best to just swap your SIMs, then you can talk to your fam back home on Viber or WhatsApp).

The Tbilisi arrivals terminal

Don’t bother with any of the money changers there. If you need some cash, I advise either pulling it out at an ATM or just doing the smallest of what you need. That of course, depends on the next step of the process.

The Tbilisi airport is much like any airport in the world: A taxi mafia sits outside, waiting for the inconspicuous tourist to step out and look for an easy way into the city. They take the Trump approach and offer “great deals”, even the “best deals!”, and at only a mere 150 lari who can disagree?

Don’t listen to this nonsense.

Once upon a time, there was a sign posted in the lobby that said rides should only cost 25 GEL. I would point at that sign when negotiating with drivers as they were yelling at me for 50 or even 100 GEL. After a while, I noticed that someone had torn down the sign; it appeared to have been a violent intervention as well.

That is to say, 25 GEL is still the normative standard. Drivers may complain that they have sons, daughters, grandmothers, rabbits, or whatever to feed and they need all your money to pay for their second cousin's colon cancer treatment in Germany and so on. Maybe it’s true. Also maybe they shouldn’t be sitting at the airport waiting to give rides, competing against those who will drive for less.

Here are the best practices:

1. Use Bolt or Yandex. Before your trip, download these to your smartphone. There is free wifi in the airport, so they’re quite easy to use, even easier if you bought a SIM chip or have a functional travel plan for your mobile. For both services, it’s a set 20 or 25 GEL fee (depending on surge) into the city.

2. Use mass transit. There’s a 24-hour bus that goes to Freedom Square, up Rustaveli and eventually to the main train station. It’s 50 tetri (0.5 lari) to ride, but it does take a really long time (nearly an hour to Freedom Square and maybe over an hour and a half during rush hour). You can pay either the machine on board with coins (no change) or if you have a contactless Visa/Mastercard, then you can use that. There’s also a train, but they only run the trains twice a day, strategically timed for when there are no flights. Well done Tbilisi government!

3. Negotiate. But don’t bother with those guys standing next to the door. They even try to convince my Georgian wife that 100 GEL is the standard. Instead, go down to the Departures door and wait for a taxi driver dropping someone off. Those guys, who are not members of the taxi mafia, will often take people into town for 15 GEL. This is perhaps the best deal, but for the newcomers perhaps the most difficult to manage.

4. Don’t even speak to the taxi mafia guys. Those guys are all swindlers, and will even change the price once you arrive at your hotel/destination. Trust none of them. Don’t even think about using them “because it’s easy”. It won’t be easy in the end, and you’ll start off your trip to this wonderful country with a horrifically sour taste in your mouth.

Once you arrive at your hotel/guesthouse/airBNB, enjoy your trip. Don’t let any of that nonsense spoil your time. And don’t think they’re targeting you because your foreign, brown, black, green, female, or whatever. Those guys are ass clowns to everyone, foreigners and Georgians alike.

pulled off the official Tbilisi Airport page

Tbilisi city government, if you’re reading this, you should understand there are two very easy ways to much improve a tourist’s experience to Tbilisi, and get them having a pleasant time from the get-go.

1. Create a voucher system. Indoors, have a government/airport controlled booth selling travel vouchers for 25 or 30 GEL (or whatever standard price you decide on). This voucher then can be used for airport taxis (both ways). Airport taxis must accept the vouchers, and get reimbursed according to their vouchers.

2. RUN THE TRAINS AT THE BLOODY TIME OF THE PLANES ARRIVING. A five year old could figure this one out. An adult Georgian working at Tbilisi city hall apparently can’t. You guys literally have it all in place. Just do it. Eventually, when there’s money, I would also upgrade the Samgori train station, and run a line from Mtskheta – Didube – Station’s Square – Samgori – Airport, and have that in motion once an hour every day 24 hours a day. This would not only benefit hotels and such in Mtskheta, Station's Square, and Didube, but also make the whole transit process easier for tourists and would be massively beneficial for local Tbiliselis, and also for any Western Georgians going to the airport. Also imagine how much traffic stress that the airport causes that can be remedied (also include park and rides and long term parking facilities at all those stations!).

pulled off the official Tbilisi Airport page

​Leaving Tbilisi

It's now time to head back home and hopefully you've had a wonderful time and not too many hangovers. Getting to their airport is probably even easier than getting out of it. I'd recommend giving yourself thirty minutes to get there and an hour and a half there (people of course recommend two hours there, but it's a small airport and every time I get there early they haven't even opened the baggage check desks). The Tbilisi airport doesn't seem to have early check-in, so in most cases I wouldn't even bother with that. But do be prepared for a line, and by "line" I mean the Georgian definition of "massive amount of people elbowing each other".

You can get there by taxi. That fee should be around 25 GEL. If someone offers you something more expensive, don't take it. Instead use Bolt or Yandex. There's also the #37 bus (50 tetri) from Station's Square that hits Rustaveli and Baratishvili (near Freedom Square) every hour or so.

You'll check in, then ride the escalators up to security, then passport control, and then you can wait around in the lobby and sip on ten dollar coffee or twenty-five dollar glasses of two dollar wine. Enjoy!

#Tbilisi #traveltips

Putin protesting protests of Putin

(enjoy my first rebooted vlog bit... it's more done just to be audio/podcast of the blog below, but maybe I'll add some effects later to the series and make it more vloggish, let me know what you think in the comments)

Georgia is safe.

I’ve got to repeat that time and time again, despite the popular draws the country has into the international media. The citizenry generally struggle to be known for positive things, like cheese boats with eggs, wine, techno clubs, and fashion, but the real draw in our disaster porn-obsessed culture seems to be civil unrest and war with Russia. To be sure, the ongoing occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are pressing concerns, but they don't really effect the climate for tourism, and if you don't travel there, you'll even have no idea that part of the country is barred by demarcation lines.

Like any country, things go wrong. The government has its problems, the city has its corruption, these things aren’t really that strange in the developing world, nor are they in the West. The United States (my home country) has been under wave of wave of violent protests, from BLM to Proud Boys to “antifa”, most of these end up with looting, beatings, tear gas, and mass arrests. So when a bit of that revolutionary spirit sparked up in my adopted home of Tbilisi, the emails and concerned calls phoned in. It’s a small country making international news for protests, so of course it must be big news, never mind that it’s just par for the course in a democratic country. It was actually far less violent than most American protests are (of course, if my American friends were imagining a modern American-style protest going down, I can see why they were concerned!).

After the unrest followed the typical bellicose sentiments of the Russian government, trying to drum up a dose of conspiracy and anxiety in order to gain support from their own waning electorate. Putin declared that Georgia was unsafe for Russian citizens and inexplicably placed a travel ban on the country. In response, the Georgians have a launched a movement to drum up tourism from other countries, the #spendyoursummeringeorgia campaign.

Despite Putin’s utmost, heartfelt concern for his citizens (/endsarcasm), Georgia remains a safe place, even for Russians. Georgians are for the most part welcoming people and though there are things wrong with the country (as in any country), there are also a great deal of things right in the country, especially for vacationers.

Image ripped from this CNN article who apparently got it from Vano Shlamov on Getty Images. Being a blog 6 people read means I can feel free to rip off images.

The low down

Russia has revived a kind of soft power they had once perfected in the Soviet days, focusing again more on propaganda and image to go along with strong military action rather than having any use for actual diplomatic relations. One of the main branches of its soft power is the Russian Orthodox Church, with little difference in the Soviet days of its KGB control and in modern days serving under FSB auspices—note also that Putin had his upcoming in the FSB regarding religious affairs. I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate complaints about Western culture, but that’s the thing—they’ve hijacked the legitimate complaints which should be a dialogue within Western culture to push a global Us vs. Them paradigm, making it instead between all the bad things about liberalism vs. Russia (which is only about good, God-fearing things, apparently), and if you are discontent with liberalism and/or the West, then you must kiss Putin’s hand, or at the very least, give a hand in destroying Western “Gayropean” institutions like NATO, the European Union, and the United States (which is simply gay, obviously not “-opean”)—and if you don’t, you hate families and God and all that’s holy.

if that's not Gayropean, I don't know what is. Ripped from this Eurasianet post.

It’s been a long and an immensely well-played game, one that has even pitted Orthodox Church against Orthodox Church, turning in the eyes of much of the Orthodox laity the Greek Orthodox into a nest of CIA vipers and Putin into a veritable Saint-Emperor. It’s also a game that outspoken liberals jump willy-nilly into as useful idiots, proclaiming that the NATO agenda is the gay agenda, that the future of Europe is in pink-boa-wrapped runway dance-offs at Berghain with sodomite orgies spilling down Kurfurstendamm or the Champs d’Elysees, thus playing into the entire fears that Putin has been capitalizing on (see also: brown people).

One such Orthodox institution the Russians have managed to hijack for their own political game and pursuit is the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy, an assembly that was started by the Greeks to help revive the Orthodox Churches in the post-Soviet territories and get them to cooperate. Unwittingly, the Greeks seemed unprepared for the neo-Sergianism that went along with this, a policy of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Communist regime to be willingly allegiant to the government in order to survive, and thereby actively cooperate with the regime in placing KGB spies throughout the priesthood—a practice that has not likely been discontinued in present times, just with a swap of acronyms (the players though are pretty much the same).

The Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy has been led by a Russian parliamentarian, Sergei Popov, re-elected on two-year terms since 2004. And though the Russians have parted their ways with Ecumenicism in their current slash-and-conquer ecclesiastical tactics, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t been using inter-Orthodox groups to wage their political power games and their dominance of the IAO is one such result. This doesn’t mean that the IAO is altogether malignant; cross-border cooperation is a positive thing after all, and the more multilateral institutions the better, even and perhaps especially those with Russian representatives, as that remains at least one outlet that communication can be had. It’s good Greece, Georgia, et al. take part in groups like the IAO, but we should be aware that Russia’s interests are not religious interests, except where the interests of the Church are that of the Russian state. The Georgian Orthodox Church, meddle as it does in Georgian politics (though I’m of the opinion that churches have every right to meddle, just as any other member of civil society), is still an independent organization, and praiseworthy for it. It is not a tool of the Georgian state, nor will it allow itself to be. The same cannot be said for the Church in Russia.

The latest meeting of the IAO was held in Tbilisi. This itself wasn’t enough to spark the riot, but that it was chaired by a Russian Minister of Parliament, Sergei Gavrilov. To me it reveals the great cynicism of Russia’s approach to religion: That an MP from the Communist Party of Russia would chair an Orthodox summit. Gavrilov is no stranger to this sort of hubris, as he has made regular religious appeals despite his upstanding position in an officially atheist community—a student of Stalin indeed. Gavrilov is also quite famous for making bold statements about how Georgia really belongs to Russia, or should, and is rumored to have even taken an active part in the Abkhaz war in the 90s. All that to say: Gavrilov is not, nor has ever been, a popular man in Georgia.

The IAO meeting was held in the Parliament building in the center of Tbilisi. Gavrilov, as chair, sat in the Georgian Parliamentary Speaker’s chair. The opposition was immediately insulted by this (nothing new, they’re insulted by everything, but at least now something with due cause), they bolted out, spread the word and immediately protests sparked up—Georgians seeing this Communist Russian MP sitting in their Speakers’ chair took it as a huge insult to their national pride, especially with a view of a government that many claim to be soft on Russia.

Everybody is pretty much in agreement with most of this. It’s what happened next that was disputed: Either the oppositionists attempted to storm Parliament, or the police just got overly nervous and started going crazy. I’ve heard conflicting reports from people there—I, having been trying to wean myself off Facebook addiction, didn’t even realize there was a major protest going down—but the end result of the tense showdown was that the police were firing rubber bullets indiscriminately into the crowd and launching canisters of tear gas like they were curled up shirts at a sports game. When the night was over, over a hundreds civilians and police had been injured, two people lost an eye, and dozens detained.

In honor of the two who lost their eye on the first night, protesters began to wear red eye patches. Ripped from this Al Jazeera article.

The next day, protests resumed. This time not so much about Gavrilov (though it definitely maintained a strong anti-Putin and anti-Russian government/occupation narrative), but more so about the police handling of the protest against Gavrilov (who safely left and even said he felt safe in “his homeland”—Gavrilov, from Tul, Russia, either is referring to his maternal grandfather who was Georgian or that he sees no difference between Russia and Georgia, a statement he has made in the past). As the hours passed and more speakers contributed to the protest, more and more issues were raised. There is a lot of discontent with the current political process, after all. The majority of the protest organizers seemed to have been content with pushing the agenda of changing the majoritarian style of Parliamentary elections, and having direct representation as well, meaning that participation in the Parliament would be allowed for even parties that didn’t have 5%.

International reaction

International journalists were languishing in the Georgian capital. It’s been over 10 years since the last war, and large protests had been handled pretty well since then. As soon as the rubber bullets were loaded, the contingent was there, eager to represent Georgia as a country in chaos and make every penny they could off their sensationalist dollars ready to cash in on the typical sensationalist moolah. And though the reality was that the protesting (and violence of one night) was localized to the Parliament (though tear gas did float down the neighboring city streets), that isn’t what gets clicks man! (I can’t entirely blame the international press though, as their Georgian counterparts were equally stirred to action). Even the protests every other night after were entirely peaceful and well-conducted on all sides.

Russia though, had a strange reaction. The protest was anti-Russian government. There were many naughty signs of Putin, no doubt. But the protests were not anti-Russian people (I’ve even watched a few Russian vloggers who were there). Putin, dismayed about the treatment of his MP (who is not of his party) and I suppose, insulted by the signs, declared Georgia unsafe and banned tourism travel. But why? Because they protested him? The Russian government even had RT and Sputnik, along with their local state media branches, ripping montages of foreign reports and making them appear as though they were attacking and focusing on Russian people.

Russia occupies through military and puppet regimes, 20 percent of Georgia's territory. Image ripped from this Emerging Europe article.

This is like if Trump decided to declare the United Kingdom unsafe for Americans and banned travel there, simply because they protested against him. Putin has held Georgia economically hostage before—back in 2007 they declared a wine embargo. The Georgians were basically forced to improve the quality of their wine in order to hit the European market. The result was that it led a lot of Georgians to rediscover their own traditional wines and old, long-unused varietals, leading to a minor vinicultural renaissance of the heavenly nectar. If anything, the Russians lifting the ban was a bad thing, leading Georgians to resume mass sale of cheap wine to an easy target market.

So what effect will the Russian ban on tourism have?

Georgian reaction

The Georgians doubled down. When Putin banned tourism, they essentially bit their thumbs and said, “Screw you, we don’t need your tourists anyway, we’ll get other people to come!” (By other people, they largely mean rich Europeans and Americans, not rich Arabs or Iranians). That’s when they launched their hashtag tourism campaign, to help drum up interest in traveling here.

There’s some debate on how big of a market the Russian tourists were. Many say that though they were huge in numbers, they weren’t big spenders. Others say the opposite. Who knows. But hopefully the tourism trade can go the same direction as the wine trade. There are huge needs in infrastructure here for tourism development, and if Georgians are as willing to meet those challenges as they were the challenges of the wine industry, then there’s nothing but success for this country ahead.

But first some hardship as they are losing a sizeable share of the tourism market. Hopefully they can get over that initial hurdle. But if it’s one thing I don’t doubt is that when Georgians finally set their mind to something, there’s very little that can stop them.

#holidays #Tbilisi #rantsandraves #history