3
I wandered outside. A huge concrete awning spanned the area, probably built in the ’50s to celebrate a bumper Soviet wheat harvest. Beneath it, people were jockeying for position, trying to coax their pre-Stalin-era trolleys in the direction of the taxi rank. Across the road, taxi drivers stood drinking coffee outside a row of brightly lit wooden sheds while they waited for their fares.
As I stood there trying to get my bearings, the management bonding crew climbed aboard a gleaming white Land Cruiser that I imagined was all set to whisk them away to a hot mug of tea and a full English.
I wandered over to join the ever-lengthening taxi queue. A haphazard procession of square, boxy Ladas swung towards us, their signs fastened precariously to their roofs with a couple of bungees, the same trick Silky pulled with surfboards.
The Georgian women in front of me all seemed to be either skinny as rakes, or built like bowling balls. Thirty seemed to be the point when the one turned into the other, though it was quite difficult to tell; all of them, even the ones who should have been grey, had hair that was dyed jet-black, or as dark red as a plum.
My turn came for a Lada, and a very nice mustard-and-rust one it was too. I got into the back. The windows were steamed up and the radio was going full blast in an attempt to drown out the noise of the wipers scraping across the smashed windscreen.
‘The Marriott, mate. Marriott Hotel.’
The cigarette stuck to the driver’s bottom lip bobbed up and down as he nodded. But the taxi didn’t move.
‘The Marriott. MA-RRI-OTT?’
‘Marriott! Marriott!’
The penny dropped and the Lada lurched off at a rate of not that many knots, possibly because the windscreen looked like it had been on the receiving end of a burst of semi-automatic and he was trying to see through the web of cracked glass.
The meter was covered in grease and fag ash, and had probably never been turned on. I leaned forward. The driver was in his sixties, with a bushy grey moustache and grey, slicked-back hair that curled around the collar of a black polo-neck jumper.
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. ‘How much?’
He gobbed off at me and of course I didn’t understand a word. Most of it sounded like Swahili, with the odd click and guttural embellishment here and there.
He remembered to turn on his headlights while he was talking, and we picked out a 110 hardtop Land Rover parked at the roadside. It was unmistakably Brit military; dull green, with MoD plates.
The driver had left his wagon and was leaning against the wing. Bulked out with a blue waterproof jacket, shaved head, stonewashed jeans and very smart, still sparklingly clean Nikes, he had to be American. Maybe he was dropping off or collecting ‘advisers’ for the Partnership for Peace programme.
I was still none the wiser about the fare as we followed a wide dual carriageway towards the city centre, just over ten miles away. I only knew that because of what I picked up off the web. There were no road signs at all, just billboard scaffold over the road that had probably once carried posters celebrating the wonders of communism. Now they seemed to be saying the same sort of thing about Coke and Sony.
As we reached the outskirts of the city, drab concrete apartment blocks sprang up on each side of the road. They’d been given a recent lick of paint, but not in any colour you’d have chosen sober. Some of the giant cubes were green, some purple. One was yellow.
This wasn’t what I’d been expecting, good roads and fresh paint. To cap it all, even at this time of the morning, in the dark, there were women out sweeping the road with the sort of brooms that Harry Potter played Quidditch on.
A convoy of olive-green military trucks towing artillery pieces passed us, going the other way, as we came into the city proper. I knew Tbilisi lay at the foot of three massive, steeply inclined hills. The river Mtkvari ran through it, north to south. We were entering from the flatter ground to the east.
As it became more built up, so did the number of dogs. They were everywhere, if not loose and pissing against every car within reach, then on a leash and being treated to their early morning walkies.
A blue-and-white was blocking the way. The two guys inside the shiny new VW Passat had their heads down for a nap; by the look of things, they’d got a bit tired running stripy police tape from each wing mirror to the wall on either side. My grey-haired friend peered through his screen, cursed and hung a right.
The smoothly surfaced road immediately gave way to a minefield of water-filled potholes big enough to hide a bus in. My driver joined all the others slaloming from side to side to avoid them. I wasn’t sure how some of them managed it, without any headlights.
This was more like the Georgia I’d been expecting. Maybe the tourist board didn’t want to deprive the punters of the authentic gulag experience, and the police were there to make sure there was no chance of us missing it. At least there were a few road signs now, in Russian Cyrillic and a language I supposed was Georgian, though the words looked more like rows of twisted paperclips.
The taxi driver crossed himself every time we passed a church. I couldn’t tell if it was out of respect, or alongside a prayer of thanks for surviving the manic driving of his fellow countrymen and the Jurassic-scale potholes.
We crossed the Mtkvari, the fastest – and brownest – river I’d ever seen, to the west bank and the city centre. The Marriott was on the main drag, another stretch of flat, freshly laid tarmac that paralleled the river. It looked every bit as big and impersonal as any I’d stayed in, though I could see it was one of the newest and smartest in the chain before I’d even got out of the cab.
Chandeliers the size of hot-air balloons hung from the ceiling of an atrium eighty feet high. Everyone inside looked as though they’d just stepped out of an Armani ad before heading for their early morning breakfast meetings; all of them, both reception staff and guests, were dressed in varying shades of black.
According to the bulletin board in reception, it was the Marriott’s honour to welcome the BP Georgia conference, and they looked forward to welcoming all delegates at 2 p.m. in the St David Room. Capitalism wasn’t just being embraced in this neck of the woods; it was being bear-hugged, then having its contact details Bluetoothed into every Blackberry in sight.