Tbilisi was quite a good surprise as it still keeps lots of the old town whereas a new city is emerging. I like to technically call it as a Work In Progress city - the work is progressing well, some milestones have already been completed but there are still a long way to go for the final delivery. However, Tbilisi isn't too far from other eastern European capitals.. From the occasional street fight to the huge gap between rich and poor (Hummer H2 showing off big wheels next to really old Ladas without windscreens) and past the usual chaotic traffic where the one that drives faster, horns consistently and has the crappiest car is the traffic King. All of this makes Tbilisi to be right up there with other Eastern European capitals.
After enough chilling and a couple of nights sleeping in the reception floor of Sky Hostel we decided to hitch hick to David Gareja. This is a monastery built up in the mountains right next to the Azerbaijani border. It's also known for the wild snakes all around it but if I can take the word from a truck driver, apparently no one has been bitten since the 5th century.. So, fingers crossed, mosquito repellent all over and off we go!
We started hitch hiking around 12pm ish from the South of Tbilisi and it didn't take long for a car to stop. It's quite normal to do it here and people are quite friendly..Oh! funny fact about Georgian road safety.. MOT (Inspeccao) is not mandatory in this country. It looks as thou it was so corrupted that they just thought not doing it at all.. So, cars without bumpers, windows and all sorts are quite often. Back on the road and after getting a ride from a black windows SUV and 2 dodgy trucks, here we are on this 3rd truck and funny story: Pedro starts getting excited and goes - "Wow, this is an awesome truck". Driver - "yeah, it has been a good truck but it's getting old and needs some repairing" - Pedro: "No, no no! It's great as it is! Leave it!". Five minutes after, truck breaks down (clutch failure is my guess) and we are back on walking.. Anyways, after 1 suspicious SUV, 4 truck rides and at least 10 km walking we got to David Gareja at half six pm. The place is definitely worth a visit but we were running out of time to get to Sighnaghi (a big village where we would be spending the night).
Here we were in this fantastic place with about an hour and a half of daylight and just like this wasn't enough the sky was already starting to get dark by heavy clouds as we were the only visitors in the monastery by then.. The only people there apart from ourselves and the monks where some construction workers who were building a house close by. Since sleeping with the monks wasn't an option, the workers were our only one.. It turned out not to be that bad since they were all very friendly and for some reason (I don't really want to know which one) loved my name.. Anyways, there was this Van that was just about to leave to take the workers back to a village nearby. Unfortunately thou it was full but it'd be comming back in one hour to pick up the rest of the workers and hopefully us.. By now our plans to get to Sighnaghi (80 to 90km from David Gareja) on that night were out of the window. The picture was getting quite pretty and it got even prettier when the threatening storm kicks in.. :) we were told to jump into one of these huge constructor truck to wait for the van and protected from the rain I've witnessed the most beautiful storm of my life with massive lightnings and thunders pretty close to us. After an hour and a half of waiting, one of the guys opened the door of our truck and started shouting something in Georgian which I could only understand Pedro and Tbilisi.. Apparently the Van got stuck because of the bad weather but there was a truck that had just arrived going to Tbilisi to take some rocks.. back to Tbilisi it was! ;)
To this point I already had a really good story and I just wanted to get back to some sort of civilisation.. sorry, there's more! As we drive off from David Gareja, the driver seems to be quite comfortable with his driving by the speed we were going on mountainous roads.. All fine by me ;) however after a couple of quite skilled escaping from ditches we did get stuck in one.. Just what we needed! Well, on the bright side the rain had stopped but on the dark side we were now stuck in the middle of the mountains known by having poisonous snakes.. Sweet! The driver and I had this look at each other that there is no need to speak the same language to understand.. I read on his eyes something like "mate it would be nice if you could come out with me and help to take this truck out of here" my eyes replied back something under these lines "mate, there is no way I'm getting out of this truck in the dark with the risk of getting bitten by a snake. I'm fine here, let's sort it out tomorrow" .. I think that after a couple of minutes he got the message ;) I know it wasn't a brave move but this was me looking after myself mom! In the end he got out on his own (I have to give him all the credit in the world for that) got some rocks to put under the tyre and after going back and forwards with the truck we were miraculously back on track.. After that is driving style changed from Dakar racing driver to 80 year old lady driving to the shops on a Sunday afternoon. As I thought this was going to be it.. He gets lost! Only because my georgian isn't good enough yet to give directions as he completely ignored me when we missed a turn.. So here we are at 10:30pm without any sort of clue to where we were going and even better the Azerbaijani border was just a few kms away.. Good thing I had my passport with me so there was nothing to worry about apart from what the heck was a lithuanian and a portuguese doing on a construction truck in the middle of the night crossing to Azerbaijan. I'm sure we would be able to come up with a pretty decent story if they didn't shoot us first.. We then started to spot quite bright lights on the top of a hill which I really thought it was the Azerbaijani border. It turned out to be a Georgian Military base.. At this point I had no idea if it was a bad or a good thing. No problems there as we drove past it and after another good hour in mountainous roads we finally found a tarmac road which would takes us safe to Tbilisi.
Here goes a few pictures from the trip so far.. My apologies if the quality isn't as good as the pictures in the first post but let's just blame Apple..
