Kutaisi

We bid a fond farewell to the Blobber Baron and headed for the Tbilisi bus station, jumping on a surprisingly plush intercity coach to Kutaisi. We were even served a cup of tea! It’s not a Cambodian nasi goreng topped with a fried egg delivered in-situ, but serving tea at 100kms/hr is a feat not to be sniffed at. Kutaisi is a small city in the Imereti region of western Georgia, meaning it is the source of that good cheese we’ve been hoovering. Dan has gone up a belt notch, and Chelsea is dreaming about green vegetables. Two weeks of bread and cheese has done the job.

This has been the first of many short stops we’ve got this week as we start the sprint towards Europe proper. We whipped round the old town of Kutaisi which is one of the oldest inhabited places in the world. Jason and the Argonauts came through here on their quest for the Golden Fleece. This adventure is depicted in a massive, Soviet-style bas-relief by Bernard Nebieridze completed in 1982, near the Green Bazaar. Turns out every town between China and Turkey has a Green Bazaar. A more contemporary hero, the khachapuri queen of Imereti, Bebia Dali, is the inspiration for the mural ‘With Love’ by artist Sasha Korban. It’s a charming city, though a little quiet in the off-season.

We had a few brilliant recommendations from our Tbilisi friend Sebastian and worked our way through restaurants Gala, Palaty, and Café Foe-Foe, the last of which means ‘hoity-toity’. Dan settled in there to spend the day working on his novel. Chelsea walked around the city and stumbled across a Georgian band trying (and failing) to film a music video in the park. They’d get only about a minute into the song before an oblivious granny would wander through the set, obstinately ignoring crew entreaties and camera lines.

We’ve been charmed by the prevalence of live music in Georgian restaurants. If it’s a nice spot, there’ll be a vocalist and pianist at minimum, and occasionally a cellist as well. Our dinner of khachapuri, ojakhuri and gebzhalia was accompanied by a surprisingly stirring instrumental rendition of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ by Metallica (Dan misidentified this as Linkin Park 👎).

We’re back on the bus heading for the coast now, heavy mists blanketing the green and gold tea-fields of the Guria region all the way to the Black Sea.Read more