Georgian Fairy Tales: The magic of wild places

It was a peaceful half hour in the calm, cool quiet, watching the square fill up, keeping an eye on the ornate clock tower, with Belle’s little town, it’s a quiet village playing in my head.

Soon the rest of the group arrived (one family with three kids, the rest couples and one lone male) and we all piled into the spacious van. I was the the only female solo traveler, so I got to sit up front with our guide Galina- a Slavic dead ringer for Emma Stone.

And it wasn’t long before I was fielding the usual question: Are you alone? The couples were friendly, most of them were expats from the Gulf, and all of them wanted, at various intervals throughout the day, to know if I had any companions, what I was doing all by myself, and the inevitable You should find a husband!

(The last one was said by a kindly Syrian gentleman with twinkling eyes as his wife looked on in bemusement, so I won’t hold it against them.)

Highlights of the long drive out of the city:

• Urban fishermen by the Kura, a pretty, sunlit scene that only needed a Bach minuet in the background
• The monument to David the Builder at a city intersection (Brandon the Builder, said my inner GoT fangirl)
• The surreal sight of both left- and right-hand cars speeding along
• The monastery that appeared dramatically on a hilltop – this landscape is full of postcard-perfect surprises like that
• Tidy lines of the sprawling village for refugees from Abkhazia and South Ossetia (places I would not have known without Messrs. Le Carré et Clancy)
• Passing through Gori, Stalin’s birthplace – Think they have Stalin Park or something? I’d said to him a couple of evenings before we’d flown out, and he had given me another one of those looks. Stalin Park?! Well, it turns out there was no Stalin Park, of course, but there were still Stalin magnets for sale.
• Crumbled ruins of the market where slavers gathered to bid for the Georgian boys who would become warriors (Meereen, whispered the GoT fangirl)
• The area where Ilia Chavchavadze, a prince revered as one of Georgia’s founding fathers, was assassinated – I just read one of his stories yesterday! I exclaimed to Galina, who was happy to know she wasn’t sitting next to an illiterate.
• The pit stop where I picked up some pine cones and made friends with a large white dog that followed me all the way back to the van.
• The wide expanse of the Georgian Military Highway that ran all the way to Russia. All roads lead to Moscow, he had said, which had led to a list of the best things to come out of Russia – Tetris! Tchaikovsky! and we’d agreed on vodka.

MOOOOve over.

Finally we were driving through Borjomi and its achingly beautiful pine-covered mountains. A broad and sparkling river ran jauntily alongside the road, glimpsed in iridescent flashes through sun-mottled leaves.