Equally cessed and blursed

If you laugh in the face of god enough times, they will eventually start laughing back at you. That’s my theory, at least, for what we’ll call winning by failure at getting to Kutaisi Airport.

I don’t know why but I’m incapable of turning up to Kutaisi in a normal way. One time it was because I decided, cavalier, to miss my bus in favour of an emotional goodbye with the person I’d just divorced, meaning I had to go panic and get a taxi which was plenty ridiculous enough (a four hour taxi, even in Georgia, is no joke) but this one really went over the top.

Two things are important to know for this story: Kutaisi is Georgia’s second or maybe third airport, it’s basically just a strip of concrete that used to be a military base and has a handful of flights a day. Two: it’s somewhere between three and four hours drive away from Tbilisi, even with the motorway connection between the two. Pretty much Georgia’s only motorway, in fact.

When I booked my bus back to Kutaisi it said I needed to be there for a 16:00 departure, which felt vaguely over the top for needing to be there for about 20:30 but you know what, I’d rather be safe than sorry. As it happens, this story involves being neither.

I was mostly tuning out during the early part of the journey from Tbilisi because I was hungover and feeling some complex stuff about leaving just as I’d got used to being in Georgia again. And also some annoyingly convoluted admin I’d known was going to take more than one go with Tbilisi City Hall was about to drag on much, much longer than my trip.

That’s my excuse, anyway, for the fact it took me awhile to clock that we weren’t on the motorway. My first hint was that there was a shitload of snow out the window, which was weird because in the lower bits of Georgia (a mountainous country with at least 12 climates despite being extremely small) it’s pretty warm by the end of March. So: that shouldn’t be there.

Also we were pretty clearly climbing into the mountains, which the motorway doesn’t do. Again, weird sign. So I load up google maps and find out we’re actually on the loop road to Chiatura which is weird because Chiatura isn’t near Kutaisi but also at this point we’ve got a tonne of time and I want to see Chiatura, even through the window of a coach, so I’m pretty hype.

Chiatura’s a Soviet-era mining town, producing most of the magnesium for the USSR. The mine shut down in 2014, though and hasn’t been replaced with any other industry. Chiatura’s unique public transport system of tens of cable cars criss-crossing the gorge it clings down either side of is lying rusting and ruined, cars still dangling threateningly from tangled wires and there are much more empty, rotting buildings than there are full or even non-abandoned ones. Stonework on the outskirts is turning into heaps barely distinguishable from the mining slag piles and it’s atmospheric as hell but undeniably totally fucked, as a place.

About halfway through Chiatura we joined a huge queue of traffic. It’d been slow moving for awhile at that point but that’s not all that surprising when you’re going through mountain roads and I initially thought it was just whatever passed for rush hour, a little surprised by the bustle given how emptied out Chiatura looked. In fact the town’s fuckedness is emphasised by the fact that the Georgian road authorities have decided to repair the damaged road by just… not allowing it to work. one way choke points created big queues of semi-stationary traffic as night started to fall but even then I was pretty chill, I mean, eventually we’ll get past the block and then we’ll be on our way.

I don’t know why I thought that, given this was not my first Georgian bus trip. Some strange, ineffable trust in the process had taken hold of me on the basis of absolutely nothing, especially any experiences of Georgian buses. I should have got a marshrutka, you can rely on them; transit van minibuses safely converted to run on the cigarettes the driver must chain smoke constantly to maintain motion, you know where you are with them, the natural way of things. The concept of an official bus service is just lip service to foreign ideals.

Anyway, so we’re in Chiatura and it’s getting dark. Then finally we’re kinda just outside Chiatura and the reason for the delays becomes obvious, which is that there’s a chunk of bits of road that are, err, how can I put this? They aren’t. As in, there’s a big hole after some concrete barriers where one side of the road should be.

That happens in the mountains, I guess and there does seem to be some sort of maintenance taking place. So it’s annoying and it’s kinda starting to grate on me that we should be at the airport in 20 minutes and we’re nearly two hours away but it is what it is.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that nearly two hours to go 64 miles is kind of anomalous but bear with me here, I was in Georgia. Time works differently. Everything happens at some point and you can’t fight it, so there’s no point making a fuss. As the Georgian saying bedi karze momdgomia goes, fate arrives at your doorstep.

Getting nervous while travelling isn’t really a me thing. I don’t even really get grumpy unless there’s some sort of nonsense going on in Schipol or something, travel is that liminal space where the only way out is through. You can equip yourself with all the tools to be good at it (and I am) but there are also times where you can’t do a goddamned thing about the situation.

Take being on a bus that’s a long way from the airport you need to be at and which is going over pitch-dark, unsurfaced mountain roads, bouncing in and out of pot holes about a foot deep, next to cliffs. I’m not stupid, I know how dangerous Georgian roads are and the nose-to-tail traffic isn’t making the ability to maneuver around hazards any kind of mitigating factor.

So I make sure my seatbelt’s on and stare into the dark. The entertainment of rubbernecking at rural industrial decay has been cut off by the night and there’s only the odd bit of lurching cliff edge or a lone house with a light to be seen outside so I text my friends and mention that I’m in a suboptimal situation, all things considered.

Still, there’s not really anything I can do about it other than sit it out. So we go further up the mountains, then start a precipitous descent down to Zestafoni. I’d say I was like, not exactly high key but definitely at least background seriously concerned the bus was going to roll and that was taking the edge off any worries about missing my flight, as a more immediate and mortal concern.

The very real possibility you could die in as cringe and fail a way as ‘bus’ is pretty distracting from everything else. By the time we make it to Zestafoni and rejoin the highway we probably should’ve been on all this time I’m feeling very zen anyway, having made peace with my worries being more about checking out than checking in for my flight. That’s long gone, I’m just gonna have to find out what the next way out of Kutaisi is and start working out a route home. Or go back to Tbilisi, whatever. Just so long as I’m off that goddamned mountain.

Which is when I got a text from Wizz Air, a reliability shonky airline rarely running anything on time who I’d vaguely been hoping might do this, saying they’d rescheduled my flight for half past midnight. Implausibly, my transfer in Gdansk will still fit and that means we get to Kutaisi just as baggage drop opens, shortly after the plane should have taken off.

Somehow, the whole stupid thing has come together. I’m not hanging by my safety belt halfway down a cliff edge, I’m going to actually get my flight the perfectly normal way because the airline are so shit. It’s an incredibly lucky series of events that are, at the same time, the absolute opposite of fortunate.

Anyway, then it turned out my plane was completely out of wine, providing a sober Wizz experience — not something I’d recommend under any circumstances and certainly someone getting the last laugh in.