The border officer glanced briefly at my passport and slammed her stamp on it with a bang that shook her booth. And then I was through and loose in Shota Rustaveli Airport’s arrivals hall, still bleary from two back-to-back flights totalling eleven and a half hours.
I needed three things: money, a SIM card for my phone, and some change for the bus into town. The first two were simple. A bank machine was easy to find and readily dispensed me some Georgian lari. There were also booths for three different telecoms. The representative for Magti was happy to set my phone up with a SIM and a prepaid data plan for the equivalent of just under $20 CAD if I signed a long document in Georgian. Hopefully I didn’t sign my life away! (You can read more about how to buy a phone plan at Tbilisi airport on this blog.)
The hardest part proved to be the seemingly simple task of catching a bus. I asked the young women at the airport’s information desk where I could change some bills for smaller coins, so I would have a bus fare, since you need ₾ .50 in exact change. One of them had her head down on the desk, taking a nap. The other was absorbed by her phone. The latter looked at me incredulously. “At the currency exchange,” she said shortly.
I asked her where the bus stop was located.
“Outside!”
Where outside?
“Outside!”
She went back to reading her phone in a booth barren of pamphlets or maps.
For the record, none of the currency exchange booths in the airport can change a bill for coins. To do that, you’ll need to go next door to the departures hall, where there are small items for sale, and buy something that leaves you with the right change. Also, to find the bus stop, step outside the doors of the arrival terminal, turn right on the sidewalk, and march approximately 150 metres to the very end of the departures terminal, through the gauntlet of importunate taxi drivers. Ignore the blue sign half way there with the graphic of a bus on it. That one’s just for decoration. The real stop is the electronic board farther on. In theory, there’s a bus every 15 minutes, but when I showed up, the board said the next one would arrive in 37 minutes.
At that point, I struck up a conversation with another backpacker and we decided to share a taxi into town. (Cheers, Malan from Mumbai!) This was the first of many occasions on which I was happy I had learned some basic Georgian, since it turned out that our driver–like most Georgian cabbies–spoke no English. The journey grew more pleasant from here, as we sped away from the airport through a landscape of pastures and roadside bushes with orange blossoms.
We passed Zurab Tsereteli’s Man and Sun monument and entered a city of crumbly stucco and balconies festooned with laundry. I had made it!
Kartvelian Adventures 