Adventures with mercenaries and flashfloods

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• Entry from Tbilisi

  Tbilisi, Georgia
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Made it across the rest of Turkey and entered Georgia with no real trouble. There were no indications of where to got at the border, so we joined a queue of comfortably plump Georgian ladies who looked like the could be trusted to be doing the right thing. The customs officer wished me 'Good Lucky and Great Travels in Georgia, Sir Ambrose!' and we were on our way.

We had meant to stop as soon as we had had the chance to buy some food but there were no towns for miles and miles and we almost at Tbilisi before we decided to turn off and find somewhere quite to stop. Thundering down a back road at 60 mph, we shot through a Georgia/Russia checkpoint without noticing. Oops. We did notice the Russian side however as we pulled up to a heavy duty concrete blockade manned by heavily armed, unofficial-looking Russian militia. We thought about turning and running away, but it would have been an agonizingly slow 5 point turn and would probably have looked more suspicious. So we handed over our passports to terrifying Russian mercenary number 1 and smiled politely, with very little idea what was going on. He was wearing murderous looking leather gloves, and had a very big knife tucked into his jacket. In case his machine gun ran out of bullets. We were relieved when we got turned away and sent back to the Georgian checkpoint, which we were a little surprised to see, having failed to notice it the first time through. Unsurprisingly, they were a little suspicious of the three of us and we had to explain in fractious Russian, they we were very sorry, we didn't see it, we don't mean any harm, please don't shoot us, etc etc. Eventually they let us on our way to Tbilisi, but the days events were far from over.

...We found a small steep side road that led us to a spot just beside the Knesi river (which runs through Tbilisi). Having evaded the Russian militia we were happy enough to park just about anywhere. Stopping by the river allowed us to wash some of our clothes and (hopefully) get a bit of a kip. At around 9pm we could see some forked lightning in the distance but we were unconcerned as we could hear no thunder and figured the storm was some way off...this was a mistake. Some time near midnight Chris awoke as drips of water landed on his head. Immediately he woke Dave and two of them broke out the saucepans as the rain threatened to relieve us of a night's sleep. Having dealt with the problem we all tried to persist in what I can only describe as the worst storm I've ever been in. 2 hours later I felt water droplets on my head. We all woke again and realised that sitting the van beside an already quite tenacious river in torrential rain mightn't be a good idea. Dave checked outside and indeed yes; the van was sitting in a 6 inch stream of water. For fear of being swept away Dave jumped into the front and heated Molly up. On the first attempt the van travelled about 20 feet up the steep, stony slope before losing grip and sliding back down towards the river. Next two attempts, same thing. On the fourth attempt Dave decided to keep it in first gear and give it hell. We thundered up to the top of the slope.