Crazy-Ass Taxi World

One of these days, I swear I’m going to write a book about taxis. Not the machines themselves, but the experiences one can have in them.

A case in point: tonight I arrived in Tbilisi, capital city of the Republic of Georgia. The actual name of this country is Sakartvelo, and how we got from there to Georgia I have no clue - but then, the radical anglicisation of country names is a phenomenon that often mystifies me. I mean, how did Daehan Minguk mutate into 'South Korea', for example? You see what I mean. 

Personally, I think we should’ve retained the word Sakartvelo in English, because a) it’s a great word, and b) when a person says "I'm going to Georgia", very often there's a subsequent need to clarify that they're not talking about the US state which hosted the Atlanta Olympics.  

But anyway ... Sakartvelo/what-we-bizarrely-call-Georgia is the ninth former Soviet republic that I’ve either visited or lived in or both. And out of all of them, it's the one with by far the best reputation. In fact, it has one of the best reputations of any country I can think of; I’ve never once met a person who’s been here and come away feeling anything less than rapturous about it. 

Given this unbroken record of glowing recommendations, I’ve been meaning to get my ass here for years. So I’m really quite excited to have finally relocated said ass to said republic.

Unfortunately, the holiday didn't kick off in ideal circumstances: the flight in was terrifying. Intense crosswinds forced the pilots to do a go-around (or maybe two, I’m not entirely sure), before finally bringing us in for a wild and rather precarious landing at Tbilisi international airport. A couple of times we went into freefall, losing what I’d judge to be around 100 metres (though when I say “judge”, what I really mean is “guess blindly, bringing exactly zero aeronautical expertise to bear on the matter"). 

The pity of that is, for me, freefall is actually a lot of fun, provided you can remove the PSDE (Possible Sudden Death Element) from it. If I’d been able to see half an hour into the future, so as to know that the landing would turn out ok, I could’ve relaxed up there and enjoyed that whole ‘stepping down off the clouds' sensation. 

Sadly, though, my powers of prognostication are not what they could be.  

On the up side, I had the pleasure of spending what I thought may have been my last moments on Earth with a very friendly and smiley Georgian woman called Nino, named (I congratulated myself on knowing) after the saint who brought Christianity here from the cave churches of Cappadocia some time around the 4th Century CE. 

I don’t know what the original Nino was like - probably quite dour and preachy, I’d imagine - but this Nino was quite a beauty, with a face that reminded me of a young Deborah Harry, only slightly more eastern-looking, if you can picture that. Despite the woolly pink top she was wearing, her naturally black, shoulder-length hair and her blood red lipstick - which she kept nervously re-applying as our Turkish Airlines 737-800 veered around the sky like a bee after its sixth gin & tonic - added a mildly gothic touch to her appearance. 

Most strikingly, though, Nino had a voice woven from pure silk; the kind of voice that makes you want to engage a person in conversation purely for the joy of hearing them speak. At one point, the thought actually flickered through my mind that if the plane started to plummet and it became obvious that we weren’t gonna make the runway, I should just lean in and kiss her.  

*ahem*

Sorry ... huge tangent there. 

(And btw, I almost certainly wouldn’t have done that. Even when looking directly into the face of death, I’m far too much of a ‘gentleman’ for my own good. Stupid me!)

So finally the pilots get us on the ground, and Nino and I part company at the baggage carousel. She goes off to stay with her family in some rural and no doubt picturesque region of Sakartvelo, where at least one vineyard-covered hillside is always within view, and where flush-cheeked women burst into polyphonic song as they climb the mountain slopes to milk their goats above the treeline. 

(If you’re wondering why I mentioned the polyphonic song there, have a look at this wonderful video, recorded by three-and-a-half Georgian women on their smartphone a couple of years back. It went viral at the time, and rightly so - regardless of your tastes, there's a pretty good chance it will blow you away and maybe even move you a little:

So about two minutes post-Nino, a familiar-looking wheelie bag goes past me on the carousel, but when I inspect it more closely, I realise it can’t be mine. Four hours earlier in Istanbul, I’d put my bag on the check-in conveyor in near-perfect condition. This one, though it’s definitely the same brand and the same model, looks like it’s survived a mortar attack.

Another few minutes drag by, and all the passengers have left. The beaten, torn and apparently-slightly-melted wheelie bag comes around again on the carousel, and I think “Holy crap - it IS mine! What the hell have they done to it?!?” 

I take my poor bag off the carousel and try to stand it up. It falls over and lies prone on the white concrete tiles of the baggage reclaim area, looking feeble and dejected. I try to open it, but the zipper has been mashed. So I lift the wretched creature up by its handle and carry it to the Lost & Found desk. After a long wait, they advise me to take my enquiry to the on-site office of TFA (Turkish Fucking Airlines). 

(Note: that expletive is now an official part of their company name. Ok, not really - but it should be.) 

I think “Ok, fine, but I’m going to smoke first.”.

I go outside into the freezing, whipping wind. Immediately, I’m accosted by taxi drivers. The first one seems drunk. The second one is more alert, but perhaps a bit too alert - he borders on pushy and annoying.

Hoping to shake him off, I explain that I’ve got stuff to do before leaving the airport, and I’ll come back out when I’m done. But he has a better idea: he follows me back inside the arrivals hall (neatly side-stepping the security check - guess they recognise him there), to help me out. Of course, this is a time-honoured taxi drivers' trick: make yourself useful to your prospective passenger, so that they feel they ‘owe’ you, and then re-open negotiations in a far stronger position. 

Back inside, nothing goes especially well. The TFA office is closed, the ATM won’t take my main card (but it takes another card - phew!), and the information people advise me that I can probably speak to a TFA representative if I hang around until 1am.

Yeah, right.  

After almost two years ‘in country’, I've had time to acquaint myself with the nature of Turkish customer service. Your typical customer service rep is a rigorously-trained smiling machine. They smile, and they smile; their smiles appear to be looped like hold music, until the appropriate moment in your sob story arrives and they effortlessly switch to looking concerned and empathetic and absolutely determined to assist in any way they can. And yet, in spite of all that, it’s quite clear that the person who coined the expression “Like getting blood from a stone” had never asked a Turkish customer service representative to change a faulty item. If he had, he would’ve known that making a lump of rock bleed is child’s play by comparison.

Plus it's 11pm, I've been travelling all day, and this is the first day of my holiday, damn it!

So at this point, I basically give up on TFA. The taxi driver is still there, and he’s helped me with some translations, so I give up on shaking him off as well. It’s obvious that he’s gonna be my ride into town tonight, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

We walk around to the back of the airport building, and he points to his car, a black Mercedes. It’s as black inside as it is out - all vinyl seats and shiny black buttons with mystifying hieroglyphs on them, supposedly indicating their functions. But the car smells of smoke and sweat and disrepair, and one of the rear-view mirrors has been completely destroyed - and I mean completely. There’s nothing but a tangle of wires and electrical tape sticking out of the driver’s side of the car, like the stump that might protrude from a robot’s shoulder if you ripped its arm off.  

He puts the key into the ignition, and says in Russian “What the hell?” Then to me, in English, “All the passwords changed”. For a moment nothing happens, and it seems like the ride is over. But somehow, he manages to override whatever system it is that’s preventing the car from starting (it seems to be related to a message on the dashboard display, saying the car is 7,800kms overdue for a service), and we proceed to the toll booth at the entrance to the airport car park.

The woman inside the booth asks the driver for 5 Georgian Lari (about $2), and the driver - who by now has introduced himself as “George” - winds down the window and remonstrates with her. Amazingly, she relents and lets us go. But then we’ve got a problem: the window won’t wind back up!

George instructs me to hold down one of the hieroglyphically-marked buttons, and as I do so, he puts one foot outside the car and a hand on either side of the glass pane. He shoves the window back into place by force - an action which, apparently, is somehow facilitated by my button-pressing.

And then we take off into the city ... at a million frikkin’ miles an hour.

George steers with his knees, using both hands to retrieve his tablet from the back seat. His brother has just called him, and he decides that answering the call is more important than retaining firm control over the steering wheel. 

“Yep”, I think, “No doubt about it. I’m definitely back in the Soviet space!”

I ask George what I should see while I’m in Tbilisi, and he starts talking but falters because of the language barrier. He then apologises for his English, and says “I can explain in Russian, but in English, I don’t know the words”. I tell him that I understand a little Russian, but I emphasise the  "a little” part, because I haven't had much practice in recent times.  

George says “If you only have a little, you probably won’t follow me” (which makes me warm to him a little, because too many Russian-speakers - just like their English-speaking counterparts - hear you speak three words of their language and immediately assume that they can communicate to you like they would to a native speaker). 

Then he starts talking - and I understand almost every word he says. He’s a clear, cogent speaker - his style is direct and simple, which, when you’re a foreigner in the Russosphere, makes him worth his weight in gold.  

A little while later, he apologises for his English again. I say (in Russian) “George, I used to live in Kazakhstan and I learned Russian there, but these days ...”

“Ah, you have no practice?”

“Yeah, no practice. So it’s great for me to have this chance to hear Russian. But I’ve forgotten lots of words, so be patient.”

Feeling encouraged by my desire to listen, George proceeds to give me a potted history of Sakartvelo in about two thousand words. We talk about Nino (the original one, not the cute one on the plane) and Cappadocia, the King who founded Tbilisi, how the city got its name (it’s a myth involving said king, along with a pheasant brought back from the dead by the magical healing powers of the warm springs in the area), the architecture, the influence of the Russians and the Persians and the Azeris, and a whole bunch of other stuff you’d normally have to pay a tour guide for. It was awesome.

Meanwhile, his driving hadn’t got any less scary.

So, after speeding down three-lane highways for about 20 minutes, using all the lanes available, and swerving suddenly down a couple of exit roads, George stops the car across the road from a late-night currency exchange place. “Give me your money”, he says.

If this was my first visit to an ex-Sov, I’d probably assume I was being robbed at this point. But I know from past experience what’s happening here.

At the risk of embarking on yet another hopeless tangent, I want to say something about this phrase “ex-Sov” - shorthand for “former Soviet Republic”. In many ways, it’s a wholly inadequate term. The territories it refers to comprise about one sixth of the world’s landmass - and so, as you might expect, we’re talking about an incredible degree of cultural, geographical, ethnic and religious diversity here that an umbrella term will almost inevitably fail to capture. And yet, there are at least a few little details that somehow manage to traverse that vast space, cropping up everywhere you go in the former USSR. One of them is that nobody ever seems to have any change.

George is no exception, and what's more, he knows that the ATM at the airport only dispenses 100 Lari notes. The ride costs 50. So he takes my crisp 100 to the exchange window, where the woman unceremoniously tells him to go away. She doesn’t have change either.

“Suka!” he says as he gets back into the car.

(This is literally Russian for “Bitch!”, but it’s a much stronger insult.) We take off again, hoping that my hotel will be able to break a hundred.

Then suddenly we’re in the city centre, and first impressions are flooding in through the window. They're quite overwhelming! There’s a 5th Century fortress floodlit on a hill, overlooking medieval walls. There are 19th Century merchant houses and gigantic Stalin-era brutalist hulks; there’s beauty, there’s decay (plenty of it!), there are wide expansive boulevards and poky, ancient lanes, and there’s an overriding feeling of exoticism about the whole place.

Whizzing through it as we are, I feel my heart in my throat again - but this time it’s all good. I’m gonna have so much fun getting to grips with this city!

I’m sure anyone who’s travelled widely has experienced this at least once: the 'first blush’ of seeing a new and mysterious place through the window of a taxi, and knowing that the days to come are going to reveal some fabulous secrets. Filtering those initial moments through the lens of a mad taxi driver - who seems likely to either a) kill you, b) ensure that your first hour remains among the most memorable you spend here, or c) possibly both - can be truly exhilarating.

And that’s why I’m going to write a book about taxis.

It’s going to be a compilation, though. So start thinking about your chapter now.