Mongol Rally 2007 - Windmill Giants official blog

We woke up early, stuffed ourselves on the decent breakfast that was provided, and set out towards Georgia.  We decided to take the road less traveled through the mountains rather than take on the crowds crossing the border near the resort town of Batumi.  Rusty excelled on the sharp turns and steep roads that passed though terraced slopes of tea trees, and we were relieved to find fewer death-defying stunt drivers around us.   

As we climbed higher toward Artvin, we came upon absolutely jaw-dropping gorgeous scenes around almost every turn.  An impressive dam and several quarries were among the sights that gave us occasion to pull over for photos.  The quality of the road itself was fantastic, with a rare rocky stretch or two serving as the exception rather than the rule.  Even after 14 hours in the car the previous day, we were happy to be on the road again.  This day was probably the most enjoyable driving we did on the entire Mongol Rally, and arguably one of the best drives we’ve taken ever, ranking up there with Highway 1 in California and Rocky Mountain National Park.   

The trip through the mountains was going more slowly than we had thought, and we were concerned that we would once again be arriving at an unreasonable hour for our Couchsurfing host in T’bilisi.   It was bad enough that we were arriving a day later than we had initially told him, and we didn’t want to push our luck when he was generous enough to put us up for the night.  Pressed as we were for time, we reluctantly continued on past a festival resembling Turkey’s answer to Woodstock, before eventually coming to a high mountain pass of rolling grasslands.   We drove for over an hour without seeing many cars or people at all for that matter; just the occasional shepard out to the summer pastures with his flock like it was a thousand years ago. 

Finally the road narrowed and we came to a gate that closed just as we pulled up.   We were the only car at the border, and hoped that would help speed us through the crossing.  Clearing Turkish passport control was slightly bumbling but largely uneventful.  The scenic drive and smooth dealings with Turkish officials had left us a bit unprepared for what sharp transition a border crossing can be.  We were about to drive into what had been the Soviet Union, and we hadn’t thought much about it until we got there. 

In stark contrast to the lanky, silly looking guard that waived us our of Turkey, the gate to Georgia was opened by a thick-necked, sausage-eating, vodka-swilling, brute of a soldier impatiently barking orders at us in Russian.  We promptly forgot all of the Russian that we knew and fell back on the play-dumb strategy that we hoped would keep us from paying the many bribes we had been told were on the road ahead.  We stood for a while under direct sun on a hot day while guys in crew cuts and military fatigues looked suspiciously at the pages that had been added to my passport.  We smiled stupidly, occasionally pointing West, saying “London” then East and saying “Mongolia” and the pointing to Rustinante.  The soldiers marched back and forth between various sheds with our documents.  While they certainly weren’t the friendliest of fellows, the Georgian guards at least were not corrupt and did not hassle us for bribes.   

Passing at this little used border crossing took just over an hour, which helped make up for the time we had lost driving through the mountains.  We expected to arrive in T’bilisi later than we had hoped, but most of the road ahead on the map was marked as a major road so we figured we would probably make good time.  As was often the case on the Mongol Rally, we had figured wrong. 

The gate into Georgia opened onto what one half of our team argues was the worst road on the whole Rally, until the other half reminds him of driving through 20 miles of sand in Kazakhstan.  We’re not talking potholes; it was if the whole road had been jack hammered before they hit it with heavy artillery.  This continued for about three miles before a perfectly paved road forked to the left and we turned.  Illiana jokingly said that she hoped this wasn’t the way to some secret military installation, and about two seconds later a military vehicles passed us going the opposite direction beeping and shouting.  We passed over a hill and saw that the road ended at some sort of power plant, so we quickly turned around before they opened fire and made our way back to the opposite of pavement.   

This God-awful road eventually gave way to something was just plain bad but at least drivable.  We passed through some very economically depressed communities in the mountainous northwestern part of Georgia before we reached the valley that we followed to T’bilisi.  Rustinante’s ego swelled as he passed rusting old Moskvich and Lada cars, but he got the occasional dose of humility as a new BMW would race by.  None of the road signs were in the Latin or even Cyrillic Alphabets, and we quickly learned the letters that spelled out T’bilisi in the local scrawl to keep us heading in the right direction.   

We came to the city limits of T’bilisi after dark and learned that the city was much more sprawled out than we realized and that we really had no idea where we were going.  All we had from our CS host was an address, and though we knew from his online profile that he lived in the center, his street wasn’t on our map.  Our cell phone was only good for texting after leaving Turkey, and we knew that our pre-paid texts were running low and had to be conserved.  We stopped often, showing reluctant strangers the map in our Lonely Planet book and asking them to point us in the right direction.  Not being able to read the alphabet surely didn’t help, but trial and error eventually brought us to a local prostitute who was able to show us the building.   

Our CS Host Anthony was very understanding of our challenges on the road, and welcomed us to his very spacious apartment after 10pm and set us up with our own room.  We picked up some nosh and local beers at a supermarket and talked for awhile about the Rally, Couchsurfing, life in Georgia and NYC before he let us rest up for the next day’s drive to Baku.