Tbilisi

We stayed six nights in Tbilisi during our two weeks in the Caucasus Region. Tbilisi and the Moxy hotel served as our home base as we went out on tours, flew to Azerbaijan and back, and drove into Armenia and back. Tbilisi was welcoming and friendly and we were happy to make it our home base. Huge shout out to the Moxy – it felt like a home, and I liked the area of the city it was in. Not right in the quaint but touristy old town, not in the upscale area where the fancy tourists stayed. But what felt like more of a normal neighborhood that was central enough that we could walk or Uber to anywhere. 

The first morning, our goal was the funicular that would take us up to Mt Mtatsminda which would give us a good view over Tbilisi. We had arrived at 3 am the night before after a 12 hour flight delay – so we hadn’t seen anything or been able to orient ourselves. The funicular to Mt. Mtatsminda was only about a mile and a half from our hotel so our goal was to walk there and explore the city en route. 

The Moxy was located near the Dry Bridge, where they have a flea market every Sunday, and we got lucky as it was Sunday morning. Michele found a pin of Georgia that she wanted to buy, but we hadn’t yet changed money or hit the ATMs, so Michele used her Russian for the first time on the trip to explain we would come back after we got money. 

We walked through Leonidze Park which had a statue garden with QR codes on the statues. Instead of an explanation of the statue we picked, we got a reading of a poem. It was an anti-Soviet protest poem but I didn’t have enough cultural context to understand it. I liked the QR codes though, and wished we had more time to listen to all of them.  

Once we got up to Mt. Mtatsminda, we started orienting. We spotted Narikala Fortress in the distance, the Bridge of Peace, some modern-looking cylinder buildings that we later found out were a concert hall that never opened, and the Tsminda Sameba Cathedral that dominates the cityscape.  

Once we’d seen everything we wanted to see, we headed down, and set our azimuths to Narikala fortress.  

On the way we passed Freedom Square, and popped into a swanky wine bar to try the local cheese bread Khachapuri [we got a sharing size that looked a lot like pizza]. For my taste the cheese was funky and salty so I ate the crust and downed two coke zeros. Michele has a more extensive palate for cheese, so she ate her slices.

We had initially thought that our hotel was in the Old Town so we didn’t make an effort to head there first. As we started approaching the neighborhood leading up to Narikala Fortress, we realized that we were walking into the Old Town proper. We walked up the winding streets the back way up to the Fortress which had been used to store munitions by the Russians and had been mostly destroyed. From there we walked to the Mother of Georgia – a massive statue with a sword in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She keeps watch over the city, offering wine to her guests symbolizing the overwhelming Georgian hospitality, but with a sword ready for anyone who threatens Georgia. 

We rode the cable car down from the statue and Fortress area, landing in Rike Park between the Bridge of Peace and the cylindrical buildings we’d seen earlier – the never opened concert hall. While a more rational approach might have been to take the cable cars UP to the Fortress [it was hot out, and rather steep], AND a rational person might also have started their tour of Tbilisi in Old City first – in retrospect, I liked the way we did it. I like seeing the less-touristy parts of the city, and walking from the Moxy to the funicular certainly gave us that. I liked getting the view of the city from Mt Mtatsminda as a way of orienting first. While most guidebooks would tell you to go straight to the Old City first [and I might recommend the same], I wouldn’t change our route if I could. BUT we did recognize that we had effectively skipped most of the Old City by taking a cable car over it from the fortress.

The next time we had ‘free time’ in Tbilisi, we went straight to the Old Town. We walked along the river from our hotel and crossed the Bridge of Peace. The Bridge of Peace was a spectacle itself. The architecture is nice – with a curving, twisting roof above the bridge which provided shade on the hot sunny day.  But the bridge was packed with tourists and locals who were out for the tourist dollar, including people offering boat rides, people with monkeys and pheasants and falcons who you could take pictures with [for a fee!]. There were bike riders and walkers and it was a madcap obstacle course. 

Once we got to Old Town, the streets were lined with cafes with outdoor seating. We were there at an off-time so most of the restaurants were empty, but there were a few people smoking hookahs and many of the cafes had employees out front with menus to bring people in. We were navigating to the Meidan Bazaar which we knew was in the heart of Old Town – so we kept going until we found it.   

The Meidan Bazaar is in a tunnel that runs under the main thoroughfare in Old Town and it was packed with fun things, from wines and socks to trinkets and teas. We wandered back and forth through it a few times, and then emerged back into the sunlight to check out the rest of Old Town. All of the touristy shops, restaurants, and wine bars you could want were packed on top of each other climbing up the narrow streets to Narikala fortress above. There were hostels and hotels and everything was friendly but not overcrowded. Touristy but still authentic.  We found a few souvenirs, and then found a nice place to eat called Organique at the end of a long row of restaurants. It was quiet and didn’t have a hawker out front, and had vegetarian food [a good veggie burger] and good Georgian wine.