Days 1 & 2: Home to Tbilisi via Luton

While Tim is spending a few days at the French Esperanto Conference, I am off on an adventure to Georgia with my family. This blog post should have been called "Home to Tbilisi via Amsterdam", but let's just say the adventure didn't get off to the best of starts...

We were due to fly from Birmingham to Amsterdam with KLM after work on Friday evening. The plan was to stay overnight in a hotel at Amsterdam airport, before catching a Georgian Airways flight to Tbilisi at 10.40 on Saturday morning. The Georgian Airways flight was going to be great; we had business class seats booked, with the promise of Georgian food and wine to accompany them.

To start with everything seemed to be running smoothly. We all got to the airport early, checked in our bags and survived the very slow and overcrowded Birmingham security experience. We even had enough time for dinner and drinks before our flight was called.

The gate was announced at the scheduled time and it seemed like the flight might take off on time.... And then disaster struck! When we were sitting in the gate area waiting to board, there was suddenly an announcement that there was a technical problem with the plane. We were reassured that engineers were trying to fix it and the initial suggestion was that it was going to be a comparatively short delay. Slightly frustrating, but not the end of the world.

As the minutes ticked by, however, the delay got longer and longer. It seemed that the problem was with the steering system of the plane. The engineers were apparently on the phone to people in Amsterdam and looked like they were essentially trying to switch the plane off and on again, but with no success. The KLM initially suggested we might take off at 21.00, then 22.00, before finally notifying me that the flight was cancelled.

Chaos ensued. There was only one staff member left working by this point. She had stayed behind after her shift, which had been due to finish at 8, and was soon completely overwhelmed by people who needed their flights rebooking. KLM automatically rebooked us onto a flight from Birmingham to Amsterdam at 17.40 on Saturday, which was no use to us as we needed to be in Amsterdam by around 8am at the latest if we were going to make our next flight. The KLM lady suggested she might be able to book us onto an Easyjet flight to Amsterdam from another airport - 06.00 from Luton was a possible option - but even then it wasn't certain that we would have time to get through passport control in Amsterdam, collect our baggage and check in for the second flight before the check-in desk closed.

We really didn't know what to do. The Georgian Airways flights we'd booked were expensive, so we didn't want to lose them, but on the other hand we also didn't want to lose our entire holiday. If we didn't make the connection in Amsterdam on Saturday then we would have had to wait until Wednesday(!) for the next flight, which would have completely thrown out our itinerary. What a nightmare! Other people on the flight had similar problems; one man was trying to get all the way to Lagos, other people were trying to get to Iceland and were being rerouted via odd places like Belfast and Aberdeen.

Eventually we were led back out through security to collect our baggage and leave the airport. It was well past 10pm by this point. Having researched every possible way of getting to Georgia, we eventually came to the conclusion that the best solution would be to give up the idea of travelling via Amsterdam and book a new direct flight from Luton to Tbilisi with Easyjet. There was a flight on Saturday which still had four seats spare and which would get us in to the Georgian capital just a few hours later than originally planned. We decided to take the plunge, and I booked our seats via the Easyjet app. Helen booked us on a National Express coach to Luton for the next morning and I managed to speak to KLM via webchat and asked them to cancel the random 17.40 flight to Amsterdam they'd moved us onto and promise to refund our tickets. Whether we'll get a refund of the Georgian Airways tickets is more uncertain, though I did also submit a request for that. The airport hotel we'd got booked in Amsterdam was non-cancellable, so that might be one we have to pursue KLM for compensation on.

By the time all this was sorted, it was around 11pm. We got a taxi back to my parents' house and all had time for about five hours sleep before jumping in an Uber to Birmingham coach station at 06.30 on Saturday morning.

Soon we were off on our National Express adventure to Luton!

I was slightly surprised that the coach journey was scheduled for three hours - as in my head Luton is quite a close airport - but it turned out that we were going to stop in a lot of places: Birmingham Airport, Coventry, Northampton, Milton Keynes... Quite impressively given it was a bank holiday Saturday, we did arrive in Luton just after 10am in line with the coach timetable, despite a bit of congestion on the M1.

Our flight wasn't until 12.15 so theoretically we had plenty of time to navigate Luton airport, but disaster struck again when the entire baggage system appeared to break down. We checked in and printed our baggage labels via a machine with no problems, but then when we came to hand the bags over we found that the conveyor belts which should move them away from us and through the airport were malfunctioning. Nothing would happen for ages, then a belt would suddenly spring into action and move a couple of suitcases, before freezing up again. Not ideal!

We were lucky that this malfunctioning had literally only just started at the point we arrived and so we were quite close to the front of the queue for bag-drop. We maybe had to wait for 15 minutes or so before our cases were taken, but at the point we were heading to security the queues were beginning to get enormous and staff were starting to talk about manually carrying bags for flights that were due to take off soon. If we'd been much later, I don't know whether either we or our bags would have made the flight.

But we did make it - finally - and shortly after 12.15 we were on our way to Tbilisi. It's around a 5-hour flight to Georgia and it was definitely not as glamorous on Easyjet as it would have been on Georgian Airways, but we did try to make our own fun with a meal deal...

...and cocktails.

I wouldn't say the five hours flew by, but we got through them and as we got closer to Tbilisi we had some amazing views of snow-covered mountains.

Georgia is three hours ahead of the UK, so it was around 20.15 local time when we stepped off the plane into a new country.

Passport control and baggage reclaim were pretty efficient and we were out of the airport quite quickly. Helen booked us a taxi on Bolt, which seems to be the preferred taxi app here, and we had a journey of about 20 minutes to the hotel, where a staff member was waiting for us to arrive. It's a bit of an unusual hotel, as it's located on the very top floor of a tall building which houses a bank at the bottom. The instructions had been to arrive at the bank, then send a Whatsapp message and someone would come to collect us. Luckily the taxi brought us to the right place, where the staff member found us and showed us into the hotel.

The staff member turned out to not really speak English, so initially communicated with us via Google Translate and then in Russian. I didn't really feel like I'd had enough sleep in the past 24 hours to be speaking Russian, but I just about got through his complex explanations about which key fobs to use for which doors (me and Helen have three different fobs plus a key for our room!). He asked us what time we'd like breakfast in the morning, so I asked what time it would start. It turned out to be 9am, so we said we'd go with that. Georgia seems to be quite a laid back country!

I forgot to take a photo of the hotel room before we unpacked, but I did take a picture from the outside terrace, from where there are some great views out across Tbilisi. This is what it looks like at night...

...and this is what it looked like the next morning.

The location of the city is beautiful, surrounded by hills.

We turned up for breakfast at 9am not sure what to expect. It turned out to be a feast!

In addition to the omelettes, pancakes and cheese pictured above, we also got presented with some delicious cheesy bread. There was way too much food to get through!

By 10am we were heading out and catching the local metro for a couple of stops towards the centre of Tbilisi. No photos from the metro as apparently it's not allowed, but it had a very Soviet feel. The escalators were very long and the fastest-moving escalators I've ever encountered in my life; you have to jump onto them and hope for the best. Public transport here is amazing value and I was only charged 42p for the journey.

We emerged into the daylight again at Freedom Square, the main square in Tbilisi.

It's Georgian Independence Day latest this week, so the square was mostly roped off by police who were seemingly getting ready for the parade and demonstrations. We walked around the square, then down a street with more traditional Georgian buildings towards the old town.

Unfortunately the weather forecast for today wasn't great, so it was quite grey and overcast.

We were grateful that it wasn't actively raining, though.

We walked alongside the remnants of the old town walls.

There were some gorgeous buildings here...

...and in the distance there was a good view of the cathedral I'd seen illuminated in the distance from the terrace last night.

There were some really cool statues dotted around this part of Tbilisi.

I really liked this one, which seems to depict people very enthusiastically doing a Georgian dance.

Meanwhile this street into the old town featured an entire row of statues!

There was a real mixture of characters.

These men on a bench reminded me of Bratislava.

In the distance we soon caught sight of one of the most famous sights in the old town: the clocktower.

This is a strange, somewhat crooked structure, attached to the city's puppet theatre.

We were lucky to be there just before 11am, so we got to see the clock in action when a little figure came out to ring the bell for the hour.

In general the old town was very pretty.

We emerged from the other side of it at a much more modern location: Peace Bridge.

The bridge itself was quite an odd design, but walking across it was really fun.

We were heading towards a cable car station and we got great views of cable cars heading over the river.

The cable car heads to the top of this hill, which is home to the botanical gardens and also an enormous statue called the Mother of Georgia, which you should just be able to make out to the top right of the below photo.

Unfortunately I have forgotten to pack my selfie stick for this trip, but Helen and I attempted a selfie on the bridge anyway.

On the far side of the bridge we walked through a small park...

...and had a view back towards where we'd come from.

We had to queue for quite a long time for the cable car, but once we got on it it was amazingly cheap - about 87p. It was a relatively short journey and before long we were at the top, looking down on Tbilisi.

You can see the Peace Bridge that we'd just walked over.

A short walk uphill brought us to a proper view of the Mother of Georgia statue.

It was built here in 1958 to celebrate 1500 years of Tbilisi.

When you're close to it, it's actually quite hard to get a good shot; from further away, it was clearer.

From up here we could look down towards the botanical gardens, which is where we were headed next.

Entering the botanical gardens cost 4 Georgian Lari each, which is around £1.

We walked past some cactuses...

...managed to avoid falling rocks.

...and soon came to a bridge over a beautiful waterfall.

I initially thought it was quite a small waterfall, but as we walked further away from it, it became clear it was actually quite big.

The Mother of Georgia statue was on the horizon as we made our way through the gardens.

It was a really pleasant place - green and leafy, with the occasional breeze which was really welcome on what was a very humid day.

I really liked these benches, which were dotted around the gardens, and which I think say "Tbilisi" in the Georgian alphabet.

We'd been walking downhill from the cable car station through the gardens, so we were eventually able to exit into Tbilisi on foot without needing to take a cable car down. We continued to walk down hill, passing the town's mosque...

...and multiple churches.

We passed the old bathhouse...

...and saw a beautiful blue building in the distance.

The tiles were really gorgeous.

We stopped for lunch at this point and tried khinkali, Georgian dumplings. They are delicious, but quite difficult to eat; you have to bite a small hole in them, then suck out the hot broth inside before eating the meat and pasta.

Refreshed after lunch, we walked back through Tbilisi.

We passed under the cable car we'd travelled on earlier...

...explored an underground market...

...and emerged into the daylight again to find it had actually turned into quite a sunny day.

We visited the Sioni Cathedral, which is beautiful both inside and out. I only have photos of the outside, as I wasn't sure what the rules were inside. It felt like a very religious place.