Thor’s wrath – a tale of Tbilisi

We’re all writing an account of what happened that night, because, well, it was one hell of an experience.

Not helped by the difficult rainy night in Batumi the day before where we struggled to find our hostel, or by the hair-raising eight hour minibus ride to Tbilisi earlier that day, we decided to walk the one hour walk to our hostel from the bus station (because that had gone so well yesterday).

And well, whaddya know, about two minutes into our walk, it began to rain. We quickly found shelter in a shop to get our waterproofs on (mostly over our rucksacks rather than us), before going back out into the rain because the droplets were so heavy that it would have to blow over soon. Right?

Wrong.

As the rain got heavier and heavier and we started to get steadily wetter, we decided to cross the road to find a bus stop. That didn’t go well, as the other side of the road wasn’t really a pavement but more just muddy gravel, because of course it was. We trudged quickly over that to reach a much less muddy stretch of tarmac behind the obvious roadworks and realised there was no way a bus was stopping here. We finally decided to take shelter under a closed shop front to wait out the (now torrential) rain. By this time, the flashes of lightning and the thunder had made it clear this was a full-blown thunderstorm, and the road was quickly becoming a river. The shelter wasn’t great, so even under the shop front we were getting steadily more soaked, but we kept waiting for it to get better. It got worse.

My dad decided to go down along the road to see if he could find a bus stop or something, and while he was gone, my mum and I witnessed hailstones. When he (finally) returned with very little to show for his troubles but very wet clothes, we decided the best thing to do was to set off in the rain as it showed no sight of stopping.

We quickly grew to not care about how wet our clothes were or how we kept having to wade across the road in places, just trying our hardest to move towards our destination. No taxi was willing to pick us up, and a few cars that drove past us intentionally drove close and fast to splash us with even more water (Georgian drivers are a NIGHTMARE don’t get me started). We got chased by some vicious looking stray dogs at one point as well. All things considered, things were looking pretty miserable. Still, even at the time, there was something about the situation that was funny to us in a hysterical sort of way, and we weren’t about to give up. The rain slowed down and almost stopped at one point (false hope) and then came back with even more of a vengeance, with the cracks of lightning directly overhead, sounding like the sky itself had split open and scaring us out of our sopping wet sandals every time. Thor was definitely angry. 

After we trudged up a (very) steep hill and crossed a (very) dangerous road, got lost in a small cul-de-sac and finally reached the building our hostel was in, of course there was a number pad which we didn’t know the code for to let us into the building. I was starting to get Batumi flashbacks. So, in a last ditch effort, we pressed every button to call all the flats in the building until one of them (thankfully) answered and (thankfully) let us in.

And so, soaked to the bone and aching from head to toe, we arrived at our hostel three hours after we had gotten into Tbilisi, dripping onto their entrance way, but greeted with kindness by the residents of the youth hostel. I had forgotten what it felt like to be dry. 

And as the raging thunderstorm continued well into the night, I fell asleep wondering how on earth we were able to get here, in the hell of that torrential storm, and somehow managed to survive it all. But we had made it. That was all that mattered. We had made it, and we could finally rest.