Airport

Airport 07-29-05

Suddenly Tbilisi was abuzz with news of the mysterious pagan festival Kvirikoba in the Svanetian highlands, a festival that had been celebrated to some ancient God long before Christianity ever found it’s way here. Emails are flying around, and the english language paper even printed up an article. At expat dinners and frisbee practices, everyone was saying, ‘are you going, are you going!?’

Andrea Kuznich from Toronto, fellow Georgian music researcher, is here for two months, and we decided to try to make it to the festival to record Svanetian singing. Traveling with us would be Shergil, my Svanetian brother, Andrea’s two year old blond munchkin Luca and his Georgian aunt, twenty year old pop singer Nona. Also our British world traveler and english literature eloquentsia, James, Laura Bucher, American corporate lawyer turned international humanitarian orphanage assistance volunteer, and her muscled, arrogant, backgammon champion of a Georgian boyfriend, Bakuri. Who could stop this crew?

From Saturday we called the airline contact number trying to make reservations for one of the cheap flights that were supposedly flying two and three times a day to the festival, but sorry, no advance reservations. Actually, no advance information at all including when the flights were leaving or how much they might cost. Sometimes there was information, in small, hardly palatable bite size chunks of conflicting data such as, flights at 8 and 1, flights at 10:30 and 4, prices are $15, prices are $60, and ‘do you want housing,’ that will be $12, that will be $30.

Tuesday night, Shergil calls me and says his cousin in Svaneti says one thousand people are trying to come to the festival and the only way we will get on a flight is to go tonight and wait to get on a list along with the other one thousand people. As it was 10pm, and I was in my underwear writing in the 90+ temperature in my apartment, the non-functioning airconditioner on full blast, I declined the airport invitation, and we agreed to meet in the morning.

Wednesday morning, we’re at the airport. One flight has left, and there are no tickets for the second flight, but maybe there will be soon. The lady at the desk points to a room full of armchairs, where about forty people are lounging around waiting for flights, and says, ‘see those people, they’ve been waiting here for two nights trying to go to Svaneti.’ But as most of us have learned, a typical conversation in Georgia, over the course of an hour, will follow such a pattern: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, no?, yes.

So we waited.

We took on VIP status as Andrea became an international film director, I became a festival performer with Laura, and James our reporter. Shergil unfortunately, among his many gifts, is surprisingly not Georgian in his persuasive abilities, and he was unable to make any headway with the minor power people trying to run things in the Georgian Airways Office. Three hours go by. They’re saying it’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Tbilisi today, and it feels like it.

There are options. A minibus leaves from the other side of Tbilisi and supposedly arrives in Svaneti ten to twelve hours. Tempting. Actually, we considered it, because the airport was so ridiculously inept we were beginning to wonder if there weren’t some secret handshakes or passwords to get on these flights.

At the last minute of course, three other people who were waiting with us this whole time miraculously got on the flight.... We’re promised a third flight. We take a coffee and icecream in the cafe. When we come back into the airport, she says, sorry there won’t be another flight today, but you will probably be able to get on one tomorrow if there is a morning flight. ‘Well how will we know if there is a morning flight?’ ‘I’ll call you.’ None of us wanted to stomach the minibus ride if there was even a remote chance to get on a fifty minute flight, so we decided to come back on the morrow. Manana calls later and says we’re on the flight for 8:30 am.

Thursday, day of the Kvirikoba, upper Svaneti.

Tbilisi -the fearless seven.

We congregate at the airport at 7:45am, Manana shows up at 8:20. Sure enough, we’re the first six names on the handwritten list of people who might be sold tickets if a plane is flying. When we ask her if there is going to be a flight, she shrugs at us and asks if we’ve checked on the weather conditions in Svaneti...!

I look at James astonished, translating for him. We almost laugh, but she is actually serious. One of the other Georgians in line calls a relative in Svaneti to ask how the weather conditions are.... ‘all clear.’

Manana starts selling tickets, 9am, Shergil buys one for $15, I step up and she says it will be $30 for you. I ask, is there a difference in ticket prices for foreigners? Yes, the government subsidizes the Georgian airfare prices, foreigners pay full fare. Okay, that’s fair enough, I say somewhat reluctantly, but just then, some other man steps into the office and says no, it will be $60 for the foreigners. I protest mildly, he stiffens his collar, bristling as hedgehogs will; I back away from the desk, bewildered. Am I flying to Svaneti on an airplane or digging tunnels with hedgehogs?

All the other Georgians buy their tickets and us four foreigners are left there, feeling very uninformed, very cheated, very abused by the worst airline administration ever encountered. I’ve walked into a video store with six friends and found a movie we all wanted to watch faster than these people could figure out how to sell customers tickets for their airline. If I had been watching us on TV, it would perhaps have appeared to be an amusing comedy of errors, but desperately wanting to go to the festival and being at the mercy of this system, made it very unamusing not to mention extremely frustrating. Andrea almost walked out with her kid and bags, we tried to restrain her, but then I almost walked out too, so we tried to restrain me. Anyway, we had fun playing tug of war in the airport for another two hours.

Realizing the system is Soviet, and made for VIPs and family connected people, we reluctantly tried to swing that card. We had one of the festival directors in Svaneti on the cell phone, we had several foreigners speaking fluent Georgian on the phone... nothing would change power-man’s mind, we were going to pay $60 today or not fly. Well, we knew without us, no one was flying, because we represented more than half the ticket sale money for this flight (did I mention the plane is a sixteen seater). So we waited an hour. So we decided to wait them out, or at least wait out some kind of information that was informative and customer supportive. They weren’t used to this, and tried to strong arm us, threatening to fly without us, asking for our final decision, and finally bringing in a guard who said the flight was about to leave, leave, leave! We need a final count now!

$60 one way in Georgia was a lot more than any of us had anticipated paying for the flight, but on the other hand, wasn’t that much in western terms, and we all wanted to go to the festival.... but the feeling of being jerked around for two days in 100 degree weather was so unappealing that all of us almost walked out of there at one point or another. We checked our wallets to see if we even had the extra cash to go up and back. At 11am, we lined up to buy tickets, but just then, Shergil turned to me and said, ‘they’ve just said you’ll only have to pay $30.’ I couldn’t believe it! The series of ‘no’s had finally turned into a ‘yes!’

Having tickets in hand, I asked Shergil further, ‘how did that happen that the ticket prices dropped at the last minute?’ He said, ‘we have to remember this guy’s name....’ pointing to an older man with a cap, ‘he just paid the difference for your flights....’

What?! So we thought they had backed down and gave us the original price instead of the inflated one, boosting our bargaining egos, but no, actually some old Svan had come out of the woodwork and paid for us? It was too much to believe. The tables were turned. We were excited about having tickets, at a fair price, heading towards Svaneti, but now were we somehow indebted to a Svanetian highlander that we didn’t know? What did that mean? Would we have to drink enormous quantities of homemade 70% alcohol? Would we have to buy him a new cow, or pay him the money with some kind of special Svanetian interest rate involving blood feuds? Would he accept our money anyway, and what if he didn’t? How could we reimburse him? Suddenly we were very ready to let go of our money, and fast. Maybe if we just slipped him the difference on the sly, we wouldn’t be co-opted into any mountain rituals...

We wait in line for half an hour, the bags go through Xray, we go into another room and wait another half an hour. We are driven out to the runway, where we load into a tiny plane. Apparently it had not been ready to take off two hours earlier as threatened.

Our benefactor is on the flight, he doesn’t have a seat, but seems to be teaching the pilots how to fly, turning switches on and off in the open cockpit five feet from my forwardmost seat. It takes another half hour for this comedy team to get the engines turned on and off about six times, and Shergil reports that they’re talking about super high winds that might prevent us from flying. I decide not to think about this and turn to make funny faces at Luca who is the only amused by this.

At 1pm we takeoff, the plane only slightly bigger than my uncle’s pickup truck but sitting on two enormous jet engines that hurl us down the runway and into the air in about twenty seconds. Awesome! The rest of us are in seatbelts tightly clutching our windowsills, but old man with the cap is standing in the front of the plane talking with the pilots as we take off. His story will not be disclosed here as it has yet to unfold.

Tbilisi opens up below us, the concrete blocks forming playground mazes that cluster haphazardly over the plains, a huge reservoir near the city glows turquoise in the sunlight. We’re off for Svaneti! Hiya, hiya!