This morning started with a tour out to the Chronicle of Georgia, which is just north of the city but would take quite a while on public transport. It’s a monument, according to the scroll at the entrance, to Georgia’s 3000th anniversary as a state and its 2000th anniversary of adopting Christianity, despite the dates being out by 3-400 years. The Chronice was started in 1985 and abandoned, not quite finished, somewhere around 2009. There are walkways above single-storey buildings curving around the edge of the monument and it turns out these are classrooms and workshops for traditional Georgian craft, including the work of finishing off the monument.

The Chronicle of Georgia is 16 pillars, 35m tall each, with stories from Georgia’s history, myth and from the Bible. Unfortunately, the sculptor didn’t leave a list of what each artwork represents, so there’s a certain amount of guesswork required even for the Bible scenes. It’s a weird and wonderful place, on a hill overlooking the Tbilisi Sea. Apparently this was once three salt lakes, now joined up, but it’s also a reservoir that supplies most of the city’s drinking water. I could see before even doing the reading that this was a reservoir. There are boats on it and it’s a popular place for swimming and watersports in the summer. I had a look – I could see dinghies moored offshore and pedalos on land but no sign of kayaks. I would have liked to do a kayak trip.

Lots of people have compared the Chronicle to Stonehenge and almost as many people have wondered why. It’s because it kind of looks like Stonehenge – lots of upright stones, only bigger, blacker and more foreboding. This is absolutely the place alien overlord will greet Tbilisi from one day. It was freezing when we arrived and there was a heavy mist over most of the view but a lot of it cleared and the sun came out and by the time we returned to the bus I had to take off all my layers so as to not die of heatstroke before we got home.

I went straight back to the hotel for a little lunch and then back out to Europe Square via the church around the corner from me. I’m not entirely sure what kind of church it is, only it’s the kind where I’m supposed to cover my hair (with a scarf from the box outside the door) and you can’t take photos. From there, you have a great view over the river and over modern Tbilisi. A few things stand out. The tethered hot air balloon, for one. The Peace Bridge, which is a great glass curving canopy over the river. The City Hall, known locally as the Mushrooms because it looks exactly like a great big chunk of fungus growing from a tree. And the cable car which goes up to the fortress on the other side of the river. So up I went. It says on my transport pass that it’s valid for the cableway but it isn’t – or not this one, anyway. So now I have two transport passes!

Anyway, up I went. There’s a botanical garden up there which mostly looks like a forest in its January misery and I have no idea how you actually get at it, as all the paths are a dizzying distance below. I only had an hour to get to the sulphur baths and now I was on the right side of the river, I thought I’d make my way down the mountain and hope I popped out in the right place. I skipped the fortress – we’ll be back here tomorrow on our Old Town tour – and zigzagged down the paths and viewpoints and unexpected restaurants until I found myself popping out, sure enough, in Abanotubani, the bath district. This place is unmistakeable – not from the smell but from the weird brick roofs and domes that form the ground around here. Once there were hundreds of bathhouses but apparently there are only five now. I’m not convinced. I’m pretty sure I could see more than that. I had a booking at Chreli Obano, which is the most famous, most spectacular and most expensive – and also the only one where you can book online, although you seem to need a Georgian phone number to verify the booking. For 100 GEL (about £30), I could have my very own spa room with sulphur bath and for an extra £6, I could have a traditional scrub. For £60 an hour, I could have a room with hot and cold baths and two saunas – not a bad deal in itself but split between six people, something to jump on. Anyway, I just had a small room.

The bath is hot and no one ever mentions how much it sploshes over the edge. I watched lots of videos so I knew what to expect but no one ever mentions that if you so much as breathe, the water will pour over the edge and splash so loudly that you half-expect someone to come and see what on earth you’re doing. 15 minutes later, a scrubber person will come in for the traditional scrub. Every room has a tiled slab and they scrub you with a mitt that feels like it’s made out of carpet and then they get a kind of net bag and squeeze it in such a way that it produces mountains of soft bubbles. You get rinsed by having a bucket of hot sulphur water thrown over you and then the scrubber lady takes her 20GEL and departs unceremoniously. Best not to look at what comes off you when you scrub. Anyway, I now have my own scrubbing mitt, so I’ll do that every now and then.

The bath is really hot. They say to cool down in the shower every fifteen minutes but I soon found it had to be every three or four minutes. No one mentioned that reception calls you on the internal phone to tell you when you have 15 minutes left but they do mention how much the baths smell of sulphur. I actually didn’t notice. I half-wonder if that’s because once you’ve spent a certain amount of time in Iceland, you go nose-blind to smelly geothermal water but on the other hand, you can really smell the sulphur in the metro. Liberty Square metro is particularly fragrant. Anyway, it was very hot and when I was finished, I had to run across the river and up the hill and around the corner to get all my cold drinks out of my fridge. You need cold drinks, proper cold ones, for a sulphur bath. I’d like to go again, not to Chreli Abano – not because there’s anything wrong with it but because there’s still at least one sulphur bath I’d like to try out but we’ll see how the rest of the week works out.