Day 5 – or day 2 – began in the usual way. A metro to Rustaveli, cross the road, use the underpass and then walk under the bridge and up the stairs to the Bicycle Statue, thus avoiding three scary road crossings. There were several buses today and the lady from the Georgia Tourist Board who was there to greet us yesterday was there again. Today there were four variants on Old Town tours departing, which meant quite the muddle over buses, people double-checking exactly what their tickets actually said and one person fleeing the bus at the last minute when she realised Old Town Day Tour and Cultural Heritage Old Town Tour were not one and the same. Cultural Heritage meant museums, one of the tours meant a zipwire across the botanical gardens and one was a gastronomy tour.

Mine was just a plain walking tour. We did a quick circle up to the Heroes roundabout and then down Rustaveli to the church round the corner from me. I’d left home well over an hour ago by now and I was back just five minutes from where I’d started. We were going to have a look at the king on the horse. This is the one who founded Tbilisi. Did I tell this story yesterday? Anyway, in the fifth century, King Vakhtang was out hunting, his hawk caught a pheasant and they fell into the sulphur springs and His Majesty decided there and then that he was moving his capital to this place – Tbilisi means something along the lines of “the warm place”.

Then it was back to the bus to cross the river and we left for our “two-hour walking tour of the Old Town”. We did the bath area, the waterfall behind it (blocked off because of recent rockfalls), through the narrow parts of the old town, through Meidan Bazaar, an underground bazaar, an array of churches and narrow cafe-lined alleys, an enamel shop that surely didn’t want a horde of tourists barging in and out again, the Peace Bridge, the Catholic Church and then the Caravanserai for a wine-tasting. Now, she’d mentioned the wine-tasting and lunch a few times and we were suspicious because that wasn’t on our list. Also, by the time it was 12:30 and we were still walking up to the last church, hadn’t had wine or lunch and I couldn’t see how we were going to get back to the Bicycle in half an hour with all that left, I kind of lost a lot of enthusiasm. This was a 10-1 tour. Why wasn’t it finishing? I wanted lunch. I didn’t want to taste wine.

The wine museum is underground behind the Caravanserai, which is a place where travellers on the Silk Road would stop and set up temporary shops on their way back and forth. We had a history of Georgian wine and then we were seated around a large table with nibbles and the wine arrived. The rest of the group were equally baffled, especially as it was gone 1:30 by the time we even went into the museum. The winemaster was astonished by the three of us who refused wine, apparently not knowing that we weren’t expecting this on our tour. There are lots of wine tours on offer and I have deliberately not booked any of them.

After the wine, it was time to get back on the bus and go for lunch. I escaped. I was in the Old Town, I just had to cross the bridge and climb up around the church and I could go home for my lunch of hamburger rolls and plastic cheese slices. I had a viewpoint photography tour at 5 and who knows how long this tour would go on for? It was already running over by an hour and a half and evidently there was plenty still to come.

Lunch, a book, the briefest not-quite-nap and it was already time to go for the viewpoint tour. I got myself to the Bicycle. There was no one else there. No surprise, exactly. This morning, no one had got on the bus until 9:59 although maybe they’d been milling around outside figuring out which bus they were supposed to be on. But there was no bus. What viewpoint were we going to? How we were getting there? Were they taking us on the scary metro? I checked the itinerary. Since I carefully copied everything into my notebook the day before flying out, the start point had moved! We were supposed to be meeting at the lower station of the funicular in… twelve minutes. Ok. How to get there? Rustaveli was the nearest metro. What bus did I need? Where could I get on it? In traffic, it would be quicker to walk. So I walked. It’s 23 minutes, which meant I was going to be late but I had a transport card and a group with big cameras can’t be hard to find. Or I could just go up there and take photos by myself. It’s not particularly far but it’s all uphill and the last stretch up to the road is almost vertical. One of the street dogs seemed to guide me to within the last couple of hundred metres, checking I was keeping up, pointing up the next hill and round the next bend and I enjoyed that. Tbilisi has as many feral dogs as Bucharest but these ones show no aggression whatsoever. They like to lie in the sun and amble around. One joined the Old Town tour, pressing its nose against our guide’s leg as she talked about the Georgian Patriarch and she scratched its ears. I asked why all the dogs have a yellow tag in their ears and apparently it means they’ve been vaccinated against rabies. Well, that’s nice.They’re a bit grubby but they’re pretty friendly and they’re about as undangerous as feral dogs can get.

I made it to the funi. A man was swiping a card to let people through. It wasn’t the blue transport card I had in my pocket. And then I looked at the other man, pushing a group of people through as the turnstile turned. I looked at the huge camera in his hand. I’d made it! The very last one was going through but I’d arrived in time to go up with them!

We went up to the restaurant and TV tower at the peak of Tbilisi, 770m. Looking down, I’d climbed at least a third of the height from the Bicycle before even reaching the funi. It wasn’t actually ideal conditions for viewpoint photos. It was hazy and the sun was hiding behind thin clouds. We walked round through a theme park to the ferris wheel and took some photos through and around it. The sun was setting and making some faint streaks of pink and blue. We got some snowy mountains and towns on the other side and then we retreated to the cafe for hot chocolate so thick you couldn’t drink it – had to eat it from a spoon – and a Napoleon cake the size of… well, I don’t know what size it was. Maybe the size of a cake, except it was supposed to be one portion for one person. Impressive thing.

Back at the bottom, we got three Bolts, which is the local equivalent of Uber. There was a drinks and nibbles thing that everyone had said they were going to pop into just for half an hour, having drunk more than they intended at the welcome drinks on Tuesday that I didn’t go to. I wasn’t entirely planning to go to this one but getting in a Bolt with these people seemed easier than figuring out how to get home without walking 2km in the dark.

At the place, I met a couple of people from this morning’s tour. Dylan gave a nice succint run-down of how the tour had gone and then said they’d done quite well and had finished by 4. Another 10-1 tour hadn’t finished until 5. This is beyond our tour guide’s GMT, Georgia Maybe Time. Anyway, I didn’t stay long. This was another case of “how do I get home from here?” but it was ok. Walk down to the main road. Walk along it until it ceases to be one-way. Stop at the first bus stop going in the right direction. Get on a bus. Bus drops at Avlabari. Home by 9:15, which is the latest I’ve been out – but then again, it’s only the second night. Too tired after a long day to write the blog.