Today is my last full day in Tbilisi and I have a suspicion I’m going to want to come back. I’ve done a lot, including quite a lot I wouldn’t or couldn’t have done on my own but there’s also quite a bit I haven’t done – the balloon, a boat trip, Narikala Fortress and anything outside of Old Town.

Anyway. Conference today started with a networking breakfast, which meant those few people who were capable of being up before 10am sitting awkwardly around eating croissants and some mysterious pastry with something mysterious on top. Session one was Travel Writing Masterclass which was more about pitching to publications and research trips. Session two was SEO – getting Google to notice the things you write, and that mostly went some way over my head. Session three was pretty much how to take photos and videos of yourself. I dithered over session four – do I do the SEO Q&A (nope, not after the morning SEO session), the practical solo photo-taking (… maybe not?) or the “What next?” about how to turn the ideas from the weekend into reality (that’s the one I went for). I had lunch in the upstairs restaurant, got some bread, requested some butter and ran outside to take a few photos of the view.

The day finished with two panels – the first on monetisation, which was mostly about putting accommodation affiliate links in the description box of your YouTube videos and the second was on creativity, which was a YouTuber and a TikToker talking about what you do when things go wrong or right, how you film things while also enjoying the trip and so on.

Then I came home, declining the gala dinner and big finish in favour of going to the sulphur bath. No 5 had a room for one at 9.30 so I paid my deposit, came home, ate some bread & cheese and packed. In half an hour or so, I’ll get up and go back down to town.

I was in room 4 and it had its good points and its bad ones. The bad ones were the squat toilet, the high edge of the bath, the heat of the bath and the atmosphere of being in a run-down school toilet. On the other hand, it was 70 GEL instead of 100/110, it had spectacular ceiings in both the changing room and the bath room, there was easily double the space there was in Chreli Abano, the lighting was bright – maybe over-bright – and the domed ceilings let in some fresh air – which meant they also let in traffic noise. I think of the three, I like the Royal Baths the best.

I came home just in time to catch the nightly fireworks at Narikala – I’ve heard them but never yet got up and gone to see. Probably a good thing, since my room doesn’t face Narikala. Tbilisi by night is pretty.

And today we come to the bit I’ve been very vague about since September. I am at a conference for people who do travel-related things. The people I’ve met today and the people who’ve been on the trips and tours all week are travel writers, photographers, film-makers, bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers and any other platform you can think to put something travel-related. All the tours have been included in the price of the conference ticket – that’s the trip out to the Chronicles on Tuesday, the Old Town tour, wine-tasting and lunch and the viewpoint tour on Wednesday, the enamel workshop, visit to the IDP village and lunch on Thursday and the cave town tour yesterday, plus all the drinks and meals I’ve skipped, plus two days of conference plus lunch and snacks and drinks over the weekend. A surprisingly affordable way to see a lot of Georgia! And what with writing it up here every day, I’m pretty confident I’m the first blogger to be producing blog content!

Today there were four sets of four sessions. I opted for the travel writing one in the morning, the Power of Narrative, constantly interrupted by an older gentleman who shares his name with a big fluffy naughty cat who seems to be a newspaper journalist, who kept pointing out far too loudly “We’re not fiction writers! We don’t know about things like the three act structure!”. A) Speak for yourself. I’m terrible at writing fiction but I’ve had a go and I know plenty of the mechanics and plenty of the theory B) can you really not see that/how narrative structure works in non-fiction? C) Will you listen to Alex and stop assuming you know better?

Before lunch and after lunch were two sessions on editing travel videos. I’ve been filming snippets of my trips since about 2013 but filming enough to put together and actually putting them together are two things I haven’t really mastered. Lunch was in either the upstairs restaurant or the downstairs one and took the form of a Georgian buffet – less pressure to eat all the things but also no cheese-stuffed khachapuri today! I had plain bread but I decided to be a grown-up and ask for butter and some was produced! So it was bread and water but at least it was bread and butter.

The last session of the day wasn’t a particularly good choice for my particular interests and the one I ended up going along to was “being a presenter”. If I’m going to stitch together my snippets, I may as well get some tips on how to explain to the camera what it’s seeing. I’ve never been a big fan of talking to machines, not since Alain Kamber typed, letter by letter “il faut un accent” during a language lab session back in 2005.

And that was it for the day. Actually, it wasn’t. At lunchtime, two of the staff came rushing over in great excitement because the finished enamel had been delivered and they wanted to see everyone’s reaction to opening the little bags and seeing our finished work. There were only ten of us but I was slightly amazed that armed with a name tag and an enamel pendant, they seemed to go to the right people without having to ask what our names were. That’s been a theme of the week. We’ve seen the same faces over and over again but no one can keep track of the corresponding names. Anyway, since I last saw this pendant, it’s been baked a few times, a few more layers of colour put in and it’s been polished and you just wouldn’t know that a couple of days ago, we were painting fine glass powder into raised outlines because they’re absolutely smooth and slightly domed and very beautiful. “Look what we made!” we all exclaimed but we have to admit, Ikorta did far more work on them than we did.

The big party is tonight but it’s been an intense week with lots of early mornings and long days and lots of food and wine and I’m staying in tonight. Straight home at 5.30 (well, got on the metro in the wrong direction because I wasn’t paying attention), got some more juice and I’m not even going for a sulphur bath tonight. Conference day 2 tomorrow, then the long ride home on Monday.

Today was the longer trips out of town day. Ours was the closest, just an hour and a half away at Uplistsikhe, the Lord’s Fortress, a cave city dating back to the 4th century BC. From our point of view, we thought it seemed quite isolated but that’s because we know there’s a main road just a couple of kilometers away and a capital city of 1.3m people an hour and a half away but 2400 years ago, this would have been the big city.

Begin at the beginning. The other tours left at 9am and ours went at 10am. We had the tour guide Lela from Tuesday and there were two other people from the enamel tour yesterday plus a good handful of people I’ve either seen around or have been on other trips. We were in the small coach. When I arrived, there was a minibus and that seemed far too small to transport 25 people an hour and a half and back but luckily, that was unrelated and our coach turned up. We went up the main road, past Tserovani (and the big Carrefour and the Coca-Cola Georgia bottling factory) and then out to Gori, birthplace of Stalin. Should there be a museum about him? We discussed it, our guide discussed it and apparently the people of Gori in particular discuss it. I’ve been told “Did you know Stalin was born in Georgia? We are not proud” but the people of Gori have a slightly more complex relationship, given that he’s – in the words of my guidebook – “simply the only important thing to ever come out of Gori”.

Across the river, past the cows being watered in the shallows, round the bend and there we were at Uplistsikhe where Lela herded us and local guide Tamar explained what we were actually seeing. Uplistsikhe is long abandoned but it’s had two major periods. The first was in the few centuries BC. The guidebook says it was a religious centre by 1000BC but that seems a very long time ago. Second was in the medieval period before being largely destroyed in the 13th century. It’s carved out of sandstone and there are rooms and “hooks” and shelves and jails and wine cellars and drainage channels and fireplaces and all sorts still visible. Many of them have lost their roofs, either through age or through earthquakes or through using wooden beams to hold up stone second-storeys. Entrance is via far too many steps and then there’s plenty to scramble on, views across mountains and plains and rivers. Some of it was patched up by the Soviets, so there’s the occasional incongruent concrete pillar holding up the mouth of a stone cave and perched on the top is an ordinary brick-and-stone from somewhere around the 9th or 10th century. I’m astonished at places like Winchester Cathedral, built in the 1070s and even more when I find an actual Saxon church but here it’s quite normal to see a church built in the 4th or 6th century. Some of them have had a certain amount of renovation over the last 1500 years, new belfries or frescos or whatever but it’s kind of unimaginable that somethng that old is just part of normal life here.

We exited via a secret tunnel – higher but also shorter than we expected and with stairs running through it. I daresay it was carved by hand just like everything else but it really looks like it it was formed by swirling floodwaters. Very exciting finish!

Now, we knew a lunch was coming. Lela had mentioned the lunch and besides, by this point, we’d learned to pretty much expect it. I’d looked at the map and decided it would either be in Gori – that would make a certain amount of sense – or back in the same restaurant in Mtskheta as yesterday. I watched the blue dot as the bus left Uplistsikhe. I watched it take the road south of the river. I watched it bypass Gori. I watched Mstkheta get closer. I watched us leave the road and cross the river towards Mtskheta. We were dropped off in the same place. We walked down the same road, took the same turning. Yep, same restaurant. This time, because we were 25 instead of 10, we were seated at three or four smaller tables and instead of having two of every dish, each table only had one. It was still too much to finish but it was less overwhelming somehow, half the food split between six instead of double the food split between 11, even though that’s pretty much the same amount of food. I was quite pleased – the bread came out first and although it took a moment, the cheese-stuffed khachapuri appeared fairly quickly and with no toasting or explanations or everyone diving in to take photos and videos first, it was still hot and melty when it reached my plate.

It was much more efficient than yesterday. Some people ran out to see the cathedral, a few of us went down to the river (and then panicked when we realised the restaurant was empty – back up on the main street, we discovered the rest were only a couple of hundred yards ahead) and then it was straight back to Tbilisi. I’d checked the itinerary before we set out. 10-3 yesterday had become 10-4 by this morning and we actually got back at 5:45, which by the standards of the week was practically bang on time.

There were Friday night drinks across the river from Rose Revolution Square but I decided I’d rather come home, drink some pineapple juice, have a couple of squares of chocolate and go and have another sulphur bath. I wanted to try No 5 Bathhouse but they didn’t have a room until 11pm, which is a bit too late. Gulo’s had a room but it was 180 GEL (~£54) which was a bit too much. Chreli Abano is nice and is the popular one but I think the Royal Bathhouse was better value so that was my first stop after that. Yes, they had a room! It would be an hour. Actually, it would be 50 minutes. It was ten past eight and I was given a receipt for my 50 GEL deposit saying 9pm. What to do for 50 minutes in the Old Town? I know for many people the obvious answer would be a bar or cafe. Not me. Was it worth going home? No. Not walking up that hill twice in one evening. Sit in the waiting room? Ah ha! Go up the cable car! I still had my Metro Money card in my pocket so I paid the princely sum of 5 GEL (£1.49) for a return ticket. I’d already been up once in daylight but it’s definitely worth going up in the dark. I stayed long enough to see the Mother of Georgia statue (to be honest, best not viewed from directly underneath) and to take some selfies with the view. There are lots of little market and souvenir stalls along the path and they have some incredible lighting. You can take a selfie with proper good lighting and also the lit-up city behind and… actually, the effect is that you’ve photoshopped yourself in. I had to take some more further down where I was more silhouetted just because they looked more real. Then back down the cable car where I discovered it was 8:43. I’ve still not really got the hang of Georgian Maybe Time. They absolutely won’t be expecting me at 9 on the dot (they weren’t) but if I get there late, they might decide I’m not coming and give my room to someone else! And there are two major road crossings between the cable car and the bathhouse door. I had to get across Europe Square, which is actually a roundabout, and then across Vakhtang Gorgasili Square, which is actually four lanes of traffic with no lanes drawn on the cobbles. I got there in plenty of time. Even with the roads, it’s only 530 metres and I managed it in seven minutes.

It was the same room as yesterday and the same… I don’t know what the word is for the lady who’s on reception and shows you to your room and hammers on the door if you stay too long and shouts “Lady! Please!” when she wants you to follow her but I think of provodnitsa which is the lady on the Trans-Siberian who does much the same job. I thought I was wearing quite a distinctive hat but she clearly gets through a lot of people in 24 hours because once she’d showed me to the same room, she asked if I’d been before. Yes, this time yesterday. Dial 0 if there’s a problem. Lock the door. Check your watch. Jump in the hot water.

I want one of these in my house. This particular pool is about the size of a double bed and deep enough to stand up in and a really pleasant warmth. Yesterday I spent a lot of time gazing at the tiles on the floor and the side of the massage slab and took photos before I left. I know mosaic tiles are expensive but I could buy plain white ones and paint these patterns on them, couldn’t I?

It was 10pm by the time I was finished, the latest I’ve been out all week. It’s 11 minutes and a 27m climb back up the hotel, where I washed the sulphur out of my hair (there’s a shower in the sulphur room but you don’t want to waste your precious hour) and now I’ve written this, it’s bedtime.

Yesterday, the unexpected wine tasting, lunch and the fact that the tour overran by several hours was a novelty which we all gossiped about. “Were you on the Old Town tour? What time did it finish?” “My tour didn’t finish until 7.30 and it included everything!”. Today this has all become established fact.

We started for the enamel masterclass a little after 10. We assumed it would be in town. I thought maybe it would be in the shop & workshop in the Old Town which we invaded yesterday but we headed north – and kept going. In fact, we went to Tserovani, half an hour outside the city. Google Maps labels this place a refugee camp. Guide Anna calls it an IDP village, internally displaced people. It was built following the Russian invasion of the region now called South Ossetia for the people displaced by the war. There are 2002 houses, 9000 residents, a school for 1100 children, a kindergarten for 250 small kids and a row of shops, pharmacies, banks, hairdressers and whatever 9000 people need for daily life. Every house started off exactly the same, from the floor plan to the cutlery but once people realised this wasn’t a temporary shelter for a few weeks, they began customising. Many houses now have extensions, gardens, garages, even the occasional second storey.

The studio trains and employs women around the village and also raises funds by selling the enamel jewellery, which is a traditional Georgian craft, lost for hundreds of years and now re-discovered and being revived. Doing it properly means spending four or five days cutting and soldering silver wire to make the frames, filling it in with glass powder, baking it and adding more powder, two or three or occasionally even six layers deep until the glass fills the frames, then it’s polished and finally it’s finished. We didn’t have time for that. We picked pre-made frames and just filled them with the first layer of colour. Over the next few days, the studio will do the extra layers and the polishing and deliver them to the hotel in Tbilisi on Sunday. We’re all very excited about that.

Enamel is fiddly. The spaces to be filled look a lot smaller once you’ve got the finest paintbrush in the world on there. Not that you’re painting. You’re just using the brush to dab the powder into place, without getting any of it in any of the other sections. If you do, you scoop it out with your brush and some clean water and replace it. Most of the white powders are actually reds and oranges, so there was a lot of “Is this white?” being asked around the table.

When we were finished, they all had their first bake so we could gather round and see how they looked. At first glance, while still hot, there’s a lot of dark blue and dark orange and you think that it’s all gone horribly wrong, but it cools quickly and the true colours start to come through. They’re all very pretty! While we were waiting, most of us had a look in the cabinet and ended up buying a piece. I went for a ring with pomegranates on. There are pomegranates everywhere in Georgia. On the streets, you’ll see piles of oranges and pomegranates waiting to be juiced or turned ito glintwein, which I gather is just Georgian for hot mulled wine.

By now it was gone 1 – the time we were supposed to be finished – and we still had a short walk around the village to come. Some people had a cookery class at 2. We said if we left by 1.15, we can still be back by two – at which point the guide put in “But there’s a lunch in Mtskheta. We can make it a quick lunch?”

It was not a quick lunch. It was a banquet. At least two of the other tours were also in the restaurant – which meant everyone was missing the cookery class if they’d had a tour in the morning – and it went on forever. Every time we thought we’d finished, another dish came out. I ate a slice of what I assume is cheese-stuffed khachapuri. It’s usually boat-shaped bread, filled with cheese and an egg on top and this looked very much like a pizza, only with the cheese inside the bread but I’m reasonably sure it was a Georgian dish and looking at the menu, cheese-stuffed khachapuri is the only one that seems to match what I ate. We also had two bottles of amber wine which is actually not much between 11 people, even if one isn’t drinking it. Since we’d absolutely missed the cookery class by then, we went for a tour of Mtskheta, where there’s Georgia’s oldest church. Well. It dates back to about the fourth century, or at least, a wooden basilica does. This building is much younger – built between 1010 and 1029, so during the reigns of Aethelred the Unready and Cnut the Great. It’s had some work done over the centuries. We had to cover our heads and put on tied wrap-around skirts. You’re not really supposed to take photos inside but the guide whispered that it’s ok as long as you’re discreet and don’t get in anyone’s way. This is where the royal families of Georgia were buried up until the monarchy was cancelled by Russia.

Then, at last, it was back to Tbilisi, arriving at the Big Bicycle at 5:22, nearly four and a half hours later than planned. Tomorrow’s tour is supposed to be 10-3. We reckon we’ll be back between 8 and 9. Right now I’m writing this up and charging my phone and having a snack. There may have been enough food to feed 30 (nothing gets binned in Georgia; if no one else will eat it, the street dogs will have an evening to remember tonight in Mstkheta) but I needed a little something by the time we got back. Plan for the rest of the evening: walk down to Abanotubani and see if the Royal Bathhouse has a room for 1 this evening. Book for Saturday if not and then try my luck at No 5 Bathhouse. I could do with a nice sulphur bath – not necessarily the accompanying traditional scrub – after the last couple of days.

I walked down to the bath area and was in luck – Royal Bathhouse had a room available in ten minutes, or however long it took to finish cleaning it. Now, it was 110 GEL whereas the one at Chreli Abano was 100 GEL. I declined a scrub (30 GEL here compared to Chreli Abano’s 20 GEL) but it was a much bigger room with a bigger and deeper pool and a large changing area with sofas and table. It was a little better-lit and the tiles were definitely prettier. Overall, I think it’s worth the extra 10 GEL, if you’re ever in the area. Walking back was quite good fun. Tbilisi is pretty by night. Apparently Georgia has abundant water-powered energy and so they put lights on everything and leave them on all night. The cable car has coloured lights on the bottom, the Peace Bridge gently pulses shades of blue, the fortress is illuminated, the TV tower glows purple, the restaurant and funicular are lit up and it’s all very beautiful. I came back, had some bread and butter and I think that’s about it for today.