Georgia

I was cheated out of my Georgia experience.

I'm bitter. Very bitter, in fact.

On the last day of the conference, I called the airline to change my tickets. Seeing as I hadn't arranged my Georgia travel yet, I couldn't give them a fixed date of return. They gave me five days in which to finalise my travel.

When I got to Ankara, Cem and I spent the next four days trying to arrange travel to Tbilisi. We went to different travel agencies and no one could give me any info for flights. No charters, and the only Turkish airline flight left before the conference started and flew back a few days after the conference was done. Oh, and costed 450 euros.

So we went to bus stations. No one had any itineraries. The closest we got was at one office, they told me I could take a nine hour bus trip to Trabzone and then *possibly* find a bus to Tbilisi from there.

Riiiiight.

They couldn't guarantee service, especially this time of year. Half of Turkey was paralised from snow storms and they said bus service was going to be delayed.

I had to make a quick decision. It wasn't helping matters any that Cem kept telling me stories of the PKK kidnapping and raping female tourists. When I said that I hadn't heard anything on the news about that, he told me that these incidents were so common that the media stopped reporting them.

I had to make a snap decision. It was the last day to make my tickets home, so I chose certainty over uncertainty and booked them for February 14th.

A few days later, I received an email from the Spanish intern in Tbilisi, who was in the mountains the week before and had no email access. He told me that as soon as he had gotten to Trabzone, someone had asked him where to go and then led him to the Georgian bus. However, he also could have been lucky that time.

On the flight to Istanbul, the man I sat next to told me that there had been two avalanches in eastern Turkey.

When I got back to work, I checked my email. Apparently the Georgian organisation didn't read the last email that I sent to them (the one telling them to send all correspondance to my webmail account and not my work address). Turns out that there was another delegate coming from Ankara and they thought we should arrange our travel together.

To say that I am disappointed and bitter is an understatement.