Lisi Lake + Vake Park in Tbilisi, Georgia

Back in Tbilisi, Georgia. Went for a swim at Lisi Lake yesterday where this dog ruled the territory. It’s nice to come back to this lake. Afterward, my drivers asked me if I had a place to stay in Tbilisi. So they drove me from Lisi Lake to Vake Park, where they know people with whom I’d supposedly have things in common with.

I am sleeping in Vake Park in my tent. There is a small community of travelers and people who protest the building of a new hotel there. Vake Park is apparently one of Tbilisi’s last green spaces in an ever-urbanizing landscape. They obstruct the destruction by ‘guerrilla gardening’, i.e. planting trees back where the area has been cleared. They also periodically clean up the trash from the forest.

Oh, and there was also a fire at night, pretty close to the camp. We could smell a little bit of smoke, but it was mostly uphill. But nobody at Vake Park’s camp seemed to care. It was strange. The flashing lights from the emergency services projecting on the canvas of my tent were quite bad for sleep.

The firemen and police were there all night long, looking at the situation – with a burning cigarette in hand, of course – just chatting about the weather and family. This morning the smell was gone and the Vake Park people just had slept through all of it or were not worried at all. One guy who has been here a while told me this happens nearly every night.

Good times, lovely people.

 

We get WiFi from nearby restaurants such as Wendy’s or the free WiFi in one area of the park. But that last one is spotty at best. Almost no one has a local SIM card to share their mobile data from. To be fair, we would probably use up all their data in a few hours.

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