DAILY MAIL (London)
>September 16, 2005
>LENGTH: 1787 words
>
>HEADLINE: MY RED BREAKFAST HELL
>
>BYLINE: TANYA GOLD
>
>BODY:
>COULD the Black Sea be the new Mediterranean? British
>travel agents have whirled themselves into a frenzy
>about this fabulous new holiday destination -- Costa
>Crimea -- just above Turkey and just below Ukraine.
>Are the rumours true or is it just a marketing ruse to
>bankrupt Italy? As I board a British Airways flight
>for Georgia -- the former Soviet Socialist Republic
>clinging to the east of the sea -- I am happily
>optimistic. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin may have
>been born here, but a tropical paradise at this
>east-west crossroads of the world is waiting for me --
>isn't it?
>
>I land at 5am in the capital Tbilisi and, after
>fending off an advance from a drunken Geordie oil
>executive, I secure a taxi to the bus station. No one
>speaks English in Georgia so I make backstroke
>gestures to indicate my destination is Batumi,
>Georgia's second city and premier seaside 'resort'.
>
>My taxi driver, who looks like a gangster (everyone in
>Georgia seems to look like a gangster, even the
>babies), gives me a peach and drives me round the
>deserted back streets. 
>
>Tbilisi looks like Paris, spliced with Baghdad, dumped
>in a rainforest and invaded by guerillas; it's
>elegant, steamy and full of bomb craters from the
>recent civil war.
>
>The driver dumps me at the bus station, a vast,
>peeling Stalinist brick, charges me GBP 17 (my
>guidebook said pay GBP 5 but who was I to argue?) and
>waves at a tatty mini-bus.
>
>The bus station is the most sinister place I have ever
>been to, including TopShop in Oxford Street at closing
>time on a Saturday. It is full of obese women and men
>who look like they'd cut your throat for a packet of
>bacon crisps.
>
>It smells of despair, loss and cabbage. I have heard
>about the kidnapping of Westerners in this corner of
>the world and I have a plan; I will demand the
>potential kidnappers film me from my good angle while
>they threaten to do horrible things to me.
>
>But my disguise (no jewellery, no make-up, Matalan
>clothing) is a success. Nobody shows the slightest
>interest in kidnapping me. I sit and chainsmoke,
>feeling slightly disappointed.
>
>Slowly the minibus fills up with Georgian tourists
>and, three hours later, we leave. I am wedged between
>a mother and daughter who keep shouting at each other
>and eating melons, and behind a driver who plays
>Georgian pop at 200 decibels.
>
>He flicks cigarette ash into my eyes as we vault at
>speed over potholes. It is like a Mad Max film and,
>although I glimpse lush rolling fields beyond the
>(grimy) minibus curtains, I am too scared of dying in
>a minibus crash to appreciate them.
>
>After four hours, the driver brings the
>
>bus to a screeching halt so we can use the loo. Only
>it isn't a loo. It is a pit in a stinking hut. It is
>guarded by a giant old woman with a kind face who
>demands a coin for giving me the wonderful opportunity
>to catch a terrible disease.
>
>When encountering a Georgian toilet, all I can tell
>you is -- don't ever look down. And don't, whatever
>you do, fall in. And it's back on the hell-bus for the
>last four hours to Batumi. When we arrive it belches
>and spits me out. I am weak from being squashed by fat
>people eating melons, and fearing death by car crash.
>
>I stagger, feeling as if I've had a minor operation to
>the Pyramid Hotel, which advertises rooms for GBP 5 a
>night.
>
>I wave money and a silent girl takes me up to a room.
>It is a suite designed for suicide: a tiny, boiling
>square with peeling walls, broken fans, a filthy bed
>and a terrible, terrible smell.
>
>I start to cry; I am in hell and all alone. I miss my
>cat. Some wit has written 'Gucci' on the wall
>(possibly in blood). There are holes in the bathroom
>walls; are they bullet holes? I lay my head on the
>pillow in despair and nearly throw up. It has matter
>on it.
>
>The smell in my room is growing. I envisage bacteria
>blooming in my bed so I walk down to the baking beach.
>It could be Bournemouth after the apocalypse or
>Butlins after the coming of the anti-Christ; it is
>stony, monotonous and ugly, but the women in straw
>hats, eating melons, seem to be having fun.
>
>Perhaps they haven't noticed the discarded needles and
>condoms on the sand. The region to the north,
>Abkhazia, recently seceded from Georgia during a
>vicious civil war. It's clear that it took all the
>best beaches with it. Abkhazia is where Stalin lay on
>
>a sun lounger plotting the destruction of the affluent
>peasant class (the affluent peasants in Georgia are
>the ones who own a cow).
>
>So you can't get to a decent beach in this area
>without being shot. Fabulous, I think, stepping
>gingerly over a needle. I hate politics.
>
>The Black Sea (it isn't black, it's grey -- they lied)
>doesn't look too tempting but I plunge in anyway. The
>water feels warm and sort of oily and I splash around,
>admiring the oil tankers on the horizon.
>
>I return to my hotel, which I begin to think is a
>knocking shop, to watch Georgian TV in my room.
>
>BY some weird miracle, the TV actually works and I
>watch a fascinating programme about two thwarted
>lovers, who have long, existential arguments while
>sitting on old oil pipes.
>
>I watch for hours, transfixed, occasionally spraying
>Chanel No5 around the room. I watch TV to amuse myself
>because I have no telephone reception. The vast piles
>of watermelons scattered over Batumi have obviously
>blocked contact with the outside world.
>
>If my accommodation is gulagstandard, I do eat well in
>Georgia; far too well. Georgians are obsessed with a
>dish called cheese bread, delicious (at first nibble,
>anyway) deep-fried cheese sandwiches. They are an
>uber-calorie explosion that turns the nation's
>sloe-eyed beauties into fat babushkas.
>
>Like the Hobbits in The Lord Of The Rings, they are
>also obsessed with mushrooms, so much so that the
>menus have entire sections devoted to mushrooms, for
>example Mushroom a la Stalin, a large paranoid
>mushroom that kills all the other mushrooms on the
>plate.
>
>Then there are the watermelons. Ah! Watermelons! I ask
>to buy a slice of watermelon from a street vendor and
>he seems to insist, grinning, that I buy the whole
>thing.
>
>That's a language barrier for you; the cursed melon
>weighs the same as a small car and I have to carry it
>down the street while he waves happily at me.
>
>Every time I turn round to check if he's still
>watching me, he grins. At last I turn a corner and
>dump it; I just know I've ruptured something.
>
>Georgians have an odd relationship with food. There
>are electronic weighing machines at every street
>corner but almost everyone is fat. My theory is that
>Georgians eat some cheese bread, wander down to an
>electronic weighing machine and then go home, taking
>some cheese bread for the return journey.
>
>On day three of my 'holiday', groaning with the
>intravenous application of cheese bread, I beg a
>waitress for a fruit salad. 'No!' she cackles in
>broken English. 'You want cheese bread!' 'No, I
>don't,' I plead. 'Fruit.' 'You want cheese bread!' she
>comes back. 'Fruit. I beg you,' I am almost weeping.
>
>She sweeps off and, triumphantly, presents a cheese
>bread and carefully watches me eat it. Truly, this is
>the land that brought forth the great dictator. I'm
>sure Stalin's dinner parties were like this. 'More
>chips Comrade Trotsky. Ketchup?'
>
>By the middle of the week, the language barrier is
>becoming a serious problem; I find myself pointing at
>mysterious sandwiches and making chicken and cow
>noises.
>
>My chicken impersonation is pretty good and even the
>Georgians crack a smile at the crazy foreign girl who
>has no husband at the great age of 31. 'Husband dead?'
>asks a taxi driver, ferrying me to the Turkish border
>so I can have a swim in sight of the armed border
>patrols. 'No,' I explain. 'Husband won't come. Husband
>hate cheese bread.'
>
>Swimming in the lovely Black Sea is turning my skin an
>odd pink colour so I decide to try some sightseeing. I
>visit the local Stalin Museum (Georgia has Stalin
>Museums like we have Tesco, one on every corner).
>
>It is a two-room shack in which Stalin apparently
>lived for a few days, trying to facilitate revolution.
>I touch Stalin's blanket (it's cream), his teapot (a
>natty pale blue) and spoon (it's quite dirty; couldn't
>he have a five-year plan to clean it?).
>
>Further sightseeing adventures are interesting. I am
>accosted by a beggar outside a pretty church. She
>howls and clutches my arm so I give her GBP 5 and she
>stops howling.
>
>AS I leave the church, however (it is exquisite --
>Georgia has a real battered grandeur), she reappears.
>I try to explain with my one word of Georgian
>('madlobt' -- 'thank you') that I have given already.
>So she howls and howls. I empty my wallet.
>
>Then I go to the local state museum. It has a vast
>display of bits of wood. It also stocks stuffed
>squirrels, toads in jars and giant fish.
>
>On my final evening in Batumi I visit a nightclub. I
>order coffee and watch obese fifty-something men hold
>hands with teenage girls. When they begin to disappear
>to a mysterious room at the back, I realise I am
>actually in a brothel. And, worse, no one seems to
>want to buy me.
>
>Perhaps they think I am the cleaner. So I go home to
>my room to watch the oil-pipe romantic comedy and play
>count-the-cockroach and ignore-the-smell.
>
>By the end of my week I have cheese bread fatigue. I
>have gained nearly half a stone and I am waddling on
>my daily visit to watch the oil tankers. Perhaps it's
>time to pop over the border to Chechnya for a light
>lunch? Or to head south to Iran for a pedicure?
>
>The rumours spouted by evil travel industry
>executives, I can confirm, are false. There are no
>British tourists in this region, unless they are being
>held hostage.
>
>The only Brit I meet is a Scottish freight executive
>called Mr White, whom I bump into at the airport
>waiting for my flight home. He is in Georgia to
>collect an employee who was mown down by a crazy
>Georgian driver.
>
>At least I don't leave Georgia empty-handed. I pick up
>a small, gold statue of Stalin and some oil paintings
>of Lenin at a local flea market.
>
>I also have some kind of rash on my bottom (Georgia on
>my behind, perhaps?) and, thanks to a creature living
>in the bowels of the oil tankers on the Black Sea, I
>have an ear infection. My ear swells to the size of a
>cauliflower and I am semi-deaf.
>
>A Georgian smoking in the aeroplane toilet home delays
>my plane. We wait at Heathrow for armed police to
>board the plane and apprehend the criminal.
>
>He shouts at the armed police and, as I limp to
>Arrivals, smelling of petrol and drains, I ponder that
>home has never looked so sweet.
>
>Costa Crimea, my grandmother. I will never curse
>Heathrow again.