Tbilisi, Georgia

I'm on the third and last leg of my summer tour of the Caucasus.  Today in Tbilisi, Georgia.  It's been 10 years almost to the month since I was last here. A new airport (passenger numbers have more than doubled), dozens of new hotels and huge growth in tourism. Interestingly, lots of middle eastern tourists (as I saw throughout the Caucasus) along with the usual western suspects.  Lots of Russian tourists too - ten years ago Georgia was doing its best to remove all traces of its part in the Soviet Union and made a point of taking down virtually all signage written in Russian.  Now much of it is back in the form of every kind of commercial proposition.  Money talks.

This is the Kura River (or in Mtkvari in Georgian) which rises in Turkey, runs through Georgia (and Tbilisi) and on to Azerbaijan where it empties into the Caspian Sea.

This is an interesting painting of Tbilisi in 1837: in those days it was part of the Russian Empire.