Welcome to Mestia, Sveneti

The view out the window

Open cockpit

Welcome to Mestia

In Tbilisi, we booked return flights to Mestia through Pegasus Airlines in the Marriott hotel on Rustaveli. Originally, we were sent to the hotel in Freedom Square, but the Pegasus booking office was actually in the hotel located at Rustaveli Avenue 13. Before buying the tickets here, we had actually shopped around at several other travel agencies. At these other travel agencies, we were told many different prices and available dates (for example, some said there were only flights on Mondays and Wednesdays, others said only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, some told us there were no flights due to the weather, and on and on). For reliable, cheap tickets, save yourself the hassle and just book them through the Marriott – I’m fairly confident that you won’t get a better price elsewhere!

Occasionally – as happened to friends of ours – the flights will actually be cancelled. In this case, your best option is to hitch a ride, take the train, or catch a marshrutka to Zugdidi and from there, get another marshrutka (or ride) to Mestia. The night trains from Tbilisi are about 8 hours and are timed so that when you arrive there are marshrutkas waiting to depart for Mestia.

(After writing this, I just read online that flights are currently cancelled from Tbilisi to Mestia, however, in case flights resume, I will leave the information on where to purchase them!)

Our flight to Mestia was through a small company, Borek Air, that was actually run by Air Canada and our pilots were Canadian, or at least they sounded Canadian! The plane was a very small 19-seater DHC-300 Twin Otter (a Canadian plane also used for skydiving and rescues). The flight was, as you would expect from such a little plane, bumpy, but amazing! I love flying in smaller planes since they have to stay at a lower altitude, you can enjoy actually the view along the way.

We were the last flight of the day to land in the little teeny, tiny Queen Tamar airport, about a 15 – 20 minute drive outside the town of Mestia, and a crowd of tourists was waiting to board the plane to head back to Tbilisi. The airport had one little walk-through metal detector, a baggage scanner, a small information desk and check in, and a small waiting area with green, circular chairs and metal tables lined up along one wall. Once off the plane, we grabbed our backpacks and then, as it was much colder in Mestia than it had been in Tbilisi, we put on some warm layers.

After we got our backpacks and warm clothing sorted out, the two guys decided that they would hitch a ride into town to buy some food supplies since we were planning to camp outside of town that night. It took them ages and, while we waited, my friend and I (the only non employees in the airport) noticed that the staff seemed to be having a particularly good time taking so many photos of themselves, and my friend and I looked at each other and remarked that the camera seemed to be the same one that her boyfriend had. However, we didn’t say anything because how do you ask someone whether or not that’s really their camera?

Of course, when the guys finally got back, they immediately rushed over to us and asked if anyone had handed in a camera because her boyfriend had actually lost his camera. We laughed and told them about the staff photo shoot and said he should ask the woman at the desk – who happily returned the camera to him since she had already downloaded and printed out several photos for herself and the other staff. We checked the memory card to see if they had left any photos behind (they had done some pretty hysterical poses), but unfortunately, they had deleted them all. At least we had a laugh watching them!