Public Transport in Georgia

There are different kinds of public transport in Georgia. Well, first of all, it all depends on which city or town or even village you refer to. As you would already have guessed, there is no public transport in villages, as they are pretty small for that and people there usually get to their destinations on foot or by horses or cars. They have these large cars, mostly, that were used in Soviet Union and they use them mostly in lowlands. And horses are used for transportation, mainly, in highlands, such as Svaneti, Tusheti, Kazbegi, Khevsureti, Racha and others.

You will probably meet drivers with minibuses mostly in every town now. For example, there are maybe up to 3 or 4 minibuses in Sagarejo and they go on a route _ from Giorgitsminda to all the way to the nearby of Satave. I really don’t know how much it costs now, but when I was at school and used this minibus transport to go from my school to somewhere in the center of the town or something, it was not expensive, but sometimes we had to wait for a long time for it to arrive and sometimes there were so many people waiting for it, that it was impossible to get on the minibus and we had to wait for another one. And sometimes it was really hard to wait for a minibus for about half an hour, that we would just walk to our destination, because for half an hour, boy, we could have already been there! So that, waiting for a public transport to pay something like 50 Tetris _ and for what? _ was really stupid from us. Also, we were youngsters and we just had fun all the way up and we didn’t even notice when we arrived at our destinations.

Anyways, there are also taxi ranks in towns and nowadays it’s really surprising how many taxi drivers you will see even in some small towns. I really don’t know how much money they make a day, I haven’t asked, but, well, they are unemployed people and they choose do to something to keep their families and not just stand there in the streets on Birzha and eat sunflower seeds and all the other stuff they do on Birzhas. Some days ago, one of my friends posted on Facebook a really hilarious thing, it was a photo from some book or tourist guide, I don’t know, but it was about Georgia and I guess, it would be called something like “things to do in Georgia”, or “things you will see in Georgia”, etc. And so there was a definition of Birzha, too. So, here it goes: “if you really want to feel like a local, you should master birzha _ the art of doing nothing and everything at the same time. You will need semitchki (sonflower seeds), a bunch of friends, an opinion on everything, and a spot to sit down. Then you just enjoy staring at people. You should gossip, relax, and let your mind unwind. Evidence of a popular birzha place is a pile of seed shells on the ground. ”

And now the big cities! (“Big city life”)

You will find many kinds of public transport in big cities such as Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Batumi, Rustavi… There are buses, minibuses, taxis.

The railway station is on the Station Square, in the Tbilisi Central. It is on the last floor in the Tbilisi Central and you can buy railway tickets there, as well as online. The railway was constructed in the nineteenth century and it’s the shortest way connecting Europe to the central Asia.

Photo gallery