Male drivers on godless roads

Paragliding in the Caucasus mountains, northern Georgia

From Yerevan, we took the midnight train to Georgia. We had secured a first-class cabin, and although the old Soviet train did not have the comfortable lamps and furnishings of my romanticised imagination, the privacy ensured that I had a better night’s sleep than on the outbound journey. Having had a flannel-wash in the small carriage bathroom, I felt relatively fresh upon our 8am arrival to Tbilisi, and after a coffee we secured a marshrutka heading to Kazbegi (Stepantsminda), the small town a few kilometres south of the Russian border.

Travel lamps and slippers

We piled into the minibus, our gruff driver immediately shrieking his way across three lanes of Tbilisi traffic. The vehicle violently weaving, he used one hand to adjust his hat and the other to prod at the malfunctioning stereo and replace one scratched CD with another. A speaker just beyond Gareth’s butt blared out atrocious pop music. A different disk was inserted which offered salvation in the form of the first ten seconds of Gangsta’s Paradise; long enough to make most of the passengers sigh with relief, until it was cut off by some mediocre four-chord song played at top volume. I plugged my earphones deep into my ear canal, self-saturated with Pink Floyd, and prayed for stereo malfunction.

As he tore over a high flyover, the driver checked his wildly swinging crucifix and feverishly crossed himself thrice, whilst veering across multiple lanes without checking his mirrors, one hand loosely on the wheel. His faith in God seemed to have already delivered him complete absolution from any responsibility to his paying, seatbelt-less passengers in the back. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he quite literally held his - and our - destiny in his own hands, in the form of a circular directional device in front of him and a deceleration pedal just below.

Slowly, terrifyingly, the hours passed, and we made our kamikaze way into the high Caucasus. The four-chord songs continued to seep around my earphones and burrow their unexceptional way underneath the vast sound of The Wall. The mountains soared, brown and dry with bare rocky peaks. Cars shot towards us out of deadly hairpin bends, and then swung out of sight. Stone crosses on the roadside flicked past; each time, the hand came off the wheel and made the three signs. And then it came: an HGV thundered towards us, too fast; we were in his lane, overtaking a long line of vehicles, with no room to move in. Crashing seemed inevitable.

At the last possible second, we swerved into a gap that wasn't really there, with only a whisker’s breadth of spare time.

“Mate, can you slow down a bit please?” I shouted from the back, employing the most British of understatements. The other passengers grumbled sickly accord. There was no acknowledgement from the driving seat. It was clearly up to God to determine whether or not today was our day to careen through the flimsy fence and tumble into the ravine, hundreds of metres below. I sent a hasty whatsapp message to my friends with our last known location, and took my passport from my jacket and wedged it into my trouser pocket, thinking that at least my mangled body might be identified at the bottom to ease the repatriation process. This was the right album to be listening to as I died, I decided; but I would have liked to hear The Dark Side of the Moon one last time.

Hairpin bends

Some time later we screeched to a halt in a carpark high in the mountains. Someone opened the door; a bright smile broke through my morbid thoughts. A woman wearing an orange lifevest leaned towards me. “Would you like a parachute?” she asked kindly. “Yes please!” I gasped. Had we already died? I wondered. “Paragliding rides over the cliffs, 150 lari!” she explained to our pale group. Nauseous, we shook our heads and stumbled from the car on shaking legs.

I sought out the driver, deciding to take fate into my own hands. Personally, I had no immediate plans to be born again. “Pazhalsta…” I started in Russian, touching him lightly on the arm. I sensed that a gentle plea was the correct approach. He squinted at me in the hard sunlight. I took out my phone, typed into Google Translate, and showed him the Georgian text. “Please drive more slowly.” The writing was now clearly on the wall. His face creased and he snuffled with surprised laughter. Nevertheless, I persisted. “Da. Diakh. Yes.” I insisted, nodding firmly and repeatedly at him. At last he dipped his head. “Da.” “Madloba - thank you”, I said gratefully. We smiled at each other. We had an understanding.

When the break was over and we returned to the car, to my dismay one of the other passengers was having a go at the driver in Russian. I hadn’t realised that anyone spoke his languages, and this was clearly not the right way to do it. The driver became visibly angry, and although I sympathised with the passenger’s plea - his wife had nearly been sick earlier - starting an argument with a man already making questionable survival decisions was not sensible. I wanted to explain that I had already had a word with him and it was sorted, but it was too late. We were back on the hairpin bends and the shouting continued, the driver lifting both hands off the wheel and turning back to gesticulate. The passenger’s wife explained that he was insisting that there was nothing wrong with his driving, and that he could drive as fast as he liked without any problem - “Look!” the driver cried over the sounds of Pink Floyd’s Mother, heaving with emotion, the steering wheel unattended.

“That’s done it”, one of the British boys next to me muttered nervously. They had booked a day return with the same driver - they were travelling three hours each way from Tbilisi to Kazbegi to do a hike and return to the capital after dark. I could only hope that they had some sense and decided to stay overnight. I didn’t want to read about them in the news the next day.

I reflected on a strange, infuriating encounter I had had the previous week with a taxi driver whom we employed to take us from Gori to the old site of Uplistsikhe, an ancient city hewn out of the rocks. I had chosen the back seat diagonally behind the driver, and as we drove away from our guesthouse, I reached for the seatbelt and brought it across my body. I then saw that there was no socket, and at the same moment, the driver turned around in his seat - while driving - and started slapping his hand at me, shouting what was obviously the Georgian equivalent of “No! Stop trying to put your seatbelt on, there’s no need, you don’t need to wear it!” His hand was still flapping about in my face and he wasn’t looking at where he was going. “Actually, I prefer to wear a seatbelt when I’m in a car, thanks very much”, I told him crossly. If he hadn’t started flapping, I wouldn't have been happy about the lack of socket but I wouldn't have made a big deal of it. The fact that he become so upset that I even tried to look for it, I reflected afterwards, was because he took my personal safety measures as a direct judgement on his driving, and by extension, on him as a person.

I also recalled that I had had arguments with nearly every taxi driver I commissioned in Kathmandu: they were convinced they knew where I wanted to go, and frequently tried to change my mind about my destination. In Ethiopia, too, I was driven by a lunatic who very nearly killed several children.

Mount Kazbek on the Georgia-Russia border

We did all make it to Kazbegi in one piece that day, and I lived to tell the tale. But that wasn’t the end of our frightening on-road experiences in Georgia. Returning to Tbilisi and onwards to Kutaisi, a day with seven hours on the road, we had yet more atrocious drivers. Our final driver of the day held his phone below the dashboard and was texting his mates and watching YouTube videos as he drove. One video involved a high-speed car crash, which he found so amusing that he watched it twice.

Our first driver of the day seemed calm, rational, and fairly good at his full-time job (how low the bar is set!). He, too, had been crossing himself all the way from Kazbegi and muttering at churches, but he had at least kept one hand on the wheel most of the time. Things changed dramatically when he stopped to let a backpacker out in the suburbs of Tbilisi. Here, he declined to get out of the minibus to help his paying passenger unload a bag from the boot, and after thirty seconds of waiting for the doors to close, he suddenly exploded in a fit of rage and bounded from the vehicle to shout at the departing man, slamming the back doors before flouncing back to his seat. I was sitting next to him - only the front seats had belts and I wasn’t taking any chances on these godless roads - and a friend of the driver was on my other side. Running through every possible Georgian expletive, the two men starting shrieking with rage at the apparent incompetency of the backpacker who had delayed us by half a minute. The driver’s face had turned pink and white and he was quite literally spitting with anger, his sputum sent arcing through the open window. Next to fall under his wrath was every other driver on the road. But the anger of this man produced neither the righteousness of God nor improved driving skills. He accelerated to 120km on the incoming road to Tbilisi, wheels screaming as he cut up one car after another, finally barraging onto a busy roundabout under the bonnet of an HGV which braked sharply, and into the bus station, spitting as he went. Goodwill towards humanity had been conveniently discarded along the roadside, along with his dignity.

I had drunk a large cup of wine that morning at the first pitstop; I had been nervous about our return journey for our two-day stay in Kazbegi, knowing how unlikely it was that we would find a competent, rational driver. A kindly fellow on the roadside had insisted that I try his homemade red wine, served directly from a large water cooler. It even offered a choice between the chilled or the warm tap. The wine had numbed the fear for about an hour on the road but had worn off long ago. Now in Tbilisi, I descended from the vehicle, giving the door a good slam on my way out, and headed straight to the nearest bar. We had another four hours on the road to Kutaisi ahead of us; perhaps Bacchus would deliver us from angry men and their lack of anticipation and spatial awareness.

These delicate flowers, I thought scornfully, with their flaccid little egos and disappointingly short tempers. I have travelled on the road all over the world and have never seen a fit of road rage by a woman; in London, too, every time I had have a scrape or a close call on the bike it has been due to male road rage or poor technique. Why are professional drivers here so bad at their jobs, and why are these men so angry? I thought into my beer. The male ego is so often too fragile, its owner too emotional, to be safe behind the wheel. This has been my experience in every country I have visited. The only times my life has ever been put in immediate danger it has been a direct consequence of petulant, emotional driving by a man too quick to anger when slighted by another vehicle, either overtaking him or simply travelling a different speed. So often does one see a car splenetically speeding up in the inside lane when a car moves to overtake, as if the driver is being personally slighted. Almost three in four road accidents are caused by men, and even when accounting for more time spent on the roads, men remain by far the most dangerous species per mile driven. If one’s driving changes with one's mood, I grumbled into my large beer, then one has no business being in possession of a moving vehicle and my mortality. Leave it to the calm and rational women, I prayed to Bacchus, and please never let me be driven by another emotionally fragile man.

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More on Georgia and Armenia:

An overload of cheese and dictators in Georgia - Georgia
The slow train to Yerevan - Armenia
The Armenian Genocide - Armenia
Armenia: then and now - Armenia