Ballroom dancing, handguns and thieves
14th August, 2007
by Dan

ARRIVING in Batumi was disappointing.
Vast areas of slums punctuated by an impressive church and nicely lit synagogue.
There were no hostels willing to let us in at 3am, but we have learned that if you drive brightly coloured cars in circles around a city long enough the police will eventually pick you up and find you somewhere to camp. If you’re lucky they’ll check on you throughout the night.
We pitched on a tyre strew, heavily littered, tarmac car park, to the sound of bass rolling over us from a nearby park.

After circling the wagons, Lovey, Carlos, OJ and I followed the music and found a Brighton-esque sea front full of clubs and bars. By now it was 4am and most partiers were heading home, heavily intoxicated, and the clubs were closing. But I did find a shack selling beer and hotdogs.
It was there I met George.
We had no local currency to pay for drinks, and my attempts to use dollars were getting a little heated, when George intervened and insisted on paying.
He was Georgian, but he had a Texan drawl, a symmetric youthful face, that should mature to become handsome, and the confident, assured manner of the privileged.
I never did work out what his father did, but five years ago young George had gone out to Texas to visit his sister. He ended up going out with the daughter of a ‘multi-billionaire’ who owned some American Football franchise, so he stayed out there to study.
He claimed to be the number one ballroom dancer in Georgia, and when he arrived in the US he quickly established himself- coming sixth in the US Ballroom Dancing National Championships.

As the police had found us a place to stay, we asked George if they were ok.
“The police are fine. They’re not really corrupt anymore. They want to encourage tourists, so they protect them.
“Anyway if they bother us we tell them to piss off. We have the Georgian FBI with us.”
He gestured towards a short stocky guy in his thirties who was at the hotdog stand. He was taking a backseat, but I could tell he was part of the group.
“My friend’s father is a minister, so he has a guard.”
“Right,” I said, wondering what state the country’s security was in when politician’s families needed bodyguards, and whether George had drunk a little too much. I think he sensed my scepticism.
“Hey, come over here.” George beckoned the guard, they conversed in Georgian, then turned to me: “Dan, do you want to fire a gun?”

I have mixed feelings about guns. I'm pleased we don’t really have them in England, it seems to work – in order to kill someone you have to something far more primal than just squeezing a trigger. You need to knife them or bludgeon their life away – not an easy thing to do.
But I'm still fascinated by the things. Maybe their inaccessibility adds to the mystery and allure.
The burly guard pulled out a handgun, loaded a round into the chamber, removed the clip, then pushed the thing towards me.
“What here?” I looked around, we were in a public area of beach front and parkland, a hundred yards from the emptying clubs and metres from an open hotdog stand.
“Yeah, just fire it in the air dude.’
I took it, it felt lighter than I’d imagined, though the clip wasn’t in it. The metal was chipped and the paint had flecked off. It still felt robust, but the cosmetics had faded. Was this guy really in the secret service? Or the mafia?
“Point it into the air, dude.”
“Ok”
I waved it towards the sky. How do you stand? Do you hold it with one hand, like in the movies, or two like safety would suggest? Did safety really come into it?
I opted for two hands, holding it at arm’s length like a dangerous but limp sausage. I gritted my teeth, locked my elbows and squeezed.
A jet of sparks shot out of the barrel like a firework, and it sprung back at me with a loud airy ‘pop’ like a champagne cork, rather than the bang I’d imagined.
The guard quickly took it away, reloaded the clip and disappeared the thing into his jacket, while my new Georgian friends cheered.



I was strangely affected, my heart pumped adrenaline quickly round my body, I felt a little light-headed and very excited. Maybe it was the danger, the stupidity, or the illegality, I don’t know, but it felt good and I wore an inane grin for the next hour.

The drizzle we had been loitering in grew to a downpour and George was insistent we return to his friend’s hotel rather than our dirty campsite. We dried off and he, Carlos, the bodyguard and I went to get drinks.
When I saw the bodyguard’s car – a top of the range BMW, with dark tinted windows, I genuinely believed he worked for the secret service. But as he sped off, pulling donuts in the car park where we were camped, I again had my doubts, and put my seatbelt on, much to the amusement of the Georgians.

George was a good host, and the bodyguard was fun. You wouldn’t want to piss him off, but he laughed easily and did what George told him to do.
Night turned to day, and the beer and wine flowed, interspersed with dips in the warm Black Sea, and traditional food at various eateries, all at George’s considerable hospitality.
“George, please, let me buy this round.”
“Dan stop it,” he’d throw his arm round me, “in Georgia we look after our guests, stop asking.”
“Well I'm getting the next one.”
And of course I never did. It got to the point were I took it for granted that I was being taken around Batumi on an epic bender with my own armed bodyguard at the expense of the national ballroom dancing champion.
By 4pm George was done in, and wanted to head back, so we arranged to meet again in five hours and I headed to a beach café to sober up with some light beer, maybe a snooze, and some time to write.

I chose the wrong cafe.
The local men, with seemingly nothing to do but drink on a damp Wednesday afternoon, inundated me with questions in Russian about my country, my Mac, my girlfriend, my travels, whether I would go to see women with them, and finally demanded that we drink vodka together ‘like brothers’.
We knocked back shot after shot of the stuff, with salted slices of cucumber,
hunks of bread and beer chasers.

I stumbled back to the campsite around eightish waving a large reed at passers by and muttering piecemeal Russian. The rest of the gang had slept off their excesses and were gearing up to go out again, so I made an about-turn and headed back out for a full dinner with more vodka and then VIP seating at a beach front club with a seemingly limitless bar tab.
We knocked back cocktails and went dancing, but something went wrong with George, maybe Marlena or Zsofi rejected his advances, maybe he drank too much, but he disappeared without a goodbye, and the bodyguard brusquely ordered the girls out of the club.


In the early hours of that morning, 24 hours since I had met George, and 42 hours since I had last slept, I found myself riding a small quad bike that I had commandeered from a youngster near the beach.
I had just finished speeding around the car park where we were camped when I noticed a fat skinhead looking the cars up and down. It is a sight we’re all well used to, and I went to explain to him what we were doing. I was surprised when he grabbed the door and shook it violently, as if testing its durability. I thought him odd, but was in no state to make a firm character assessment and so let him be.
A few minutes later Lovey turned to me: “That blokes stealing our cameras,” he said in a matter of fact tone.
I was standing with Megan and Marlena and we all looked up in unison. The skinhead was sprinting flat out across the car park towards an old abandoned shopping mall.
“So he is.”
We stared at him for a while, an incongruous sight his stumpy legs furiously propelling his squat, fat body while clearly holding our cameras out to one side.
“Lets get him,” said Lovey without a trace of panic.
The girls sprinted after him and Lovey and I jumped in Ziggy, but he had been sleeping and took a few precious minutes to start. Finally we sped off towards the old mall, which was surrounded by a couple of acres of overgrown wasteland.
We did a few circles, but couldn’t see him, so jumped out of the car and made our own separate searches.
From behind me a heard John shout and turned to see him sprinting after fatty. I gave chase and it dawned on me that I was barefoot and sporting boxer shorts, “Where are my trousers?” went through my head as I saw Lovey tackle the skinhead to the ground, kneel over him and start laying into his face.
When I arrived the guy had clearly had enough and was cowering, so we pulled him up and demanded our cameras, which he was no longer holding.
He knew what we wanted, but I could see him looking for an escape route, so I threw a right cross into his face, felt the bones in my knuckle crack and fracture as they connected with his eye and nose.
He looked stunned but started scouring the ground for the cameras.
From the darkness Megan appeared, she had given chase on foot and arrived high on anger and adrenaline. She flew straight into him in a tangle of curly blonde locks, knocking him to the ground, punching and slapping. Then Marlena appeared and gave him a kicking with her bare feet.
It was vigilante justice, mob rule and I felt, and still do, a little bad.
We found the cameras on the floor near where we had got fatty, one of them was broken, and I wonder where the story would have gone if the police had not arrived en masse. The fat thief seemed relieved they were there.


Initially we thought he would be able to buy his way out of trouble, but like George had told me the previous night, they want to encourage tourists, and protect them. The guy was a pathetic sight, sitting awkwardly on the ground, hands cuffed behind him, breathing heavily though a broken nose, puffy eyed and split-lipped, his giant gut hanging over his shorts.
None of the cops spoke English, but after half an hour they brought out a young lad who worked at a local hostel to interpret for us.
By 6am things seemed to have reached a conclusion, but they insisted we go back to the police station to give more statements.
“Three hours maximum” they told us.
Liars.

The station was more of a complex, with a couple of checkpoints to get in, and a mix of military and police uniforms inside.
We were shown to a large, almost empty building that felt like an abandoned school – one long echoing corridor with rooms coming off it. There was just a couple of computers in the whole place and not a thing on the walls, it felt barren, unused and unloved. Plug sockets were heavily overloaded and the toilet had a leaky roof, the sound of water dripping into buckets reverberated along the hallway.
During eight hours there I had the chance to explore. The place was devoid of any personal affects, as if all the cops were hotdesking. Not a picture or decoration in sight. I found the armoury and counted at least 20 AK47s in a rack and a cupboard with maybe 40 sidearms.
I tried to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me put my feet up on the sofas, I think it’s a Georgian thing, so I ended up pacing, numb with exhaustion, and examining my swollen hand.
After eight hours of bureaucracy, they said they would let us go, but they were keeping our cameras as evidence. We couldn’t believe it and kicked up a fuss, threatening to call the embassy, telling them I was a journalist and anything else we could think of. We didn’t go through all that to lose our cameras to Georgian police.
After an hour of telephone calls we came to a compromise. We would provide them with a couple of photo’s off the cameras to prove that they were ours.
So I downloaded this one onto the police computer.
Here’s your evidence.

They finally dropped us back at the site at around 3pm. I hadn’t slept in days and was feeling it, so I lay in the back of Fez and quickly lost consciousness. I woke up deep in the Georgian hills.

Ends
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