Bacho was our private driver during Chinese New Year in Georgia and Armenia. In a more formal transliteration, his name would probably be rendered as "Bachu," but I ended up calling him "Bakou" in Chinese -- it just felt more natural, more familiar somehow.
A hired driver is the kind of person you tend to forget after a trip.
He gets you from one place to the next, job done, name gone. When you get home, you might still remember a hotel bed, a cathedral dome, a particularly good plate of grilled meat -- but the driver? Usually just a vague "he was nice enough."
Not Bacho.
We arrived in Tbilisi late, around eleven at night. Stepping out of the arrivals hall, I spotted him immediately in the crowd, holding up a sign. Not the kind of standing where you've been waiting too long and start checking your phone. Not the kind where you're scanning around, half-ready for the next client. He was just there, waiting properly.
Once in the car, Tbilisi's nightscape slowly unfurled through the windows. Lights undulated along the hills, and the old town receded in dark layers behind us.
Before long, he asked me a question: would we mind if he told us a bit about Georgian history and culture? Some clients, he said, don't like it when the driver talks too much.
I said I'd like to hear it.
Only then did he begin.
Why Tbilisi looks the way it does, which part is the old town, what stories hide behind which churches, Georgia's history of being squeezed between great powers, how the people survived, how the country made it to the present day. His English was good and his delivery well-organized, but that wasn't really the point. The point was that he wasn't reciting a tour guide script. He was talking about his own country, and that familiarity and care -- you could hear it.
The next morning after breakfast, he picked us up from the hotel and took us first to the largest cathedral in Tbilisi -- Holy Trinity Cathedral, which locals more often call Sameba. It sits on a hill, its golden dome visible from far away. Standing beneath it, you get the feeling it's less an old cathedral and more a kind of symbol the city erected for itself later on.
After he parked, I assumed he'd stay in the car. Instead, he locked up and came in with us. From that point on, the next few days followed the same pattern: at every church and monastery, he'd park, walk in with us, and narrate as we went -- the frescoes on the walls, stories of the saints, the origins of the buildings, and how Georgians understand their own faith.
When he spoke about these things, there was a very natural sense of pride. Not the kind you perform for foreign tourists, but more like recounting something you've known since childhood and never stopped believing: Georgia is a small country, surrounded by powerful neighbors, invaded again and again throughout history, and yet it survived. The language survived. The religion survived. The churches and monasteries survived.
In Tbilisi, he took us to see the Mother of Georgia statue. She holds a sword in one hand and a wine cup in the other. The wine cup is for friends, he explained. The sword is for enemies. Then he naturally segued into Georgia's winemaking tradition -- Georgia being one of the birthplaces of wine, hence the cup in her hand. But, he added, the country didn't survive all these centuries on wine and song alone. When enemies actually came, there was always that other hand.
He said all this calmly, without any bluster, but you could hear the emotion underneath. As if what he'd been telling us all along wasn't just about a few sights or a few chapters of history, but about how Georgians see their own country, and why they still feel proud of these things today.
The Georgian mountains are dotted with small churches. Driving along, you'd spot one far off on a ridge. Every time Bacho caught sight of one, his right hand would rise instinctively to his chest and trace a small cross: forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder. The motion was small, practiced, eyes still on the road ahead, as if it required no thought at all.
If this were done for show, it would feel forced. But it wasn't. He crossed himself the way you breathe.
The next day, passing the Presidential Palace, he pointed at the building and said that one day he'd be working in there.
At first I thought he was joking. Then I realized the joke was his way into Georgian politics. The gist: they once elected a very rich president, and everyone figured a rich man wouldn't need to be corrupt. He was corrupt anyway, and creatively so. Bacho told this without anger, just calmly stated it, then shrugged, as if to say: well, that's how things turn out.
I asked him what his policy platform would be when he ran.
He said he'd figure that out once he got in.
After that, it became a running bit. Every time we drove past the Presidential Palace, we'd treat it as Bacho's future office. A joke told three times usually stops being funny. But travel is different. On the road, repetition slowly turns strangers into something closer. You know roughly what he'll say next, he knows how you'll respond, and this kind of trivial rapport often bridges distance better than any real conversation.
At lunch, we casually invited him to eat with us. He demurred at first -- felt awkward, like he'd be taking advantage. I told him it was nothing, we all had to eat, might as well eat together. After a bit of persuading he came in, but didn't sit at our table. He found a separate one nearby.
Afterward, he sent me a message saying he'd finished, listing what he'd had:
"I finish my lunch It was khatchapuri chiken and cola thankyou very much"
The spelling wasn't quite right and the sentences were simple, but you can't fake that kind of earnestness. You get the sense that this is a person who takes things seriously -- someone does something nice for him, he notes it, and he makes sure to say thank you.
Later, heading to Kazbegi, the weather turned uncertain. Going into the mountains in winter, the biggest fear is a road closure. If we got stuck up there, our entire itinerary would be disrupted, and his own schedule and future bookings would be affected too. So when he first brought it up, there was a hint of hesitation.
But he kept explaining: Sir, I'm not be lazy.
The English wasn't quite right, but the meaning was perfectly clear.
He was trying to make us understand that it wasn't laziness, wasn't about avoiding hassle, wasn't about protecting his own schedule. He just thought there was risk and wanted to say so upfront. People are like that sometimes -- the more they care about what you think of them, the more clumsy and earnest they become in moments like these.
In the end, we went anyway.
He managed the whole thing steadily. Stopped when it made sense, moved when it was time, no false reassurances, no forced calm. The day after we came down, the weather actually did turn bad. If the snow and wind had come just a bit earlier, things would have been very different.
On the mountain road back from Kazbegi, because we were rushing to avoid complications, he drove a little faster than usual, and one of our elderly family members got a bit carsick. The next day, heading to Sighnaghi, a few planned stops got dropped due to time, which also meant some entrance fees went unspent. He did the math and said he owed me about sixty-something lari.
I told him to forget it.
He said: then use it to buy motion sickness medicine for the elderly person. I noticed she was a little carsick.
He said it casually, as if simply picking up a loose end. But if you think about it, it was quite different. He didn't quietly pocket the sixty-odd lari, and he didn't just insist on handing back cash. He found a destination for the money. The accounts were still settled; it's just that what landed in the end wasn't change -- it was medicine.
That was Bacho the whole way through. None of the things were big, but they were all done just right.
Later, crossing from Georgia into Armenia, we finished our border formalities and waited outside for him. He came out later than us, looking a bit chagrined. I asked what happened. He gave a wry smile and said he'd been caught speeding on his last trip to Armenia -- over three hundred lari in fines -- and had to pay them off at the border this time. The speed limits there, he added, were set unreasonably low. Easy to get caught.
He said this without any real complaint, just a rueful smile while accepting his bad luck. It was a strange feeling -- you almost thought even the way he took a traffic ticket was very him. No attempt to cast himself as a victim, no grand grievance, just accepted it and drove on.
On the last day, he drove us to Yerevan airport before dawn.
There's only one early-morning flight from Armenia to Turkey each day -- the reason behind that, everyone knows. It was dark out, the airport nearly empty. We took our luggage out of the trunk piece by piece, and he helped carry and check things just like every other day, without any extra words.
As I got out, I gave him a hug and thanked him for taking care of our whole family these past few days.
I didn't bring up the tip in person. We still had over three hundred lari left -- exchanged at the start and never fully spent. Remembering the border fines, I deliberately didn't convert it back to dollars. I left it in the glove compartment. The amount was roughly the same. A small gesture.
After he'd driven away, I sent him a WeChat message telling him I'd left something for him in the glove compartment.
A while later, he replied:
"Sir thank you for tipsy apriating its too much Thanx God blass you"
The spelling was the same as before -- not quite right, the sentences a bit jumbled. But the earnestness was unmistakable.
A hired driver is probably the easiest person to forget on a trip.
But not Bacho.
So in the end, what I wanted to write down wasn't just about Bacho the person.
What I wanted to write down was this kind of dignity.