The first thing almost everyone asks when I say we are going to Georgia is, "Is it safe?" I'm not sure what response they might be expecting – it seems unlikely I'd say, "No, it's not at all safe but we are going there anyway!" The instinctive safety question appears to derive from people's lack of knowledge about Georgia. Not many people are knowledgable about Georgia, with the notable exception of the 15 year old daughter of friends who told me about the political situation there because she read about Georgia on the internet and found it interesting! I have had the benefit of knowing someone who lived in Georgia for a year relatively recently – that's where our interest in Georgia originated. Anna and Joe spent a year working and enjoying the fantastic outdoors in Georgia pre-COVID. Anna told us about the Trans Caucasian Trail (a hiking trail that will eventually traverse Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) which led to our volunteering to work on it.

To be fair in regard to perceptions of safety, last year we considered going to Georgia but Putin had recently invaded Ukraine. It was unclear how the war might progress and we were somewhat timid about travel because New Zealand was just coming out of COVID isolation. Therefore we walked the Slovene Mountain Trail instead, where I wrote about the value of risk. Slovenia felt insulated from the Ukraine war, although the fighting was only as far away as Auckland is from Queenstown – a reminder of how tiny Europe is. This time we will be a lot closer to Russia on the other side of the Upper Caucasus Mountains. However, Putin appears to be having a sufficiently challenging war in Ukraine that he isn't looking to expand to any other fronts (and I don't think he is very interested in us). In Georgia we will actually be about 200km further away from Ukraine than we were in Slovenia.

Is Georgia itself safe? It's a stable democracy. When I look up the safety of countries, this site ranks Georgia 18th safest, New Zealand 68th, the UK 77th and the USA 88th. In terms of the safety of large cities Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia) ranks 36th, Auckland 203rd, New York 205th and London 240th.  The NZ Travel Advisory ranks Georgia at Level 2 RISK, the same as the USA. I remember living in the USA just after the Cold War, when it became apparent how many Soviet missile siloes were targeted at US locations and one of those locations was 50km away from where I was living. I don't remember anyone asking me if the US was safe to go to. Nor do I remember anyone asking me whether the UK was safe when I went there to live in 1987, despite the IRA having bombed London in 1985 and continuing to do so into the 2000s. The question of 'safety' is much more about the known, and therefore accepted risks, than it ever is about the degree of actual risk.

I (probably) should get over people asking me whether what I am doing/where I am going is safe. I should be pleased that people are expressing concern for my welfare, however ignorantly. The reason I find this state of mind hard to achieve, however, is that people expressing concern for others constrains the actions of those others. If you propose doing something and people say, "Excellent, have a wonderful time," you head off there happily. If people say, "Is it safe?" or "Be careful," they instil unwarranted fear in your brain which takes away from your enjoyment. In some cases, the fear may deter you from doing what you proposed. Concerns may be valid if the fear donor is well informed and better at making judgments than the recipient, however my lifetime of activity without serious repercussions suggests I am not in that camp. I so don't want the weight of other people's fears affecting my actions or my enjoyment of my own actions. Perhaps it comes down to freedom – I want the right to make my own considered decisions based on objective analysis, not on other people's subjective fears.

Finally, on the subject of subjective fear, the subdivision we live in has been separated from Coal Pit Road by a gate, a year-long mission by Chris with the help of other residents. The gate is not to deter random humans, but to deter  rabbits, of which there are far too many in Gibbston.

When the gates were completed, Chris added a temporary sign to let people visiting (and couriers) know that the gates open automatically. He canvassed residents to check the gate wording was acceptable before any final sign is made. To our surprise, some of the feedback was concern that random people might take 'Please Enter' as an invitation to enter. The concern expressed was, to my mind, subjective fear. There have been no issues with people entering when we didn't have closed gates. How likely is it that more people will enter through a closed gate with a 'Please enter' sign than through no gate? Chris and I are still waiting to arrive at the gate to find a queue of random people taking their turn to enter; it hasn't happened yet. However, the final signs will have to wait till we return from Georgia in August so there may yet be a flood of people enticed by a 'Please Enter' sign streaming up our driveway.