The best laid plans of mice and men….
Stalin’s Train Gonio Burial Place of St Matthew This lot will need feeding you know… Its certainly made for an interesting 24 hours trying to sort our passage to Russia out. It all really went wrong with the Poti to Novo ferry. We had enquired about that as soon as we arrived in Georgia and got the provisional sailing date of 15th July. We had applied for our visas based on this but the shipping company decided to cancel this sailing and the next one won’t sail until the 25th (if it actually sails at all) so we were left with two choices, sail to Ukraine or go on the rust...
Read MoreThe long and winding road…
We hopefully said our last farewell to the brothel and began the drive north up the Georgian Military Highway to the Russian Georgian border. We have decided to try to cross the land border right in the centre of the caucuses rather than drive to Poti and get the ferry after numerous lorry drivers told us it was the best way into Russia. They told us that despite it going within inches of Chechnya it was safe and so we approached the embassy in Tblisi to check. They said they had had no reports of problems but would advise against non essential travel to this area, however they would...
Read MoreHalt who goes there?
Our plan for Georgia was to visit the David Gareda monastery which is close to the Azerbaijan border in the desert like step. We had been told Taffy would easily navigate the dirt road route but when we got to the road we couldn’t even get on to it because it was so bad. Queue the arrival of the local drunks in their 4×4. They said there was a tarmac route over a huge hill that would lead back to the dirt road missing out the start section which had been rendered impassable for us by flood damage. They drove off erratically speeding up the hill and round the hairpin bends like mad...
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A night to remember
On our way to the border we got stopped for the umpteenth time by the police, but this time the policeman was a little Hitler and tried to steal our camera as it had pictures taken in Armenia on it! Quite how when we haven’t been there and have passports to prove it I don’t know. Perhaps we’d popped Taffy in a rucksack and climbed over the mountains took a few pictures and then climbed back! His policy was to try and separate me and Linda but we wouldn’t have any of it. He wanted to take Jon into the office and told Linda to stay in the van. We refused and said we...
Read MoreWhat are we doing here?
After our previous nights storm we both woke up tired. Linda’s back was still giving her a lot of discomfort and the continuous bumpy roads weren’t helping it either. I’d got food poisoning in Tblisi and the local Georgians were not ‘the warmest most welcoming and lovliest people in the world’ that Lonely Planet had promised. They were in fact sullen faced, highly suspicious of us and seemed decidedly grumpy even aggressive. we have never been to a country and felt less welcomed than in Georgia. This attitude was whether we were in Taffy or not and despite the...
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