Back into civilization after Svaneti. 4 days in the Georgian capital to find out that it is quite an interesting town, a mixture between Soviet and European city with a cute Old Town but being slowly spoiled by modern "chill out" cafés. Arriving to Tbilisi's main railway station after some days lost in the mountains was like being back to civilization. The train station is big and bustling. First thing we did was to try to book a train ticket to Yerevan, but unfortunately there were not tickets for the day we wanted to go there, so we decided to go and find the hostel we had booked and go to Yerevan by marshutka.
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3 days spent in the High Caucasus and a couple of trekkings in the area to be sure that this is one of the best mountanious landscapes in Europe. In the last post we were going to Mestia from Zugdidi. It was a 3 hour trip by Marshrutka driving through a really impressive road. As you were getting inside the Svan land and the road was twisting, your eyes were enjoying the High Caucasus. High mountains, snow and to the left an ice-blue river flowing through the mountains that reminded me to the Norwegian fjords. Everything a pleasure for the eyes.
We had one stop on the road to eat a bit. We had Kachapuri, a kind of round bread filled with cheese or meat. In there we could also prove that Svan people are really friendly, as a guy invited to a couple of glasses of Cha Cha. Cha Cha is the Georgian equivalent of Italian grappa. And it really were two full glasses that you had to drink at once. It was a nice introduction to the Svan country: getting drunk before even getting to the destination. Some more days than expected spent in Trabzon but finally got the Iranian visa, so we have already changed country and we are now in Georgia. Getting the visa for Iran wasn't finally as straightforward as it seemed. Of course there had to be some compications and these were that after showing up at the consulate in Trabzon on Friday (as they had told us) it turned up that the visas were not ready. They hadn't got an answer from the embassy in Tehran and we must wait until Monday. The 10 or 12 people of us who applied for visas were not really happy. A weekend in between with nothing to do. The consulate kept our passports, so we could not even go to Georgia for the weekend and come back. Some decided to go to Erzurum, some somewhere else, but being on a low budget and not really interested in the surroundings of Trabzon, decided to stay in town.
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AuthorBorn in Barcelona and raised in Olot, I've been interested in travelling since I was a child, when every Summer I crossed Spain from coast to coast with my parents. Listening to my siblings' stories about their trips all over the world also helped, as well as watching Around the World with Willy Fog on TV :)
As I grew up, and while I was still studying... read more
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