Tbilisi, Visa Chaos and the Art of Not Being Able to Plan Everything

Finally in Tbilisi. This was a big goal for us. A few days after our arrival, we are city-soaked-groggy. We’ve been to the Chinese embassy three times now, and today we were finally able to hand in our passports. I keep saying “our” passports, which might have something to do with the fact that I’m the one who deals with visas and bookings. In the process, I sometimes completely block out the fact that the countries I most wanted to cycle through will be crossed by Petur and Lukas without me.

I had hoped to make it at least as far as Almaty, a city in the far east of the gigantic country of Kazakhstan, from where the two of them would then continue on across the Chinese border.

It becomes clear pretty quickly: We can hardly really plan the routes that lie ahead of “us” in advance. We already got to know the steppe in Turkey and have known ever since what a mental achievement it is to cross something like that. Add to that the wind, cold, heat, and, above all, the elevation profile. In Turkey, we divided one mountain — an 18-kilometer climb — into sections of 330 meters. As long as we still had chocolate, there was one piece after every stage.

On top of that, visa and entry regulations keep changing. Since August 24, we also need a visa for Kazakhstan (before that, you got a 30-day permit on entering the country — just stamped into your passport, easy as that), and at the moment the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan can apparently only be crossed by train. For the train, you need tickets in advance, which can only be booked online, except there aren’t any.

We know people — since William (See also the post about our gorge-Adventure HERE), we’ve only started meeting other cycle travelers again here in Georgia — who have been stuck at the train station in Beyneu, Kazakhstan, for days or even weeks. Apparently, that’s where you’re supposed to wait if you want to be let onto a train at the last minute

And then we read about people (thank God! There’s a WhatsApp group called “Cycling East”) who do have a ticket, but whose bicycles aren’t allowed on the train.

And since I’m the chief organizer of our travel logistics, I really don’t like the idea of letting Lukas and Petur go through all of that on their own. I want to control everything and have everything in my hands 🙂 And I also want to see freely roaming camels and yurts and cycle 2,000 kilometers through desert, past old Sufi sites, underground mosques and dangerously few water sources.

Today we were able to hand in “our passports” at the Chinese embassy. And we won’t get them back until Tuesday. Hopefully with permission to travel through China for 90 days. (Ninety! Days!! :-)) And it would be lovely if the police officers here in Tbilisi, who have so far come across as rather unfriendly, wouldn’t stop us for yet another passport check before then.

Today, after five nights in a wonderful hostel in one of Tbilisi’s outer districts, we’ve acclimatized to the city a little. Crazy — first we were looking forward to the comforts of having a place to stay and all the possibilities of a city after four months on bicycles, and then I find myself really struggling with the noise, the smells, and the sheer abundance of things. We’ve already spent far too much money on oat milk and Co.

A large part of the consumer world here, by the way, takes place underground. In the corridors leading to and from the metro. Riding the metro feels like visiting a ghost train. No joke! There are narrow escalators descending deep into some kind of abyss, the end nowhere in sight, and once you get down there, you’re greeted by the deafening roar of the trains. Most of the time we can only tolerate it with our hands over our ears.

And now for the rest of Georgia: We basically don’t know it.

Even though we were here four years ago with our car and spent a month in the country (part of it horse trekking near the Azerbaijani border). This time we entered close to the Armenian border — by bicycle — and cycled through the country for about a week.

We don’t understand this country. We find it difficult to connect with people, many of whom drink a lot of alcohol. But we hear that Georgians are very open and warm-hearted people, and we have already had experiences of that here too. In the end, we never really say anything about a country. We only ever say something about the experiences WE have in it.

Nature, on the other hand, welcomes us unmistakably. With an openness that borders on magic. “Breathtakingly beautiful” fits quite well. Soaked in sweat, we move through this mountain landscape, sometimes covered in mist, sometimes illuminated by a pink sky, while surviving hailstorms and thunderstorms with our hearts pounding.

We have five more days in Tbilisi to organize, work and pack. And then, unfortunately, we have to get on a plane to Azerbaijan. The land border is closed in this direction (only in this direction), and because we are cycling straight toward the approaching winter, we decided against the extremely vague and shaky alternative of a three-day Russian transit visa.