Days: 538-539 (15 December 2015 – 16 December 2015)

Total distance travelled: 136,919.5 kilometres (85,043.17 miles)

Turkey to Georgia, possibly the last great train journey of our travels… only you actually need to board a train for that to be the case.

Our plan was this.

Take the train east from Ankhara (apparently a lovely scenic journey) before alighting at Erzerum or Kars where we’d make our way by bus towards the Georgian border.

It was likely that we’d need a night in one of the two eastern locations as well, as it sounded like most buses departed earlier rather than later (when we’d arrive).

This was our plan and it seemed set, until Sarah somehow stumbled onto the fact that there was a bus direct from Istanbul to Hopa (from which it was then a short taxi from the border).

Eager to save on time, and mindful that much of the rail journey east would be overnight anyway, we began looking into this a little more, and just like that we had a new plan.

Our departure time was 7pm, and having purchased our tickets from a Metro office in the city (this was the bus company we’d be using), we were advised to be there by 6pm, where a shuttle service would ferry us to the bus station (a common system throughout Turkey).

The scheduled time and we were there, but the shuttle, it was not… half an hour passed… still no sign of it.

When it finally showed twenty minutes before departure, we truly hoped the bus terminal (to which we’d been before, but had little concept of its geographic location in this huge city) wasn’t far, as time was obviously short.

Then we hit peak hour traffic (that would be ‘rush hour’, but that expression is too oxymoronic), and for a full ten minutes moved little more than a few hundred metres.

A brief look inside our heads at this point and time, and all you’d have seen/heard would be “For fucks sake!”

Why would they have such a tight window, when surely this sort of traffic delay is an almost daily occurrence?

This was the last bus headed our way for the day, and should we miss it, our schedule was up shit creek (an abbreviation of the Australian expression, “To be up shit creek, without a paddle” which basically suggests our situation was looking poor)…

Eventually, by now around ten minutes late, we got to the bus station, our driver pulled over and shouted a few words in Turkish and people began to get out, so we did the same. Only not everybody got out… and we shouldn’t have (we didn’t understand what was being said). The van quickly sped off, and we then realised we were on the completely wrong side of this huge transportation complex, probably a full kilometre from where we needed to be!

At this point, refer back to that look inside our minds.

There was nothing else for it, but to strap on our packs, and begin the agonisingly slow run to the correct bus bay (we were at bay five, and needed to be at one hundred and forty four).

Who knows how long this took, but puffing and panting we finally got to the correct side of the terminal, where the bus… was still waiting!

Sucking in the air, but finally smiling we took our seats for yet another night aboard a bus (this would be our fiftieth night in transit for the trip).

That should say, a fully heated bus!

Our last calm moments in Istanbul (left) & Courtesy: Headphones off and at full volume so we can all ‘enjoy’ his movie (right)

It was a largely uneventful night and following day, although it wasn’t long into the morning when we hit the Black Sea coast and the views got a little nicer.

Lunch was a selection of pastries from a seaside bakery, and with a huge slice of bread thrown in as well, we were able to enjoy a nice bit of butter and Vegemite too!

At some point we discovered that the bus didn’t just go as far as Hopa, but actually covered the last fifteen kilometres to Sarp (the town right on the border) as well, so we decided to simply stay aboard to save ourselves the hassle (and cost) of a taxi.

We considered it small compensation for our missed scheduled arrival time (it was 2pm, we got to the border around 5pm), grabbed our packs and prepared to bid farewell to the land of Turkey.

It was pretty chaotic at the border, and I’m sure the only reason there was even the semblance of a queue (this still didn’t stop six women blatantly squeezing past us to push ahead in the line) was because there were permanent fixed barriers.

Fortunately the two officers on duty were processing the exits with impressive rapidity.

That is until we got to their windows.

For some reason they wanted to see our e-Visas, which were on Sarah’s phone… which was locked in one of our packs.

Why they couldn’t gauge based off our entrance stamps if we’d overstayed our welcome we’re unsure, unless they just didn’t believe their counterparts in the west of the country had done their job thoroughly?!

Still, they were checked, and we strolled our way out of the country (at my window, he’d actually stamped me out without even looking at the visa).

We could finally get our first look at the Georgian flag, and the even lovelier Georgian script that covered their immigration post.

Rumour has it, it was their flowing language that inspired Tolkien’s Elvish when he was penning The Hobbit and his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

True or not, we like it (I love the books too, although they’re not to Sarah’s taste).

A beautiful flag, and an even more impressive alphabet

The Georgian immigration officials all appeared (at least to me) to be young leggy women, and after a couple of brief questions (and a check with her supervisor to make sure we definitely didn’t need visas), we were welcomed into Georgia.

We’d crossed from Turkish Sarp into Georgian Sarpi, and after changing a few Lira into Lari, we found ourselves a marshrutka (a Georgian mini-van) to take us the last few kilometres to Batumi, our ultimate destination for the night.

The problem was, the windows of the marshrutka were all fogged up (meaning we couldn’t really see where we were going), although even if they hadn’t been, we couldn’t have read any of the signage anyway!

As such we began looking for landmarks, anything that we might be able to match the map I had in our camera.

Just as we had a suspicion we knew where we were, our van reached the end of the line, and all of the occupants were hurried out.

Bustled out as we were, we obviously left the vehicle in a hurry, thirty seconds later realising that one of our bags was missing!

Fortunately it wasn’t one of our large backpacks or day packs.

Unfortunately, it was a food bag containing a good supply of chocolate biscuits and chocolate bars, all of our plastic cutlery, Sarah’s red leather gloves from Florence (a gift from home) and devastatingly, our Vegemite!

It proved a sad introduction to Georgia…

Notes:

* Our bus tickets from Istanbul to Hopa (although we stayed aboard all the way to Sarp on the border) was ŧ80.00 Lire per person.

* A marshrutka from the border to Batumi cost us ₾2.00 Lari (as well as a tube of Vegemite and a pair of Italian leather gloves).