We spent five days in Urumqi trying to figure out where we would head next. Oona’s good friend will be meeting us in Kazakhstan in mid-October, so we had a month to kill somewhere between Urumqi and Almaty, or indeed somewhere else entirely. Given that we’ll be spending another month in Central Asia after Almaty, we were leaning towards the somewhere else entirely option.
The Caucasus sounded nice, but traveling over land from Urumqi to the Caucasus and back to Almaty within a month was not doable, so we threw our philosophical objections to flying to the wind and booked flights from Urumqi to Tbilisi and from Baku back to Almaty just in time to meet up with our friend.
We’re currently in Tbilisi, basking in some much-needed cosmopolitanism after Mongolia, but we’ll be heading west to Zugdidi tonight. Our plans for Georgia aren’t totally solidified, but as of now we’re planning to visit Sukhumi in Abkhazia, the Black Sea coast near Batumi, and possibly Mestia in Svaneti before heading on to Azerbaijan.
Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right place. 