Our flight back to Almaty was uneventful. We landed in the evening and made our way to our hostel with the shoddy directions given. They said to take bus 92 to Sayakhat and then transfer to the 141, but no details were given about where exactly the 141 stopped, so we wandered around in the … More Kazakhstan
The West We rolled into Shaki in a half-full marshrutka. The town was quite lovely from the get-go, and felt very “Georgian”, with the rolling green foothills of the lower Caucasus in the background. A dozen or so taxi drivers stood milling around the bus station waiting for incoming fares, with no advanced booking we … More Azerbaijan
Svaneti The trip from Zugdidi to Mestia was largely uneventful. The Russian girls we were sharing the car with had pitched in on a bit of a sightseeing tour, for five lari extra, so we were obliged to pay that as well. The sightseeing portion was fairly interesting, and we stopped off at the Enguri … More Georgia
We took the night train from Tbilisi to Zugdidi as our first step in getting to Abkhazia. Well, our first step was actually sending our clearance applications to some random Russian email address, in response to which we received our clearance letters (about a week later) to be printed and shown at the border. Zugdidi … More Abkhazia
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, … More From China to Georgia: A Short Update
It’s time to be perfectly honest with you, dear readership. Remember when we discussed our visa problems from UB? Well, we didn’t really solve them, we just postponed them until later. We were really in a bind, and none of our legal options really seemed appealing or even possible. We figured that my visa, with … More Mongolia: Border Shenanigans
If there’s one thing you can definitively say about Mongolia it’s that transport is difficult, expensive, and takes a long time. On a budget, solo, or in a group of two, this can become a real problem as the cost of getting to where you want to go is prohibitive. Rather than blowing a ton … More Mongolia: Altai Tavan Bogd
On some level we knew that the trip wouldn’t be straightforward, but we weren’t entirely prepared for what was in store for us either. Bata gave us reassuring words like “there’s no direct bus, but don’t worry, there’s another way, we can talk later.” If it wasn’t for our consistent nagging we’d probably still be … More Mongolia: Mörön to Ölgii
It was finally time to bid farewell to Ulaanbaatar for good. After having spent several weeks there we were thoroughly over it, even after discovering such gems of the very limited food scene as Rosewood and Millie’s. We packed up and headed to the Dragon Center on the west side of town to catch our … More Mongolia: Lake Khövsgöl
Day 1: Our trip began with our introduction to Bagii, the driver we had hired to take us around the Gobi desert for a week. He came by the guest house in the morning to pick us up and his few-toothed grin and enthusiastic hand-shaking suggested that we’d have a fine time with him, despite the … More Mongolia: Gobi Desert
Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right place. 