Where are they??: GEORGIA

With the end of the Bayran, (3 festival days after Ramadan) we left Turkey for a couple of days, to do a quick visit to Georgia, on the way to the border the people that pick us up buy food for us, Turkish hospitality... is great! We crossed the border very quick, and without problem we got a free stamp. We advance one more hour the time, and the night was falling over us, once in Georgia we realized that this is no good… The prostitutes wait on the road to be picking up, the cows flood the main road, and the corrupt police stop to the truck driver that took us, to put him an absurd fine... And arriving to the coastal city of Batumi... we hallucinate. Everything is broken, dirty, the people is cold and sad... It wasn’t good idea to walk in Batumi by night, and we thought quick where to sleep. We trusted somebody that we found in the street and offered us to sleep in a house for a few money and accepted; since France we didn’t pay for sleep...
The building was falling itself as all of them around, they are like buildings on works, or as if a bomb would have fallen and remain like this. During the night we realized that the man wasn’t trustworthy, he had kept keeping the little extra money of all the bus ticket, and attempted to swindle us when we went to buy food. Once in the house he started to ask a lot of questions like: Do you have laptop? Do you have mp3?... A day that we pay for sleep and we couldn’t sleep well in the whole night.

We knew that the Turkish truck drivers cross Georgia on the way to Baku, (Azerbaijan), and we thought that it would be a good transport. To hitchhike here, we guess that it is not so safe, but for sure we must to pay for it; because of that, we follow the route of the Turkish and we tried to stop a truck; here they don’t trust so much, but only cost us 10 trucks of waiting and a long way avoiding cows, pigs, and a chaotic traffic to cross this poor country with destroyed cities and old neglected Russian factories. Because of that there is so much unemployment, and the life is extremely cheap for us; besides there is a high level of criminality and abuse of narcotics.

In Tbilisi we met Daniel, an incredible person and great traveler who coincide with us in the same house of Lasha, the guy of HC. He continues his journey towards China crossing Kazakhstan with 12 years of journey already, and great experience; on these days we learned a lot from him. Together we went through the streets of Tbilisi, showing us a philosophy of travel, and vision of the things very different.

The experiences are the best thing in the travel, going to a bakery to buy a bread and ending up having vodka with the bakers is something... They gave us a mountain of breads and they charged us less for which we buy at first. With our arrival, more people kept coming every time and they didn’t let us leave until the vodka was finish. Something very curious are the toasts; the person that starts, must say some words about the present people, and as longer he does, more important is the person.