What about some wine from Georgia?

In the afternoon we arrived in Hopa which is very close to Georgia so we decided to go to Batumi and buy some famous Georgian wine. We caught a ride straight to Batumi. On the border I had a nice talk with a border policeman. He recommended me to see Kaczynski blvd in Tibilisi.
Batumi is very pleasant, i must admit it looked better than Odessa. It felt very European. We agreed with Martin that its atmosphere reminded us of our own countries from the early 90s.

We spent the night near the beach. We wanted to sleep on the grass, because there were only stones on the beach. Unfortunately, the rain woke us and we moved to a nearby bower. Sometime during the night three men woke us to tell us that we should go away but when they saw our tired faces, they let us stay.
In the morning we moved to the beach, walked around the city and bought some wine, beer and Georgian tea. Then we hitchhiked back to Turkey with a very nice woman who spoke Russian. I tried to communicate with her but my Russian wasn't very good.

As fast as possible - Turkey again

We'd done 36 hour bus marathon from Bandar Abbas through Shiraz and Tehran to Tabriz. There we met with our friend Payam and his wonderful family. They were so nice to us that we felt they're our family as well. We spent the night in their flat and in the morning continued to Turkey. Payam took us with his car to the end of Tabriz and we hitchhiked from there.

Our drivers were very kind, they even took us further then they'd supposed to go and turned back after that. I'm not even talking about sharing food or drinks, we so got used to it ;) Then we walked a bit to the border crossing (almost everyone was surprised that we didn't take a taxi and some workers were joking about taking us with cement mixer car :) We left Iran on September 18th 2010.


When we arrived in Turkey I happily took off my scarf. Well, I have to admit it was tiring after some time. From the border we hitchhiked to Igdir (we did whatever we could to avoid Agri). We stopped a member of local city council and he arranged us accommodation in a teachers' house. We met three girls who were teachers there and we had some tea with them. 

In the morning, after watching celebration of a national holiday, we continued North. I was amazed and surprised how different it was from every image of Turkey i had in my head. It looked rather like central Slovakia or Romania, mountains were covered with trees, it was so green everywhere. Totally impressive.