The Armenia-Georgia Border

Yes, again a story about a border crossing. It's maybe a bit monotonous, but for us, crossing borders is always a bit of an exciting endeavour.

We anticipated that the Armenia-Georgia crossing would be easy: we don't need a visa for Georgia, and both countries are friendly to each other and towards Europeans, so from an official point of view: nieto probljiema (our travel Russian isn't exaclty well developed, but hey).

From Stepanavan, some 40 km south of the border, we took a minibus that would bring us directly to Tbilisi. Easy as can be. The Guguti border station is a very small one, however (there aren't evenblack market money changers!), and it took a while to get there over badly damaged roads.

Armenia's customs and passport control was a bit slow, but straightforward enough. Georgia's side was also relatively straightforward: we got our passports back within 5 minutes, and thought we'd be on our way shortly.

Things turned out a bit differently though: there was a passenger in our minibus who had some problems with her passport. What it exactly was, we aren't sure (something about her being "invalid" or so), but it did take a very long time to get sorted out: we arrived at the border around 10:00 and only got through around 16:00...

Several other marshrutki passed us towards Tbilisi, but they were as full as ours, so changing transport wasn't an option. Luckily, we had some food with us (salami and cheese), and the friendly border guards offered us a few fruits to calm our nerves. It was all quite painless, though, and we arrived in Tbilisi just when it started to get dark.