The Georgian offices are new buildings with your passport control in a modern slim corridor style on one side for passengers and the drive through for your car on the other side. Facilities are clean and new. A money exchange, toilets, a waiting area and a vending machine is all thats available. I guess in the middle of these mountains that’s all that you   would need? I think it took us just under 10 minutes to complete all formalities!

The Russian crossing was a bit more interesting:) at passport control each one of our passport pictures were carefully scrutinized to make sure we were in fact who it says we are! Once the car and contents were checked a very pleasant and English speaking plain clothes officer requested us to join him in a different office. Here only my husband was taken aside and as the saying goes what is said in the border office stays in the border office 😉 10 minutes later we ushered to the traffic officer. Russian forms had to completed where a sample of the same was shown in English. Who knows whether we got the details right!

The official language has been different in each country we visited so far and one language and one with it’s own character set…. ( Arabic in the Gulf, Farsi in Iran, Armenian in Armenian, Georgian in Georgia and Russian in Russia.)

The traffic or customs officer at each of these points would seem to take forever to register the car. However try typing in a different language for a while. Not an easy task! Shame on me for thinking them slow!

All in all it took us 2hours to finally enter into Russia 🙂 

Perhaps it was the change in temperature; the morning we left 
Tblisi it was a comfortable warm 31 degrees and now at this mountainous outpost it has dropped to a cool 20. But it felt like we were in a different place immediately.

The day had became over clouded and gloomy.  At the first hotel stop had they had  no availability. The next hotel didn’t seem to exist as indicated by bookings but then we approached by 2 curious English speaking students from the Arab world. What a blessing!

Obviously we couldn’t read the Russian and we were at the right place! Our kind friends immediately offered assistance and helped with translation and helped secure a good clean room.

Our day ended enjoying a delicious Uzbek/Russian meal of plov (meat and rice) grilled kebabs,  chicken, beetroot leaves stuffed bread and compot (strawberry infused sugary drink) with our new friends 🙂 and some great insights into their lives in Russian. It must be said that it’s these chance meetings that add so much to ones traveling experience. I can only be grateful.