Friday    12.8.2025 
14.69km Total: 96.77km 

I wake up with a migraine, so I force myself down for breakfast and go back to bed.
I don't miss much as rainy weather rolled in during the night and lasts all morning.

I've decided to go to the botanical garden, so I think I'm being smart (and lazy) by taking a Bolt taxi there for about €2.
However, it turns out that he is not allowed to go up there, so he drops me off at the bottom of the world's steepest hill, and I have no choice but to start using my legs after all.

And God knows I did that inside the botanical garden too.
There were no particularly sensible routes in there because many of the paths and roads were closed due to rockfalls.
I end up getting lost and finding one of the exits to the cable car, so I take the opportunity to enjoy the view and take some photos of the Kartlis Deda ‘Mother of Georgia’ monument and the fortress (which is closed for renovation).

Since I didn't think I was done in the botanical garden, I went back in only to find that I actually was.
In total, Google fit thought I had moved a little over half a mile and the equivalent of 41 floors in height.
From what I saw, the botanical garden consisted almost entirely of trees.
For the equivalent of about €1.5, it's great being able to take a walk in the woods so close to the city, so I'm not completely dismissing the experience, but personally, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed.

I had lunch consisting of barbecue and chips with a draught beer for the equivalent of €13, and that was right in the middle of the tourist area.
If you venture away from that, you can probably eat really cheaply here, but I'm not complaining about what I paid; after all, it's very convenient to have English menus and guaranteed English-speaking staff.

After lunch, I wander around like a headless chicken looking for a museum of antique Georgian weapons before finally realising that it's a small (and completely unmarked) part of the wine museum.
They are completely obsessed with wine here, to the extent that wine ice cream is a thing.
Even if I could have eaten ice cream, it would have been the last flavour on earth I would have tried.

The weapons museum is basically just one room, but it is incredibly well-stocked and the ‘museum’ is run by the collector himself, who sat there in some old-fashioned uniform eating a sandwich.
Despite me interrupting his lunch, he showed me a couple of sabres he was particularly proud of and talked about their history for a while.
Admission was actually free, but there was a tip jar, which I thought he earned.

The cable car is such an intricate part of the cityscape that it felt like it should be tried, and it was also worth the experience despite a decent queue.
Even though you had to buy and load a card to ride, the round trip only cost the equivalent of €2.5.

Now it's getting late enough that a little visit to MacLaren's Pub is justified.
I'm a little nervous about tomorrow's trip to Baku, which is nearly 600 kilometres away, considering how insanely slow it was from Batumi to here.

I'll definitely have to make sure I get an early start.

Botanical garden

Kartlis Deda

It was not possible to get closer to Narikala (the fortress) due to renovation works

The weapon museum

The cable car

Wednesday    13.8.2025
121km Total: 3378km  2h 14m Total: 49h 11m
  7.54km Total: 104.31km

Disaster. Complete and utter disaster.
I check out of the hotel and head for the border with Azerbaijan.

As soon as I leave the city, the road is refreshingly free of traffic, which of course should have been a warning sign given how things look elsewhere.
When I arrive at the border, there are only lorries and their drivers, not a single car or motorbike as far as the eye can see.

A lone border guard in front of six empty lanes of checkpoints waves me over and asks me what I'm doing here and demands to see my passport.
Turns out my eVisa is only valid for entry if you fly into the country but not even a ‘real’ visa would have gotten me through, as the border is completely closed.
A 'special permit' is required to cross according to the border police.

I am utterly devastated that I did not know or had researched this, and it is not as if the border closed recently.
It was closed during the pandemic in 2020 and simply never reopened.
I knew that the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan was closed, but I had no idea about this.
Since the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs stated that all that was required for entry was an eVisa and my Swedish green card bike insurance was valid here, I simply never looked into the matter any further.
I still find it very difficult to see the logic in my motorcycle insurance being valid in a country you cannot enter with a vehicle.

I am probably not alone in this mistake, because after I left the border police, an old man waved me over and, with the help of Google Translate, offered to help me get my bike shipped to Baku so that I could then fly in after it.
I thanked him for the offer, which was far too questionable in terms of liability, cost and time to be a valid option for the short stay I had planned.

And the whole point of my travels has always been to enter countries by land. It's overlanding not overairing.
Taking the train and ferry with my bike is one thing, but this would by my own admittedly somewhat arbitrary rules and standards be cheating and it wouldn't serve my purpose at all.

There was not much else to do but return to Tbilisi.
The hotel porter looked quite surprised when I wanted to check in again just a few hours after checking out, but for €45 a night at what I thought was a rather luxurious hotel, there was no point in looking elsewhere.

I went to the Azerbaijani embassy after they had been closed for lunch for four hours, but never got closer to a real person than an intercom.
The man on the other end gave me the very disappointing answer ‘not possible’ regarding my request for permission to enter the country by land.

Hope is the last thing to abandon a person, so I first tried to book an appointment at the embassy for tomorrow morning, as they refer to digital booking.
That booking system turned out not to work at all, so they seem quite keen to avoid talking to people.
A last-ditch effort was to send an email to the embassy in Tbilisi and Stockholm, but realistically, that obviously won't get me in either, so I am already mentally prepared for Armenia tomorrow.

After spending an unreasonable amount of time in pathetic self-pity, I went down to the old town, had dinner and drowned my sorrows with very sensible amounts of beer.

Sunday    14.8.2025
290km Total: 3668km  5h 03m Total: 54h 14m
  9.02km Total: 113.33km

Since Azerbaijan didn't want anything to do with me, I put my faith in Armenia being a bit more welcoming.

After a boring and, thankfully, uneventful journey to the border (Sadakhlo), I am stamped out of Georgia by a border police officer who is extremely sceptical about the fact that according to my passport, I simply seem to have popped up in Georgia out of nowhere after travelling from a country as far away as Sweden.
However, she accepted without further discussion that it is now possible to travel to Bulgaria through open borders.

Once on the Armenian side, my Swedish registration certificate causes some confusion.
I'm not quite sure what information he thinks he needs when he asks me something in Armenian and points to the tyre size of the front tyre.

However, he seems to have finally got the information he needs and I am allowed to drive up to the extremely bored and thankfully uninterested customs officers.
This is the first border crossing I've been through where they didn't bother to check my luggage at all.

They just ask if the bike and everything on it is mine, and when I confirm that it is I am asked to park and go to customs inspection.
There is a really sour-faced guy sitting there who looks at me at the end of the queue and points to a booth that says ‘Ararat Bank’ and nothing else, which I assumed 100% was a currency exchange booth, which can be found at basically all land borders.

When I still haven't gone there after he has dealt with a few more people in the queue, he points again and almost shouts ‘you buy’ and points again at Ararat Bank.
By this point, an Italian biker has come up behind me, so I ask him if he understands what the hell we're supposed to buy from a bank.
The Italian is an older (than me) gentleman who barely speaks any English (ballsy to go on such a long trip anyway), but he conveys that he thinks it's some kind of ‘tax’.
Bingo, here we have to pay tax for something I still don't know what it was, but when it was apparently required to enter the country and amounted to the equivalent of €10, there wasn't much to argue about.

Back with the grumpy man in the booth with stamped papers from the taxman, things go a little better, even though I tried not to look too amused by the fact that he had extreme difficulty scanning the parts of my registration certificate he needed to read as the scanner was obviously tailor-made for its purpose and my laminated (which I maintain is a stroke of genius) registration certificate did not work with it at all without some creativity and a certain amount of blunt force.

After this, I have to go to another uniformed officer who checks my passport and the papers for the bike I just got before I am finally welcome into Armenia.

Since my motorcycle insurance apparently is only valid in countries you can't ride a motorcycle to (yes, I'm still bitter about that), I had to arrange some basic coverage, and conveniently enough, there was a building right next to the border with a sign saying ‘Insurance’.

However, the business itself only advertised that they sold SIM cards, but I popped my head in and yes, it was confirmed I'm at the right place.
After a bit of bureaucracy, I had arranged TPL (traffic insurance) for 10 days at a cost equivalent to about nine Euros.

Since I don't have roaming in Armenia on my mobile, I might as well buy a SIM card at the same time.
Unlimited mobile data for a month cost the equivalent of €11.

Armenia is a hilly country, so the road on the other side of the border is superb riding on the M6, with almost alpine curves and hairpin bends.
The reason I took this particular route was that I had found a pass (Sevan) I wanted to cross, and I'm glad I did, otherwise I would have missed this.

Sevan was not particularly impressive, but it was incredibly scenic (and refreshingly cold) on the other side of the pass along Lake Sevan.

The rest of the journey into Yerevan went smoothly.
Georgia's utterly appalling driving style has not completely rubbed off on the Armenians, and the traffic density is not as high.

Once checked into the hotel, I am given a keycard with a post-it note on it, on which something that looks like ‘Suite 3’ in cursive but it's just barely readable.
It looked like a large hotel, so I thought it was a strange room numbering system, especially as I can see completely normal numbers like 201 on the second floor, and I hadn't booked a suite.

I ask a cleaning lady and am escorted up another floor to, yes, Suite #3.
The ‘room’ is considerably larger than my first apartment.
It is not until the next day that I find out I have been upgraded to a suite, even though what I actually booked was the cheapest room type available on hotels.com.
Thanks to the blunder with Azerbaijan, I can spend almost a week here if I want to, and if I need to kill time, I could definitely do so in much more spartan circumstances.

I shower, recharge my batteries both literally and figuratively, and head out into the Yerevan sunset in search of dinner.

A few miles outside Yerevan

Suite Nr. 3 🧐

Republic Square