We spent a few more days in and around Tbilisi, replenishing our supplies, taking Apollo to the vet for a health certificate and running some last-minute errands before our transit through Russia. After two long weeks of waiting and not knowing whether it would work out, we finally got our transit visa for Russia for 28–30 August!
However, it is now the 26th of August, so we really must hurry back up north to Stepantsminda. After spending a night at a campsite near Ananuri to refill our water tank, charge our batteries and do one last wash, and then spending another night in Stepantsminda, we cross the Russian border on the 28th. We arrive at the border at around 5 am, and the Georgian side is quite quick. However, we then get stuck in a traffic jam in the no man’s land between the border crossings, which are situated in an impressive mountain pass, for around five hours. The immigration and customs procedures are relatively quick, although they are definitely the most thorough so far on this trip. Apart from a police dog called Balu, the only living thing that cares about Apollo here is Apollo himself.
There is one tense moment when the border police officer supposedly calls his boss and says something about Germans and transit. He then says a grumpy ‘good luck’ as a goodbye. This makes us nervous for a while, until we realise that something has been lost in translation, because all the officers here say the same thing to us with varying degrees of enthusiasm. We guess they just mean ‘safe trip’, and indeed, after an ordeal of an 8.5-hour border crossing, we safely leave the station and head north-east!
We have a long drive ahead of us through the northern Caucasus region, Chechnya, Dagestan and Kalmykia. However, in the evening, we realise that we won’t make it today because we lost too much time at the border. We therefore decide to stop for a few hours, leaving the motorway to find a quiet parking spot near a field in the middle of nowhere about one hour before Astrakhan.
At around noon the next day, we arrive at the Kotyaevka border crossing, which is located midway between Astrachan in Russia and Atyrau in Kazakhstan. Although this crossing was faster than the last one, it still took us around five hours.
Ultimately, however, we were just overjoyed and exhausted, and happy that everything had worked out well. So, half a year after departing from the lovely city of Halle, we have finally made it to Central Asia!