If you know me personally, you’ll know that crossing the border from Georgia to Russia was actually the one thing that I was most anxious about on this trip.
Border crossings in general give me huge amounts of anxiety. There are scary looking official police/military people with guns, nobody speaks your language, your things get searched, and often you have absolutely no clue what you’re doing because no border crossing is the same. There’s just something that feels more... vulnerable about crossing a country via car. I’ve flown into many different countries and it never crosses my mind -
I just don’t get the same anxiety. I also think that subconsciously, I had associated Russia and Georgia as being to most ‘unsafe’ countries out of ones we've driven through and so that border crossing in turn would be the scariest. (Side note: I didn’t feel unsafe at any point in Georgia when I actually got there, it was a wonderful country).
The night before crossing the border, we stayed in a town called Kazbegi, Georgia. This would mean that it was only a 30minute drive to the border. We left around 8:30am and we hadn’t even been on the road 5 minutes when a Georgian security police official waved us down. Thinking it was a security check or that there was a problem on the road, we pulled in. He started talking to us in Georgian (none of which we understood) and we tried hard to work out what he was asking us. Alice showed him the map of where we were going and he nodded and walked around the car. Except he wasn’t letting us go.. he was getting in. We were that confused by the situation that we didn’t really know what to do when he got in and sat beside me!! The next 20minutes we drove in silence as we tried to figure out what was happening and get over the language barrier; and all of a sudden he gestured us to stop. And he got out, and that was it. Alice and I looked at each other in complete confusion - I think we had just given a Georgian police man a lift either to or from work!! If nothing else, at least it distracted me from my anxiety about the border crossing!
The road between Georgia and Russia is one of the worlds most dangerous roads (yes, there’s actually a list!). Not only because of the poor road quality, but because it involves a series of tunnels that aren’t wide enough for 2 cars, and that have absolutely no light in them. You can’t see what’s coming towards you, you can’t put your full beam on because it reflects of the water and then nobody can see at all, and your standard car lights just aren’t bright enough to give you adequate visibility. I don’t think I really appreciated how dangerous the road actually was until a few days later when, on reflection, I remembered that the bridges we had crossed had actual holes in. The kind of holes you could easily get your tyres wedged in. We did miraculously make it from Georgia to the Russian border with no issues.
We exited Georgia with no problems (the guy who checked our passport shouted ‘I love liverpool’ at us when we told him we were from England 😂). The men who greeted us at the Russian border were actually very cheerful and friendly. We seemed to get passed to various border officials throughout the process. First, our documents were checked, then our van was searched, then another guy came to show us a form we needed to fill out. In the interim, another man came to inform us that someone needed to ask us questions. So we left the form and were escorted to another building. Luckily for us, the locked cells seemed to be fully occupied, so we were placed in a corridor on a bench. At this point we weren’t really sure what was happening. But we were asked a few questions of a peculiar nature and we explained to them that we were driving to Saint Petersburg and back into Europe via Finland. And we waited, and waited... and eventually somebody came to let us go. So back we went to the forms, which by the way were all in Russian. After a few failed attempts of trying to have the correct information on the right form, the man in charge of the forms took pity and gave us his phone to use google translate. Now, I don’t know if any of you have ever used google translate, but sometimes it’s accuracy is questionable. Working out exactly what ‘Home pineapple’ and ‘Route contact’ might have meant was a game that at this point, we had no patience to play. After being at the border crossing for well over 2 hours now, the guard took pity on us once again and gestured a wave that we interpreted to mean ‘don’t even worry about the form’.
Next stop? Insurance. We weren’t sure whether or not to buy insurance, since our policy does cover us for Russia (even though we were reluctant to believe them). However, we decided that trying to show our insurance policy document that was English to any official Russian who likely spoke no English might create us unnecessary problems; and after the time it took to get through the border, we weren’t taking any chances. So with our £25 insurance certificate (completely in Russian) we had made it - we were at the place we had set out to reach. Over 20,000 kms, 15 countries and 6 months. And most importantly, the border crossing was nowhere near as bad as I had anticipated it to be.
The moral of the story? Don't turn down an opportunity because you're scared of something... the thought of it is often worse than the thing itself.