Part 7: Tbilisi - Istanbul | The Great Overland Adventure

2

Countries

3712

Kilometers

761

Tunnels

43

Kgs of cheese consumed

Trip overview

The Great Overland Adventure is on tour again! After arriving in Islamabad in October 2019, the project had to do a few alternative destinations because of the pandemic (Southern Norway in a campervan, exploring The Galapagos Islands, Ecuador & Colombia, and Sri Lanka in a rickshaw).

To get back on track with the original itinerary, and because covid-restrictions in some of the stan-countries were still in place, we decided to do a small jump and do Georgia and Turkey – more precisely to travel from Tbilisi to Istanbul! (Spoiler alert: Stay tuned for Tbilisi to Islamabad! 🌍)

The short version of this trip involves tons of cheese and bread, a million tunnels and a lot of time spent over 1000 meters above sea level – which means fairly cold temperatures most of the time.

However the scenery was amazing and quite a few bucket list items has been checked off..including riding a hot air balloon high above Cappadocia!!

Oh…and for those of you who are big fans of Eddie (we know who you are and he ❤️ you), he has been behaving his very best on this trip as usual. From hot air ballooning above Cappadocia, inspecting monasteries above 2000 meters in Georgia, and enduring looong days on buses, trains and cars, he’s been a champ as always – enjoying every moment, never complaining and always looking his very best on every single photo (which is a great achievement considering he’s starting to look pretty scruffy after years of travelling)..

Map

Itinerary

Oslo – Tbilisi

Tbilisi – Kakheti – Tbilisi

Tbilisi – Stepantsminda – Tbilisi

Tbilisi – Batumi

Batumi – Sarpi (Georgia / Turkey border checkpoint)

Sarpi – Hopa

Hopa – Kars

Kars – Kayseri

Kayseri – Göreme

Göreme – Pamukkale

Pamukkale – Ayvalik

Ayvalik – Troy – Istanbul

Istanbul – Warsaw – Oslo

The movie

When you enter Instagram through the link below, make sure you krank up the sound! 🤩

Se dette innlegget på Instagram
Et innlegg delt av Eddie the Travelling Eagle (@eddie_thetravellingeagle)

How the trip unfolded

We started in Tbilisi, which is well worth a visit. After a few rainy days wandering around the city itself, we did a day trip to Kakheti – Georgia’s most important wine region. Next was a trip up to the scenic Caucasus Mountains – visiting Gregeti Church at 2200 m. and admiring Mount Kazbegi at 5054 m.

From Tbilisi we took a train to Batumi by the Black Sea. Batumi was very underwhelming, at least until we (finally) found the old town. And who knew riding e-scooters can improve the impression of a city significantly?

Crossing the border from Georgia into Turkey was Eddie’s very first overland border crossing in 3,5 years! It was actually a very smooth crossing, and after waiting at the bus station in Hopa for a few hours we were soon on our way to Kars in the far east of Turkey. Don’t think we have ever passed so many tunnels before, and in the beginning it was fun but after a while it was “meh”. Think those who named the tunnels felt the same, cause they started out with fancy names such as Beşirli Tunnel or Halil Ulukurt Tunnel, but after a while it was simply “T 247, T 248 ” and so on…

From Kars we took the Doğu Ekspresi, a famous train journey all the way to Kayseri in Cappadocia. Awesome scenery along the way, including riding next to the spectacular canyons of the Euphrates River.

After a whopping 20 hours on the Doğu Ekspresi with zero sleep, Eddie did a quick stop in Kayseri. He picked up a rental car and his caretakers drove onwards to Göreme – the very centre of the famous Cappadocia region. And Göreme did not disappoint! With breathtaking views of monumental rocks and cliffs, it was everything Eddie had hoped for and more!

The big attraction we had pre-booked was an early morning hot air balloon trip above Cappadocia, but we knew the weather in May brings frequent rain to the region… But hooray, the luck was on our side an up we went in a hot air balloon the next morning at 05.10 (!) along with 153 other balloons. An amazing experience for both eagles and humans – and definitely a must do when visiting Cappadocia! 75 minutes after takeoff, and safely back on ground, we were drinking bubbles to celebrate at 06.30 in the morning..

Editors note: The next day all ballon flights were cancelled because of wind, which made Eddie thank his lucky stars even more! 🙏

After exploring valleys, rocks, caves, canyons and underground cities in Cappadocia, it was time to move on. Eddie’s caretakers did a solid day of driving all the way to Pamukkale – where the Hierapolis and the mineral rocks of Pamukkale was another highlight of Turkey.

The west coast provided a few days of rest, sea and sun after successfully crossing Turkey from east to west, and then the final strech up to Istanbul included stops at the ancient city of Troy before returning the rental car at Istanbul Airport. We arrived just in time for election celebrations where fans of Erdoğan sure made some noise..

Planning

The easiest planning so far in The Great Overland Adventure’s entire history, when it comes to visas/permits/flights or train tickets etc! Are we allowed to say that it is a bit boring when we don’t have to struggle with these things? No? Weeeell…. we do it anyway, and can’t wait for more complex itineraries that include hefty bureaucracy! 😀

But a little planning was made off course. We don’t quite remember how we came up with the idea to travel Tbilisi – Istanbul, but suspect it had to do with us realizing that it would still take some time before we could travel Islamabad – through Stan countries – into Europe. So, while searching the big world wide web, one of us stumbled across ridiculously cheap open-jaw tickets from Tbilisi – Istanbul in a period where Norway has more bank holidays than.. banks have holidays?.. meaning we didn’t have to take off many days from work during our 2.5 week holiday.

Visa/permits – Nopes, no need for it when you have a Norwegian passport or Eddie passport!
Covid restrictions – Nopes, the world has moved on to a better place! (Not even a facemask, except if you wanted to go to a hospital… and that wasn’t part of our itinerary!)

As we always travel overland on these trips (aaahh… That’s why the website is called the Great Overland Adventure you think… yup, that’s why!), the big question was ‘how?’

As we are full of self-confidence (righteous..or not?) after we’ve been driving around in a tiny tin can in Sri Lanka, do we want to use public transportations or drive around by ourselves, or do we want to mix it up? We ended up on the middle road, so in Georgia we used train and rented a car with driver (smart thinking, cause we would probably have gotten a caffeine-shock if we should pop caffeine pills for the entire trip in order to stay awake), while Turkey was spent on a bus, train and a rental car (with caffeine pills included).

To book the train ticket from Tbilisi to Batumi was easy peasy lemon squeezy as the website was in English. A fun fact for those train geeks out there… The train ticket is written in Georgian script, meaning you don’t understand a single doodle.. unless you have learned to read Georgian doodles off course! Car with a driver was another super easy thing to fix, as Georgia has a brilliant website for this called GoTrip, and it works a bit like Über

Our transportation through Turkey was a teeny-tiny bit more planning, in terms of what and where we wanted to start the different means of transport. We decided to take the bus from the border between Georgia-Turkey to Kars, the start point of Doğu Ekspresi, and instead of taking the train all the way to Ankara, jump off in Kayseri, pick up the rental car and deliver it in Istanbul. The Turkish website for train tickets was straight forward, so all we had to remember was to remind ourselves to set a reminder (phew… hard to remember everything!) for when we could book the tickets for Doğu Ekspresi, which are released 30 days before departure.

Renting a car was as easy as rental cars can be…. Except reading the contract and looking for those small letters.

So when all this planning was in place, and the hotels for the first few days were booked (in addition to Cappadocia) we were all set for take off!!! (…or were we? 😯)

Epilogue:
1 day before we were supposed to take the bus from Hopa to Kars in order to catch Doğu Ekspresi the next day, we suddenly realized we had forgotten to check bus schedules and if it was possible to book in advance. For some reason, both of us thought there were plenty of buses … It was 1 each day!!… but luckily it turned out fine when we finally found a website where we could book our bus tickets. It was only in Turkish, so we would like to send a big thank you to Google Translate!! 🙏

Social media posts

Below are the photos we never had time to post on Facebook during the journey. We have also included exclusive behind the scenes and bonus materials. Enjoy! 😀

Part 7: Tbilisi – Istanbul

2