What I got wrong in Georgia

I went to Georgia because a flight was cheap and I had three weeks free. I came back with a notebook full of things I had assumed and got wrong, which is usually the sign of a good trip. This is the version I wish I had read before going, written after the fact with the receipts still in my bag.

Getting in was the easy part

On a Bangladeshi passport I expected the border to be the hardest part of the trip. It was not. The e-visa took four days, the questions at Tbilisi airport took about ninety seconds, and nobody asked for the hotel bookings I had printed and carried across two countries. If you are travelling on a passport that usually means paperwork, this is one of the easier places to start.

What did cost me time was the assumption underneath it. I had planned the trip as though every land border worked the same way as the airport. It does not, and that is the mistake that reshaped my second week. There is more on the paperwork side in my longer piece on planning trips around a difficult passport, which covers the documents I now carry by default.

The bit I got wrong

I had a plan to cross into Armenia for four days, come back, and continue north. On paper it was simple. In practice the crossing I picked was fine for me and not fine for the shared taxi I had booked, which meant a four hour wait, a different car, and a driver who quite reasonably wanted paying again. Nothing dramatic happened. I just lost a day and about thirty pounds to not having checked which vehicles could use which crossing.

The border was never the problem. The thing I had not checked was the car.

The fix is boring and it works: before any land crossing, check the crossing itself, then check separately whether your transport is allowed to use it. Two searches, five minutes, and it would have saved me the day.

What three weeks actually cost

I tracked everything, partly out of habit and partly because I did not believe the numbers people quote online. Three weeks, two cities and one week in the mountains came to just under six hundred pounds including the flight. The single biggest saving was not accommodation. It was eating where the drivers eat.

Where I would spend more

Two things. A better bed for the mountain week, because I lost two days to being cold and tired rather than to weather. And a driver for one specific day instead of three separate marshrutkas, which would have cost about twenty pounds and bought back six hours of daylight.

Everything else I would keep exactly the same, including the cheap guesthouse in Tbilisi where the owner drew me a map of where to eat and was right every single time.

If you only have a week

Skip the second country. Give Tbilisi three days, take the long road north for three, and keep the last day loose for the thing you did not plan. The trip gets better the moment you stop trying to add another border to it.