If hospitality was a nation, it would be Georgia. I had always told to Kim the quality and the attention a visitor receives from his Georgian host. And we met again with Devid and Elizabeth Abuladze six years after. I am now received unofficially as a friend, not as the UIA President. We thought they would only take us out for dinner, which they did at the best restaurant in town Kopala. But they have in mind to organize every single moment of our stay, from the visa applications to Azerbaijan, to taking Kim to snowboard and even driving us to Yerevan and Baku.
Café Palatium after dinner with all the pseudo-explorers like us sipping çay or Turkish orta coffee or smoking narguile water pipes seated on kilims. Great pasha feeling in western imagination resting away from the Grand Bazaar animation
05H00 on a Sunday morning is tough. 8 kg each for 90 days is harder but is the minimum we have managed to squash in our back packs. This trip is finally starting and yet it seems totally unreal. We have been talking about it for years and today is the first day of this dream of many years. Being driven by Ved, our Mauritian Paris driver in his Mercedes seems contradictory to the spirit of the trip.
Paris – Istanbul on Turkish airlines.