Russia

No, our journey did not end in Georgia, but traveling is an activity that begins shortly after sunrise when it becomes too hot in the car. Brewing coffee, transforming the sleeping car into a driving car, and then driving, mile by mile, roughly towards the east. The passenger is responsible for the playlist and finding the way, the lunch spots, the next attractions, and possible sleeping places. After a thousand impressions of the day and an evening of reading aloud, sleep interrupts any selection of pictures or writing of texts.

So, we wouldn't have made good influencers. Now, with a few days of peace on the paradise beach, the attempt to catch up a bit on what we missed.

The nervousness about crossing the border into Russia turned out, at least for us, to be unfounded. The vehicle search was thorough but friendly. Then began a Kafkaesque scene at a window that only opened about once an hour, a customs form to fill out, and several Georgian, Kazakh, Uzbek, and three Berlin travelers on the brink of a nervous breakdown in the chilly drizzle. After 5 hours and 6 attempts, the form was finally correctly filled out, and we were able to drive into the Russian night.

Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kalmykia… I don’t know what made us more nervous, the Russian border or crossing through these regions that we had previously only known from war reporting. The truth is, the people were everywhere very friendly to us, bringing us gifts (mostly watermelons), and we felt welcome everywhere, from the last foothills of the Caucasus to the Volga Delta.

But of course, the conflict is present here everywhere, even if everything seems very peaceful. But we are in Russia, the country that has massively influenced the destinies of the surrounding countries from the Mediterranean to the Pacific for centuries.