Day 17 Georgia and Armenia - Journey from Tbilisi to Dilijan

So, today we continued from Tbilisi to Armenia.

After breakfast, I first noticed that we were provided with a parking space by the Evangelical Lutheran Parish. I didn't notice that yesterday. Many thanks for that...

From today onwards, I am traveling alone again. My travel partner Roy has turned to hiking in the Georgian mountains, and I have separated from my American companion Harley.

So, off to new areas...

The border control at the Georgian-Armenian border was okay, everyone was friendly and spoke English well enough. At the Georgian border control, they actually asked me about the traffic violation ticket that I paid yesterday.

At the Armenian border control, I had to pay a kind of entry customs fee for the transporter and myself, around 12 euros. I stated the value of the transporter as 300-500 euros. Let's see what that's good for.

Right at the border during the control, I met Ben. He is from Holland and hitchhiking to Yerevan. And just like that, I had a new fellow traveler. And then we also met Mahi from Iran, and then there were two.

Right after the border, I took out liability insurance for the transporter, 36 euros for 60 days. Why 60 days? Stay tuned...

And then I bought a SIM card. But it didn't work, the guys tinkered with the phone for about 1:30 hours.

Since it took me a bit long to set up the phone, I got camping chairs on the side and let the guys do their thing. And look, the SIM card dealers seemed to have never seen such chairs before and wanted to buy them from me after trying them out. They thought it was a shame that they were not for sale.

Something went wrong with the phone setting, so I got my money back and went off without network. Strange, the Georgian SIM card worked before and shortly after. I will buy a new card in some city tomorrow, it will work out.

My destination for today was Dilijan, which we reached well in the evening.

There, Ben and I stayed at the 'green garden guesthouse'. The innkeeper Arman is a blacksmith, and I was allowed to park directly in the workshop yard. And then we were escorted to his pantry and got to taste rose wine and Armenian brandy. All homemade by him and his family. Delicious...

And then we had a fine dinner there, the prices for everything are shamefully low. Ben and I had a nice evening, we had a good conversation.

Mahi wants to sleep in a tent on the outskirts of the city, maybe I'll meet him again tomorrow. He is also an interesting guy and has traveled a lot as a hitchhiker and work-for-food traveler. It was somehow funny when an Iranian and a German speak to each other in Russian and replace missing vocabulary with English...

Today, I did 205km.

Just two kilometers more and I have driven 5000km on this journey so far.