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Tbilisi (Georgia) to Saki(Azer)
First real border today and it's started to rain. I think we got lost on the way to the border, I'm not sure, but we seemed to take a long time getting there, luckily Mark was leading so I don't have to make up excuses this time. The border was the usual boring drag we hung around in the Azerbaijan border post generally getting in the way watching the police barter their way through the local populace's property. We all had to pay a $5 bung to the main man; well it certainly looked like a bung he simply takes the money and literally puts it straight in his pocket. In the end there were so many wet western bodies jammed in this border post that the windows started to steam up at which point the officials started to get steamed up and the whole process started to get grumpier,eventually they processed us all and kicked us back out into the rain. Following a long soggy ride to Saki we checked into a caravanserai, which, in case you don't know, is a hotel used by the caravans on the old Silk Road you can see the pictures but it's essentially two storeys with the humans on the top floor and the animals underneath. An amazing place on any other day however it's the nature of these older places that they are short of mod cons so there were a few problems keeping warm and drying gear etc, having said that the place itself was fantastic and the food was great - well the Major and the Traveller, as Colin has become known, ordered Ipsi something or another which seemed to consist of chick peas and a rather large chunk of mutton fat served first as awatery soup then recombined to form a fatty stew - you kinda had to be there, which didn't seem to be too popular - M muttering something about public school dinners and T getting grumpy with the over enthusiastic waiter who wanted to crush the recombined chick pea stew into a single amorphous lump - apparently the traditional serving method. Still gave me a laugh: ah well off to my freezing bed; feet toward the window as I don't seem to be able to close it. It would be nice to have a warm female body to cuddle up to but such are the joys of the travelling man.
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