Denied entry to GEORGIA 🇬🇪 - Australia to Scotland by road - Episode 80

Our first night in the Troopy was chilly and quiet, all except for a lone gunshot at some point in the middle of the night. We can only guess it was a shepherd scaring off an intruder though a little confronting considering the last time we slept in the Troopy all that time ago.
With still no views over to Mt Ararat in the morning we packed up and headed down the mountain and into Yerevan to do our PCR test. We navigated our way to the centre of what seemed like an industrial estate to find a bustling medical centre. Gauging by the passports in hands it appeared most of the other people waiting were American Armenians trying to get back State side. With no time or place to wait for the result we continued our journey north towards the border. The landscape changed quickly and quite significantly from the drier undulating topography of the South to wide fertile sweeping farm lands and more pronounced mountain ranges. Mountain ranges, that because of a much clearer air, we could actually see now off into the distance. Passing through smaller farming towns the religious ideology continued with huge statues and churches. Dilapidated evidence of the Soviet era also began to filter through the infrastructure, from the general brutalist design of the towns to run down and abandoned factories, this reminder of Armenias past would carry on and become more prominent as we continued deeper into the Caucasus.
Like huge scars, the north-east of Armenia is covered in gorges and deep valleys that appear to slice through the plateaus and farm lands. Dotted along these valleys are old soviet villages like Haghpat, our destination for the day only 30kms from the Georgian border. The roads in this part of the country were at various stages of construction ranging from dreamy smooth, to dirt, and one section of “goat track”. One thing that has challenged our Western mindset over the course of our journey is how locals in different countries simply treat their vehicles, regardless of type, purely as a machine (coincidently car is “mashina” in Russian which is spoken widely in Central Asia) to get from A to B regardless of terrain. All through Asia we would find cars in places we wouldn’t think of taking them. Whether it was herding horses on the high mountain planes of Kyrgyzstan, tackling off-road snow roads of Pakistan, or roads turned mud pits of Cambodia, the owners never seemed phased, it’s just the way things are. Armenia was no exception, taking a diversion around some roadworks and up a steep dirt track we were met with a Mercedes’ and a BMW coming the other way. No problem for the Troopy though given the Troopys lack of traction on the way up we think they might have bottomed out on the way down.
We had decided to stay in a campground in Haghpat which was perched on the side of a gorge with amazing views over to the adjacent side and down the valley. We chose to stay here as it had stable internet which helped Jolie with a uni exam, and to receive our PCR results. Martin, his partner and family run the campground and were putting a lot of investment in to the campground including a huge new kitchen and dining building, and a planned pool next summer. Our PCR results were well overdue by the following morning so Martin assisted with calling the medical centre, rerouting the emails to his email, and then arranging for them to be printed in the village. Thankfully they were negative!
Since the last episode the rules had changed for Australians entering Georgia with a vaccination certificate and negative PCR being sufficient. We had heard however that there may still be problems at the border with the guards choosing what to implement. Because of this we decided to print all the information from the Georgian government website out, in Georgian, to take to the border and defend our case.
Waving goodbye to Martin and his camp ground we headed down the valley, past the crumbling factories, to the border where all our efforts with paperwork was in vain. We didn’t even make it to immigration as the Troopy’s paperwork stopped us in our tracks. Armenia wouldn’t let the Troopy out as they suspected Georgia wouldn’t let it in, so leaving the Troopy in Armenia we stamped out, walked across no mans land, and tried out luck with the Georgians. Vehicles from Europe carry a credit card style card, referred to as a “Car Passport” with all the vehicle information on it to cross borders. Australia being an island doesn’t really have a necessity for this type of system. Of course we had the Carnet (now expired) though Georgia doesn’t operate on this system. In other countries which work on temporary import permits, showing our registration and export documentation had been sufficient. This border though was playing hard ball, it was either the European “car passport” or no entry.....
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