Traveling From Azerbaijan To Armenia (via GEORGIA...)

I'm Oskar and I'm Dan and today we are traveling from Azerbaijan to our 92nd country with a day in Georgia. We're Oskar and Dan, two boys from Sweden trying to see as much of the world as possible. This year our goal is to hit a hundred countries and after spending a peculiar but interesting time in Azerbaijan, country 91, it was time to head to its neighbor Armenia. Given the relationship between the two countries, which isn't exactly the best, there's currently no way of going directly between them. The land border is closed and there are no direct flights. This leaves us only two options. Either book a flight on an airline that flies to both Baku and Yerevan, such as Pegasus, Fly Dubai or Qatar Airways, but all these trips would require a huge detour. So the most reasonable option is to go via the third Caucasus country, Georgia, which we visited in 2021. The only option is to book separate tickets, which is exactly what we did. Make sure you watch until the end of the video to hear how the trip went, if we were given a hard time in immigration, and to see how fun it was to be back in Tbilisi. Just quickly before we get into the video, this trip took place more than a month ago, long before the most recent clashes erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia just a few days ago. With that said, let's get into the video. Hi guys from Baku International Airport, where we have a very fun travel day starting just now. We are heading to country 92, which we'll talk about once we've left this country for controversial reasons, but we're flying via Tbilisi, Georgia, which we're super excited about. We're gonna spend the day there, take our friend April in, show her around. Because we have been before. April 2021, so now it's 15 months later. See what it's like in the summer, see if we can have some good Georgian food. So let's go. This could be one of the most beautiful airports we have ever been to. It is so aesthetic. There's all these like trees and everything. The trees are plastic though. All right, time to board our flight to Tbilisi. Go! This is a 50-minute flight, so it's super short, and I think we're all just going to take the opportunity to sleep because we're damn tired. All right, we made it to Tbilisi in Georgia. Now we have a nine-hour connection here until our flight onwards to Yerevan tonight. Obviously, there's no direct way to go between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as the two countries aren't on the friendliest of terms. So now this ticket to Tbilisi was separate from our flight tonight to Armenia. So keep that in mind. I really love the Georgian flag for some reason. It's so pretty. So we got two SIM cards. Even if it's just a very short layover, we don't have any data here with our phone plan, so it is worth it. Some of the SIM card companies in the arrivals hall definitely try to rip you off because we went around to a few of them, and the prices can differ by like as much as 300 percent, you know. What was the name of the one that we, the provider we went with? Beeline. Oh yes, which was only like 7 gel per SIM card. And now we're just gonna put our bags into storage, and then we're off into the city. It's so weird to be back here because this is literally one of the last places I thought we were going to return to so quickly, and now here we are. And I actually couldn't be more excited. Last time we were here, it was perpetually cloudy until the very end of the last day. So it's so nice to see it on such a beautiful day like this. It's just so fun to be back in a place that we've been before. Like that's so rare for us, that's the place we've gone to a million times. Especially right now as we're trying to get to new places all the time. It's so beautiful. So immediately, Tbilisi feels so much more European than Baku. So it feels like we're coming home in a way. Also because we've been here before. Outside, different sorts of grape juice, and pomegranate juice. And here fruit, persimmon, black plum, cherry, apricot, raspberry, honey, and grapes. There's a string inside. Just no reaction. I remember it, it's very good. So maybe we had feathers. Yeah. So we're going to try to get some Georgian food for lunch. Found a highly recommended restaurant, so let's check it out. We got some fresh berry lemonade. This looks so good, and smells so good. What is she doing? She's like, it smells okay. No, it's actually, it is good. So last time we were in Georgia, we didn't really know what to look for when it comes to food. And we know that Georgian cuisine is like super famous around the world. So we were a bit disappointed because it was pretty hard to find vegan food. But this time, we were more prepared and we managed to find vegan khinkali. I think it's pronounced khinkali, which is Georgian dumplings. We got them with mushroom and potatoes. Let's give it a try. Oh, they're so, so cute. And also we got this, which is eggplant with walnut. Okay, let's try it. Wait, hold the camera. It's like a soup dumpling. Okay. Really good. Amazing. A lot of good spices. It's actually very good. Back at this church where we were on a very, very gloomy day. Very different today. It's also so fun, not only the difference in time of year and weather, just thinking about how much we've experienced since then, which really changes your perceptions. Every new experience you have changes how you perceive something. So now of course our perception is different from then for that reason as well. Last time we were here, we were like spending all the time we had in the newer part of town, never really realizing that we hadn't seen the actual old town. Like we thought everything was just old, you know, around us. So then like, Oh, there's a car reversing right into me. And so it wasn't until like our last hour, literally our last hour in Tbilisi that we discovered that we hadn't even explored the actual old town. So then we just rushed through it. So we're getting more time to actually look through it and not just like rush through everything. And if you want to watch our first video from Georgia, the quality of our videos back then was definitely not great, but if you want to check it out, you can click in whatever corner the suggested video comes up. So fun fact about Georgia, it's generally considered to be the cradle of wine. It's so sweet. Oh yeah. Which I love. We're pretty much as far away from big drinkers as it can be, but this tastes so different from any type of wine I've ever had. Yeah, it's definitely sweeter. It's like juicier almost. This is really good. Welcome to Wonderland. My name is Alice. So we're going to do something we didn't do last time, which is we're going to take the cable car up to the fortress. I forget the name of it. We're taking this up there. Nice view and best of all, nice wind. Apparently you have to take a bit of a like unofficial detour to get to the actual fortress. So we're walking through the forest on the way up. Okay, we got a cherry pie, raspberry and chocolate. So exciting. Cherry pie is our new thing in Eastern Europe. Yeah, actually. Yeah, we've had it a surprising number of times. This is a fully beaten cafe, so good stuff. Oscar doesn't usually love cherry flavored stuff even. Yeah, but you know what the thing is? Cherry flavor in this part of the world where you do it naturally is one thing, but the U.S. has ruined cherry flavor. Artificial cherry flavor in the U.S.? No, it's the best. One last song just happened. All right. Wow, we're all so tired, like lethargic, but we made it back to the airport. It's time to fly onwards to Yerevan. Okay, so I'm guessing that the situation is kind of similar in most countries at the moment where passport renewals are taking a lot longer than usual and I'm running way too low on empty passport pages, which is turning into quite a problem actually. So now I put these post-it notes on my empty pages. Just because they love to waste and just put a stamp on a new page rather than using this, for example. Why do you do that, immigration officers? And just like that, we have landed in Armenia successfully, albeit about an hour plus late. Ever since we got back to Tbilisi airport, everything has been very slow today for some reason, but we made it and the travel day has been successful. And so what everyone's actually wondering about, what was it like in immigration having the Azerbaijani stamp in the passport? And I will say that it wasn't too bad, but it was definitely some of the most heavy questioning we've ever had at immigration anywhere. The guy just looked at the stamps in our passport and was like, explain yourselves, you know? And so we just said that we're on a trip of the whole Caucasus where you go into all the three countries and that was an acceptable explanation, but then we also had to provide our phone numbers and he also scanned the page in our passport with the Azerbaijani stamp on it. So generally going this direction by going to Azerbaijan first and then going to Armenia is the only real option that works. Going the other way from Armenia and then going to Azerbaijan is generally more difficult. Obviously we've never tried it, so we don't know what it's actually like, but so that was that. A few minutes of extra questioning at immigration and we were through getting some money. Thank you guys for coming along on this travel day. We love you and appreciate your support so much and hope you'll come along in the next video as we explore country 92 of Armenia. Until then, see you around the world. Okay, let's try the eggplant. Oh, you don't like it? I don't know, it's disgusting. Can't finish, even can't even finish that piece.