Finally arrived in Baku late last night after a rather trying journey from Tbilisi. We left Tbilisi after breakfast 2 days ago, got lost on the way to the border and when we finally did make it had to wait a ridiculous 24 hours before nearly being turned back for having an illegal right hand drive car.

The rest of our stay in Georgia was pleasant enough - met a few fellow travellers in the hotel and Azeri visa queue. We also managed a couple of days away in the Caucasus mountains and in Stalins home town Gori. The mountains were nothing short of spectacular, huge granite peaks with a dusting of snow just making them look even more dramatic. The day we arrived the weather was overcast and gloomy which just added to the effect. We stayed the night in the only hotel in Kazbegi (which might be the only open hotel in the whole of the Caucasus) which itself was only just open. On arrival we were informed that there were no restaurants in town but they were happy in the end for us to buy food and cook it in their restaurant kitchen. We came up with "egg fried pasta" which was surprisingly tolerable.

The next morning we woke up to find 6" of snow had fallen overnight, and guess which muppet doesn't have any snow chains for their front wheel drive shitter? The flat bits surprisingly still proved drivable but the small problem of a 2300m pass on the only road home soon became a bigger problem - a run up can take you a few hundred metres to the first hairpin but no further... Some less than helpful Russians offered to tow us to the top for a very charitable $100 so we told them to piss off. Eventually in the last village at the foot of the pass we wandered into a house whose yard contained nothing but heavy diesel machinery to see if they could help. After a few rounds of vodka they happily got a snowplough up and running and off we went at a stately 8mph all the way up. They didn't want payment but we gave them a generous tip anyway, and this, ladies and gentlemen is the difference between Russians and Georgians!

Gori was our next stop purely because I wanted to see the Stalin Museum. Being the only famous Georgian ever (Georgi Kinkladze doesn't count) they still venerate him as a great leader. The museum exhudes a fascinating religeous zeal for the man and manages to completely gloss over some trivialities such as the millions of his own people that he had murdered, etc. The guide that took us round seemed especially misty eyed when describing the great success of collectivisation ("some problems" roughly translates as "10 million die from starvation").

We had lunch in unpronouncable Mtskheta, the pretty former capital 10km from Tbilisi. A popular spot for Sunday lunchers we ate Lobia (lentil stew in a clay pot), huge pork gyoza type things and bbqed lamb. All delicious and eaten with the hands after a local ticked us off for using cutlery.

Picking up our visa was quite straightforward, until we came to deposit the dollars in the bank. Put simply the bank almost doesn't exist, and neither does the street its on and when you do eventually find the correct spelling of the street the door's round the corner on another street and in any case its not even a bank but an office so no one's heard of it anyway.

We set off on Tuesday morning to the Azeri border. Of course because we're leaving from Tbilisi there's no latin signposts to the border (they assume you've used the bypass as its actually illegal to transit through the city) so we end up taking the wrong road out of town. Every local we asked kept telling us that we were OK to proceed and eventually sent us down the most awful road which was somewhat akin to navigating the battleground at Ypres. To make sure we were still going the right way we shouted "Krasny Most" (the border) at someone who simply leapt into the back of the car gesticulating and babbling wildly. Fortunately he wasn't an escaped loony and we eventually ascertained that he was an Azeri living in Georgia and we were being invited for lunch at his on the way to the border. Lunch was fantastic - lovely homemade bread, chicken pieces, a sort of home made salsa and syrupy fruit. Also accompanied by an ever increasing crowd of friends and relatives none of whom could speak more than about 5 words of English. Eventually there were about 15 of us in this 1 room house toasting something(?) with slightly sparkly homemade wine. They also gave us a bottle as a parting gift (in return we gave the children a large packet of crisps - a move we came to regret....!).

Furnished with directions to the border we made our way there for about 4pm. And settled into the queue.

By 9 in the morning some Azeris also queuing had come to chat and decided to give us a hand and talked the border guard "managing" the queue into letting us jump to the front of the car queue (trucks seem to get special treatment and the border crossing seems completely unable to cope with the volume of imported German cars). By 10 we had reached the Georgian side of the control which went smoothly apart from the slightly concerning "you wont be allowed to take a right hand drive car into Azerbiajan". As I know that it has been done I chose to ignore that and we'd been waiting for 18 hours in a car in sub zero temperatures without any food so I wasn't going to give up so easily.

Things didn't get off to a flying start - we waited another 5 hours to get into Azeri customs at which point we were helped to jump to the front of the queue again (this time everyones tempers were getting frayed after so long waiting and several people were rather vocal in expressing their disgust though the presence of armed border guards prevented them getting too agressive).

It is at this point that (as the registered owner) I'm invited through the gate to have a chat to the customs guy. There's only one person on the whole border who speaks English and he's a young soldier (actually a really nice chap). Through him they tell me that we have to turn back as the car is illegal but after a bit of pleading and cajoling (and showing our Kazakh visas) the official relents and allows us to take the car into the country for 72 hours. The $20 worth of bribes probably also helped although I got the impression that everyone had to pay $10 to each official anyway.

And the front window seems to have broken for the last time - something went snap and the window went all floppy - may have a look at some point but haven't had the time.

We finally escaped the border at 4 - a full 24 hours after joining the queue but our joy was short lived. Hungry, tired and thirsty we were pulled over at a police checkpoint after about 5km. They proceeded to make up a "computer check" while going through all our belongings looking for money and items to steal (classily the first thing they mentioned to me was how many guns they all had - i.e. highwaymen...). Thankfully most of the money we had was hidden and we only carry a little and use ATMs instead. The bastards made off with our torch (we watched as the officer oh-so-subtly slipped it up his sleeve) and possibly 20 euros (wish I'd counted the money in my wallet before entering this stinking corrupt police state). He went right through our car and was reduced to eventually just asking where we kept our money. Fortunately he eventually gave up after going through the most obvious places, clearly annoyed that he didn't get as much as he'd wanted. We only made it another 10 or 15km when we were stopped again, this time by an officer with a car. He had nowhere to take us for questioning and by playing the dumb tourist much more effectively this time he gave up after a few minutes.

In spite of our tiredness we were positively seething and although you can prepare and expect this kind of treatment it still makes the blood boil. Faced with a whole 400 more km to go to Baku we decided to do it by night as our oncoming car is almost impossible to clock as foreign in the dark. Luckily it worked and after taking an overly long route in the dark on some implausibly bumpy main road, often averaging only 30mph, we made it to Baku by midnight and followed a friendly taxi driver to the hotel we intended to stay at.

Today we were awoken by a lot of noise as it turns out our hotel is full of refugees but at least its reasonably clean and cheap. As we hadn't had a proper meal for 48 hours we thought we'd extend that a little longer and went for McDonalds. At the moment we're just waiting for the British Embassy to repoen after their civil servant size lunch break - we need some advice about the customs documents that I signed to get into the country at all. Hope it all goes well...

It is at this point I would like to mention Grapes' "word of the week". We have quite an effective barometer of the success of the trip:

Eastern Europe: "Peckish"
Ankara visa chase: "Worst case scenario"
Georgia: "Dodgy"
Azerbaijan: "***********&^!(*^#$&^$!&%#$!*&(^#$*&%!&$ police"

Also a final note about HSBC - the World's local bank. They are not the world's local bank - they are merely everywhere like a particularly annoying bad penny. In spite of being "local" they still charge me just as much commission for international withdrawals as everyone else so I am now particularly careful to not use them ever again and spread my money around the banking world a little more.