Redbridge

After taking an overnight bus from Baku, I managed to get to, Redbridge the border crossing between Azerbaijan and Baku. Although Azerbaijan land border is closed throughout the country, exiting the country is permitted through land, which was also the main reason I took a flight to Baku previously from Istanbul.

The Azerbaijani officers were surprisingly friendly and it was one of the easiest border control I’ve been through. However things took a bit of a turn when I arrived on the Georgian side. The officers immediately stopped me even before I got into the line and took my passport. He asked me a bunch of common security clearances questions which I am obviously prepared but then he disappeared for an hour without saying a thing. He came back later with at least three more officers asking me the same questions, their main focus was to know how much money i have on my bank account. I showed my Singapore bank account to them with a small Euro and US dollars (less than 10 for each, which I didn’t know where did that come from). And they were focusing on those amounts instead of the SGD I actually have. It took me about 10 times showing them using Google’s conversion rate to tell them how much money I actually have un USD. And thank God there was a younger officer who speaks fluent English and she ended up translating everything for me and convinced the supervisor that everything about me was fine. The officers then let me pass through afterwards.

Upon exiting the Georgian side of the checkpoint, I noticed they didn’t have any public transport to the city. Which made sense since the traffic was quite low due to Azerbaijan-side border closure. However, after dodging countless of taxi drivers who were trying to rip me off, and exchanging some cash, I tried to get a hitchhike ride about a kilometer from the custom office and immediately had a big van stopped for me. I ended up giving him 25 Lari (~USD 10), which was a little too expensive to my expectations. But still better than 70 Lari the taxi driver quoted me to Tblisi.Read more