Day 291 · Batumi, Georgia

Overland, slowly, with a camera

No flights since March. Eleven countries, forty-one trains, three ferries and one very regrettable overnight bus.

See the last frames

View from a sleeper train window at dawn — Bucharest–Sofia, 05:40. The dining car had run out of everything but tea.

Carved wooden balconies on a leaning old-town house — Sololaki, Tbilisi. Every one of these balconies is held up by faith and paint.

Passengers asleep on a ferry deck under blankets — Deck class, Black Sea. Nine hours, no cabins left, no regrets.

Crates of plums and peaches at a roadside market — Roadside stall near Kutaisi. Two lari for more plums than I could carry.

A gravel road switchbacking up a green mountainside — The road to Ushguli, which is a road only in the loosest sense.

An empty station platform lit by orange lamps at night — Waiting for the 23:15 that turned out to be the 01:50.

Dispatches

Practical9 October 2025

How to sleep on a train that does not want you to

Nine months of couchettes and seat-61 improvisation, distilled into six things I would tell my March self.

Georgia2 October 2025

The Batumi bus station rule

Whatever the timetable says, the marshrutka leaves when it is full. Once you accept this, Georgia becomes a much calmer country.

Money24 September 2025

What 291 days overland actually costs

Full spreadsheet: €11,400 so far, of which transport is less than a third and laundry is embarrassingly more than I expected.

Georgia15 September 2025

Three days in a Svaneti guesthouse with no plan

I meant to stay one night. The family had other ideas, most of them involving cheese bread and a very persuasive grandmother.

Photography6 September 2025

Carrying one camera and one lens for a year

A 35mm prime and no second body. What I have missed, what I stopped missing, and the frames I got because I stopped choosing.

Practical29 August 2025

The ferry that does not appear on any website

It leaves twice a week, sells tickets from a portacabin, and is the only sensible way east. Here is how to actually board it.

Where I am, roughly

Batumi, Georgia

Here

Now · until 18 October

Sea-facing room above a bakery, catching up on eleven weeks of unedited film scans.

Kutaisi → Tbilisi

Late October

Slow train, then two weeks static to renew a visa and finally fix the tripod.

Yerevan, Armenia

Planned

November

Overnight from Tbilisi if the sleeper is running, marshrutka if it is not.

Somewhere with a winter

Undecided

December–February

Open to suggestions. The only rule is that I get there without flying.

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