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Old 30 Jan 2016
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Georgia to Russia Border
Hi All,

I'm planning my route through to Kazakhstan and was/am planning on travelling through Georgia (from Turkey) to Russia, but have been advised that there are areas in Georgia and SW Russia that I should not travel through due to kidnappings etc. The info comes from the UK Foreign Office.

I was just wondering if anyone has had any recent first hand experience on crossing into Russia via Gerogia - especially as the area's the FO claim are trouble spots happen to be the areas that the border crossing are (see maps below).

All help and advice greatly appreciated.

Rads.



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Old 31 Jan 2016
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Georgia is safer than the UK however I think they are referring to Pankisi gorge, I was there in 2013 and the only issue I had was communication issues.

There are small remote villages in the gorge and unlike most of the former USSR country's no one spoke Russian, they don't even speak Georgian as they are a ethnic group called Kists from Chechen, even my Chechen friend who visited on his motorbike trip was lucky to find someone who spoke English and his English is not great but the dialect of Chechen they speak is very different to even Chechens

Georgians classed this area as a problem area for awhile a few years back but I never felt unsafe there.

The areas in Russia I would assume is the North Caucasus republics, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya & Dagestan.

I visited all apart from Dagestan and all people were friendly but I am aware sometimes some incidents do happen in these areas. just seek local up to date knowledge if you do go visit these areas and respect the local ways as we all do as travellers/guests in other country's

However if you want to bypass these areas its easy by staying on the main road.
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Old 31 Jan 2016
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rads View Post
Hi All,

I'm planning my route through to Kazakhstan and was/am planning on travelling through Georgia (from Turkey) to Russia, but have been advised that there are areas in Georgia and SW Russia that I should not travel through due to kidnappings etc. The info comes from the UK Foreign Office.

I was just wondering if anyone has had any recent first hand experience on crossing into Russia via Gerogia - especially as the area's the FO claim are trouble spots happen to be the areas that the border crossing are (see maps below).

All help and advice greatly appreciated.

Rads.
Foreign Office travel advice is usually best ignored, or very heavily watered down.

When you cross into Russia, you enter the Republic of North Ossetia which has had the odd incident, most notoriously the School siege in Beslan, but for a tourist passing through, I think there is no real issue. The traffic cops there aren't the nicest.

Going North or West of North Ossetia is fine, but if you go east (recommended as it is a very interesting area) through Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, there is a slight increase in risk, though plenty of people visit there nowadays, and insurgency in the region has generally reduced since security operations around the Sochi Olympics, and an exodus of jihadists to Syria.

Dagestan is a fascinating area, I would not miss it!

You might be interested in the following article based on my 2010 visit:

Stage 20 – Russia & South Ossetia: The North Caucasus [2/2] | EurasiaOverland

EO
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EurasiaOverland a memoir of one quarter of a million kilometres by road through all of the Former USSR, Western and Southern Asia.
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