Day 21

The epic Black Sea crossing is not yet over.....

Once we finally docked at 8am we walked off the boat to go through passport control and then sat around for an hour until we were called back to the boat to drive our vehicles off.

Another hour wait on the quay before they started processing the first of our vehicles, and a further four hours before we were finished.

To be fair to the officials, they were having loads of trouble with an Armenian diplmat who continually wandered off and couldn't be found when he was needed, and by the end of the ordeal they were as fed up as we were. We'd spent so much time with them and they'd all taken pictures of our vehicles to show their kids that they bearly even looked inside them when they did their search.

Glad there were only 12 cars on the boat. We spent 47 hours from offically leaving Turkey to entering Russia - a distance of less than 250km.

From Sochi we have to drive north west for about 200km along the coast before we can turn east again as there are very few roads through the coastal mountains. After failing to find the only camp site we'd seen signposted in 100km, we resigned ourselves to a night of wild camping and turned off the main road onto a side road. Searching down one of the gravel tracks, the Baja called over the radio to say they had found a suitable site, and it even had a bar. Not believing them, we followed, and arrived at a big camp site with at least 70 tents - and a bar! No signs for it anywhere so I think the owner was as amazed as us that we were there.

The toilets are not very pleasant but at £9 for the 6 of us, it's the cheapest site so far.

Lat 43 57.6349
Long 39 15.8304
Dist 5391 + Black Sea
Countries 14