Adventure Travel

“The Georgians have built a funfair in the neighbouring village, I can see the ferris wheel from my balcony”, says 20 year old Alik Gassiev.

There´s only one place on the entire planet where it is possible to secure the visa necessary to enter Karabakh. And that´s at the country´s permanent mission in the Armenian capital, Yerevan.

“What’s this I asked myself, sitting up on my bunk. A mirage or the island of Tahiti? Or the heavenly lands of Samoa? That was Konstantin Paustovsky´s first impression when he first saw Abkhazia.

An irate Saakashvili looks towards the lost land on the other side of the river from a big mural. This is the Georgian checkpoint, even if Georgia doesn’t recognise any border here. Nor does anyone else.

When Claudius Bombarnac, Jules Verne´s imaginary hero in The Adventures of a Special Correspondent, arrives at the Apsheron peninsula on the shores of the Caspian he is appalled by the pollution, but thrilled at the same time by the naphtha that seeped out of the ground.

The “Hamilton route”, named after the New Zealand engineer who designed it, links both Iraq and Iran through astonishing mountain landscapes, deep in the heart of Kurdistan.