What’s next & bike box

My day today was shaped by constant back-and-forth thinking about how to continue the journey.

After what felt like endless thinking and research about my options, I went back to yesterday’s café and tried their breakfast plate. Then I visited a few bike shops to find a bike box—a cardboard box for transporting the bicycle on a plane.

Originally, when I decided to take this journey, I thought I could cycle through Iran and then Turkmenistan, completing the entire route to Shanghai by bike. I had already applied for my Iranian visa and it was ready for pickup at the embassy when war broke out, making Iran no longer an option. There had already been travel warnings before that, but I had been in contact with an Iranian guide who said the situation was stable—well, not anymore. On top of that, after three weeks of waiting, my carefully prepared transit visa application for Turkmenistan was rejected, with the explanation that transit visas were no longer being issued. The only alternative would have been an official tour, which is not what I want and would cost about 1,500 USD for 4 to 5 days.

I came up with three alternative options:

1. The first option was to cycle to Azerbaijan and take a ferry from there to Aktau in Kazakhstan. However, since the pandemic, land borders to Azerbaijan have been closed, and entry is only possible by plane. I had heard of some cyclists receiving special permission to enter overland from Georgia and leave by ferry. So I applied for an e-visa and sent a formal letter to the addresses I found online. The processing time was said to be 4–5 weeks, and it has now been more than 5 weeks—but I never received any reply. So this option is no longer viable.
2. The second option was to fly to Azerbaijan and take the ferry to Aktau from there. Initially, I thought I could ship the bike overland and avoid disassembling and boxing it. But that turned out to be a misconception—while some people had done it, it was very expensive and took several days. Since I had heard that the Caspian ferry is quite an experience, I had already decided to fly from Tbilisi to Baku. However, I didn’t book the flight immediately and instead went to buy a box for my bike. By the time I returned, the ticket price had nearly tripled—the cheaper ones were gone. That made the detour much less attractive.
3. That left only the third and final option, which I had considered a last resort: flying directly from Tbilisi to Aktau in Kazakhstan. As a bike traveler, I really dislike the idea of flying—I cycle precisely because I don’t want to fly. But now there seems to be no other choice. Russia could theoretically have been an option, but it didn’t appeal to me, and getting a visa would have taken 3–4 weeks. If flying is unavoidable, this option makes more sense. The only issue is timing: direct flights only operate on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays at 01:35 a.m. Since we only arrived in Tbilisi on Saturday evening due to the unexpected rest day in Wani, the flight that same night was too soon—even for an optimist like me. So the next available one is on Wednesday, meaning I’ll go to the airport on Tuesday evening.

Staying in one place for three whole days is something entirely new for me on this journey, and it’s one reason why I kept considering option two. I have this inner drive to keep moving forward—something I’ve discovered more clearly about myself during this trip. Maybe it was always there, but I just wasn’t aware of it. Still, after more than 5,000 kilometers, a slightly longer break might actually do me good. I’ll definitely enjoy the vegan restaurants here before heading into the more barren regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where the food will likely be more repetitive. So why not make the most of these days—a kind of “vacation within the journey.”

Through all this back-and-forth, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to make decisions even when you don’t yet have all the information you’d like—because waiting can cause options to disappear. That’s not easy for me, but in the end, things usually turn out the way they’re meant to, and that’s often the best possible outcome. Traveling directly to Kazakhstan is logistically simpler and probably makes more sense—I just had trouble accepting the idea of “waiting” here for three days.