Crossing the Georgia-Azerbaijan border by car

As much as road trips are fun, border crossing is sure something less enjoyable. You either have too much wait or crazy amount of not important paperwork to do. During our road trip from UK towards China, we did the border crossing of Georgia to Azerbaijan on day 30 of the journey. The crossing took us a good 2 hour including both border crossings. If you do a road trip in that region, here is everything you need to know about crossing the Georgia-Azerbaijan border by car.

The car documents you need for crossing the Georgia-Azerbaijan border

• Passport
• Azerbaijan Visa
• Car registration documents

The documents you need for crossing the Georgia-Azerbaijan border

All passengers will be invited to get off the car and walk inside for the border crossing on the Georgia side. The Georgian border control officer will ask for your passport and valid visa for Azerbaijan, which is great, as they make sure the is no time wasted if you don’t have what is necessary to enter the next country.

• Passport
• Azerbaijan Visa

You will then jump back in your car to drive towards the Azerbaijan border where again you will have to hop off the car as passengers for border control. Make sure to have your visa printed as they will stamp it. For precaution, keep the visa in your possession. The land crossing for Nick and myself was a bit slower as the officer saw our Armenian stamps and called another colleague to come over and question us on why we visited Armenia. As long you don’t visit the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, there is no problem to cross the border to Azerbaijan if you went to Armenia. Just a few questions, and in our case, a thirds officer came along to take pictures of our passports and Armenian stamps. Mitch, on the other hand in the car doing the land crossing hasn’t been asked about his day trip to Armenia, our guess is that they didn’t notice his stamp so he wasn’t questioned.

How long is the Georgia-Azerbaijan border crossing by car

Passing through the Georgian border is quite fast if the line up isn’t too long for the car driver and the passengers inside. It is recommended to go before 8 AM to avoid tour groups or working commuters.

Going through the Azerbaijan border was another story.

For the passengers, the line goes through quite fast and like mentioned, you can get questioned a little bit on why you went to Armenia if you went. It didn’t take much longer than 15 minutes to wait in line and go through the questions. For the driver in the car, there are two sections, one for the locals (Azerbaijan and Georgia) and the other one for the foreigners. This line isn’t much prioritized and even though, in our situation, we are second in line, it took well over 1 hour to go through the whole process.

Voilà, you have crossed the border. It is quite interesting to see people around carrying stacks of currencies in their hands to for money exchange. If you need to exchange money, that is how it is done. There are many taxi drivers around to suggest you a ride to Baku and enough stalls to sell you junk food, cheap coffees, local tea and sad 150 MB sim cards.

Last update: August 2018