Driving from the UK to Georgia: the complete road trip guide

London to Tbilisi is roughly 4,300 km by road. There is no ferry that shortcuts it and no land border between the UK and Georgia — you drive the whole way, through continental Europe and across Türkiye, and you arrive at the Black Sea. Done at a civilised pace it takes 5–7 days of driving. Done properly, with stops, it takes two or three weeks and is one of the great overland routes still open to a British number plate.

This is the practical version: the route, the paperwork, where to sleep if your vehicle is your bed, where to fill up, what to eat, and what is actually worth stopping for.

The route, stage by stage

1. Cross the Channel. Eurotunnel Le Shuttle from Folkestone to Calais takes about 35 minutes and takes a right-hand-drive car with no special paperwork. The Dover ferries do the same job more slowly and often more cheaply.

2. Cross continental Europe. Most drivers run through France and then either Germany and Austria into the Balkans, or south through Italy and across to Greece. Two to three days depending on how much motorway you are willing to tolerate. Your Green Card covers you for this entire leg.

3. Cross Türkiye. Enter at Kapıkule from Bulgaria, then follow the Black Sea coast road east — Samsun, Ordu, Trabzon, Hopa. Turkish transit insurance is bought at the Turkish border; it is quick and it is compulsory. The coast road is long but genuinely beautiful, and the driving is easy.

4. Enter Georgia at Sarpi. The Sarp–Sarpi crossing sits right on the sea and is open 24 hours. Batumi is 20 km further on. This is the point where your Georgian paperwork has to already be in order — not something to sort out in the queue.

Sort the paperwork before you leave

Georgia is unusually welcoming to British visitors, but two documents are non-negotiable at the border.

Your car insurance stops working at the Georgian border. Georgia is not part of the Green Card system that covers Europe and much of the Middle East. Neither your UK comprehensive policy nor a Green Card extends across that line. Every foreign-registered vehicle must carry Georgian compulsory third-party insurance for the entire time it is in the country, and police check it electronically by number plate. You can buy the Georgian policy online in about three minutes and set the start date to your planned entry day — it costs from $20 for 15 days, $30 for a month, or $150 for a full year for a passenger car. Fines for driving without it start at 100 GEL.

Travel medical insurance is mandatory too. Since 1 January 2026 every foreign visitor entering Georgia must hold travel medical cover for their whole stay, with a minimum of $5,000 for outpatient emergency care and $30,000 for hospital treatment. It applies to every person in the vehicle, children included, and it is separate from the car policy.

The rest is straightforward:

• Visa — none needed. British passport holders can stay visa-free for up to 365 days. Check gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/georgia before you set off, since policy can change.
• Driving licence — your full UK licence is accepted for tourists for a limited period. For a long overland trip, carry a 1949 Geneva Convention International Driving Permit alongside it. The Post Office issues them, they cost very little, and they remove any argument at a roadside check.
• V5C — bring the original registration document. A photocopy is not enough at the border.
• Right-hand drive — perfectly legal. Georgia drives on the right, so overtaking on mountain roads takes more patience than usual. Factor it into your timings rather than your bravery.

If your house is on wheels

Georgia is excellent for motorhomes and campervans, but it does not work the way France or Germany does. There is no dense network of aires or serviced campsites, and you should stop expecting one somewhere around eastern Türkiye.

What you get instead is space. Wild camping is widely tolerated across the country, and pulling off onto a meadow or a river bank for the night is normal rather than furtive. Common sense applies: stay off private farmland, take everything out with you, and ask if there is a house in sight — you will usually get a yes and sometimes an invitation to dinner.

Guesthouses are the other half of the answer. Georgian guesthouses are everywhere, they are cheap, and many will happily let you park in the yard for a small fee or for the price of a meal. In practice that solves water, a shower, and somewhere safe to leave the vehicle in one move. In the mountain villages this is often the *only* practical option.

A few things worth knowing before you commit a large vehicle to a Georgian road:

• Water and dump points are scarce. Fill whenever you can and do not run your tanks low on the assumption that a service point is coming, because it probably is not.
• The Georgian Military Highway to Kazbegi is paved and spectacular, but it climbs the Jvari Pass with tight hairpins and a lot of lorry traffic. Perfectly doable in a motorhome — just not quickly.
• Svaneti and Tusheti are different propositions. The Mestia road is fine. The Tusheti road is one of the most dangerous mountain roads in the world and is genuinely not suitable for a large or heavy vehicle.
• Winter closes things. The Military Highway shuts for avalanche control, sometimes for days. Check before you climb.

Fuel, oil and keeping the vehicle alive

Fuel is one of the pleasant surprises. Five chains cover the country — Wissol, Gulf, SOCAR, Rompetrol and Lukoil — and in mid-2026 premium petrol runs around ₾3.75–3.78 per litre, comfortably below UK prices.

Wissol has the largest network with over 100 stations and reaches almost everywhere, though notably *not* Tusheti, Racha or Khevsureti. Those are exactly the regions where you should arrive with a full tank and not a plan to find one.

Most stations are full-service — someone will fill it for you — and take cash in lari as well as foreign cards and contactless. A few unattended pumps in remoter spots will refuse a foreign card, so carry some lari as a fallback.

Diesel is universally available. LPG is common and well signposted if you run on it. Engine oil, screenwash and the usual consumables are sold at the larger stations and at any auto parts shop in a town of reasonable size; Tbilisi and Batumi have proper parts suppliers if you need something specific. Georgian mechanics are skilled, quick, and startlingly cheap by British standards — but bring your own filters if your vehicle is unusual in this part of the world, because a Transit or a Sprinter is easy and a VW California is not.

What to eat

Georgian food alone justifies the drive.

Khachapuri is the national obsession: bread and cheese, done differently in every region. The Adjarian version — boat-shaped, with an egg yolk and a lump of butter you stir in yourself — is the one you meet first, because Adjara is where you arrive. The Imeretian version is flatter and simpler and arguably better.

Khinkali are soup dumplings, twisted at the top. You hold them by the knot, bite, drink the broth, and leave the knot on the plate. Ordering fewer than five marks you out as a tourist.

Beyond that: mtsvadi (skewered pork grilled over vine cuttings), lobio (bean stew in a clay pot, superb after a cold day in the mountains), badrijani nigvzit (aubergine rolls with walnut paste), and churchkhela, the string of walnuts dipped repeatedly in grape must that you will see hanging in every market and mistake for candles.

And the wine. Georgia has been making wine for eight thousand years, in buried clay *qvevri*, and the amber wines made this way taste like nothing produced in western Europe. Kakheti in the east is the wine region, and most family wineries will pour for you at little or no cost. Obviously, whoever is driving does not join in.

If someone invites you to a supra — a Georgian feast with a *tamada*, a toastmaster, running the toasts — accept. It is the single best thing that can happen to you on this trip.

Where to actually stop

Kazbegi (Stepantsminda). Three hours north of Tbilisi up the Military Highway. Gergeti Trinity Church sits alone on a ridge at 2,170 m with the 5,054 m Mount Kazbek behind it, and it is every bit as good as the photographs suggest. Walk up if you have the legs and the weather; the track is steep but not technical.

Tbilisi. Worth several days rather than one. The old town is a tangle of carved wooden balconies, sulphur bathhouses with domed brick roofs, and Soviet-era courtyards, with a modern city layered on top of it. Park the vehicle and walk.

Batumi. Where you arrive, and easy to treat as merely a border town. It is not — subtropical, palm-lined, with a strange and enjoyable skyline of ambitious modern towers along a pebble beach.

Svaneti. Up in the north-west, Mestia and Ushguli are medieval stone tower villages under permanent snow peaks, among the highest continuously inhabited settlements in Europe. The detour is long. It is also the thing most people remember afterwards.

Kakheti. East of Tbilisi, gentle vineyard country with hilltop monasteries and the walled town of Sighnaghi looking out over the Alazani valley toward the Caucasus. The easiest and most rewarding few days in the country.

Vardzia and Uplistsikhe. Two cave cities carved into rock — one a twelve-century monastery complex of hundreds of rooms across thirteen storeys, the other far older. Both are extraordinary and neither is crowded.

Before you turn the key

Buy your Georgian car insurance and your travel medical cover before you reach Sarpi, keep the PDFs on your phone and a printed copy in the glovebox, and save 112 — the Georgian emergency number — into your contacts.

Then stop planning. The road from the Channel to the Caucasus is not a problem to be solved; it is the best part of the trip.