Recent hostilities in the Middle-East have led to millions of passengers to miss their hotel bookings , flights and cruises. Carriers and online travel agencies ( OTA ) are exploiting the situation. When a refund is carried out, both OTA and the carrier lose money. They deliberately sabotage refunds so that customers give up their money.
Georgian Revenue service is providing information on tax free shopping and the VAT refund on their website , but unfortunately in Georgian only. As the process is quite different than in other countries, we decided to share our experiences about it.
Travelling the trans-siberian railway all the way from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, Russia. And visiting Voguls on the way. We started our Trans-Siberian railway ride from Kuokkaniemi, a small village situated near Sortavala and Finnish border in Karelia. The trip ended in Vladivostok near Japan and Korea totaling well over 10.000 kilometres. It would have been possible to do the trip in about eleven days, but we wanted to stop every once in a while and look around. We bought our tickets one by one, just to the next destination, and got this way a lot of experience of Russian bureaucracy, despotism of the police (militsiya), and the lack of any kind of logic in Russia. We knew right away that our Experiment would at least be challenging. In Santeri’s words: Russia should be avoided at any cost.
British sockets ( type G ) with three pins are used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. You do not need expensive plastic adaptors to use them with European power plugs ( type C ). A thin pen will suffice.
We have been travelling more than five years with our new Finn-Savotta backpacks, Savotta LJK12 and Savotta 906, in dozens of countries all over the world . The backpacks are still in one piece and in usable condition. There are some scratches and bumps in the aluminium structure and the fabric has worn out a bit here and there but nothing major. On the other hand, there were some minor usability challenges.
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