This time, I’m well prepared for the trip. On the plane, I watch two impressive documentaries about Georgia on Netflix. It's a sort of a sequence of long tranquil shots of Georgian nothingness. If I were to put a camera in my garden shed for 3 hours, the producer of this footage could probably publish as a documentary about the Netherlands. But... I’m a connoisseur! And a culture snob! I’ll get through it, goddamnit! I totally feel like an intellectual, but by the time we land, I'm already pretty much done with Georgia.

At the airport, I make a classic group travel mistake: I walk in front. If you’re the first person to go through the sliding doors after customs and then the first to interact with the tour guide who’s waiting there, you’ll have a problem. A tour guide is like a newborn duckling, it attaches itself to the very first living creature it sees scurrying around. For a guide, the sliding door at customs is the egg that cracks open. And so, I come waddling out first. I am contact person number one all week and get all tourist information thrown at me every time. For instance, did you know that the capital of Tbilisi has been destroyed and rebuilt 29 times over the centuries? It’s a fact. I should know.

We spend the following days on a crazy tour from the Russian to the Turkish and Armenian borders and everything in between. Some highlights were: the Svanetian towers, the rock dwellings in Vardzia and the Tmogvi ruins. In the capital city Tbilisi, we spend a whole day scouting locations for the shoot we’re still planning to do there with Katja Schuurman. Among other things, we walk around Tbilisi's famous botanical garden, but it’s a bit boring. A Botanical Garden is like a kind of zoo, but without animals.

At the end of the scouting day in Tbilisi, we’ve found a few nice locations. Only our photographer Elmar is a bit nervous because of the gloomy weather forecast. We decide to risk it and drive very early the next day into the Caucasus with Katja, in search of blue skies. It's quite a long drive, so I have plenty of time to perfectly time my pun about wanting some “cold cassis” in the Caucasus. After three hours of driving, near the Russian border, the sky opened up. In the mountain village of Kazbegi (Stepantsminda) we took the last three photos of our trip.