Three countries, three alphabets, and one border you cannot use. The South Caucasus circuit — Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan — is compact enough to do properly in two weeks, and awkward enough that most people draw the route wrong on the first attempt.
The awkwardness is real and worth knowing before you book anything: the land border between Armenia and Azerbaijan is closed to travellers. Whatever a map suggests, there is no drive from Yerevan to Baku. Georgia is the hinge instead, and almost every version of this trip passes through Tbilisi twice, once on the way to each neighbour.
For a phone, that geography has a plain consequence. You are not visiting one foreign network but three, with a return leg through the first. Horizon's regional profile currently reaches all three — Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia — alongside Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, which is why a single Caucasus and Central Asia eSIM is usually the tidier instrument for this loop than three separate country plans bought one at a time.
Why the route is a loop, not a line
Two shapes dominate. Some people fly into Tbilisi, run south to Yerevan for four or five days, come back up, then head east to Baku and out. Others reverse it, arriving at Heydar Aliyev International and finishing in Georgia. Either way Tbilisi is crossed twice, and the Georgian leg is longer in total than a glance at the map suggests.
That repetition is the part worth planning around. It changes how long a data package needs to last, because this is not three short stays but one continuous stretch with a familiar city sitting in the middle of it. Entry requirements and route conditions do move about, and they are a separate matter from connectivity — confirm each country's current position through its own official channels rather than a travel forum two seasons old.
One plan, or three
Three country plans mean three purchases, three installs and three sets of details to hold in your head while you are also managing visas, currency and sleep. One regional profile is a single decision that applies at each listed stop, and there is nothing to set up again at a land crossing. That is the rule in general, not just here: a regional package earns its keep on routes that cross markets, and loses to a local one on routes that do not.
Which is why the single-country pages fit better when only one of the three is genuinely the trip: Georgia eSIM, Armenia eSIM and Azerbaijan eSIM. Georgia gets a full treatment of its own in the best eSIM for Georgia, worth reading if it is the main event rather than one leg of three.
Three capitals that feel nothing alike
Tbilisi is the walkable one. Its old quarter is a tangle of lanes, sulphur-bath domes and leaning wooden balconies packed beneath the fortress hill, with the newer city spread out along the river below. Yerevan is flatter, pinker and more deliberate: Republic Square, the long climb of the Cascade, and on a clear morning the mass of Mount Ararat sitting on the horizon beyond the border.
Baku is the one that surprises people. The walled Icherisheher is medieval and tight; a few minutes away the Caspian Boulevard runs for kilometres under towers of glass. Its metro and its museums are the sort of thing you look up while standing in front of them, which is exactly when a phone with data earns its place.
All three arrivals follow the same pattern. Tbilisi's airport sits east of the city, Zvartnots is a short run west of Yerevan, and Heydar Aliyev International is out beyond Baku's northern edge — in each case a transfer you would rather arrange with a working map and a message to the guesthouse than with a printed hotel name and hope. Sorting the data side at home is what makes that first hour ordinary.
The day trips are where it gets interesting
Each capital has an obvious escape. From Tbilisi it is the old military road north toward Kazbegi, climbing to the church above Stepantsminda with the Greater Caucasus wall behind it. From Yerevan it is Lake Sevan, high and blue and colder than you expect, with Dilijan's forests and the old stone quarters of Gyumri as longer alternatives. From Baku it is Gobustan and its petroglyphs, or a longer run inland to Sheki and its khan's palace, with Gabala as the base for the foothills.
These are the legs where terrain does what terrain does. Mountain passes, deep valleys and long empty roads can interrupt reception whichever network a phone happens to be using — the mountain's doing, not the package's.
Tip: Georgian and Armenian each have their own alphabet, and Azerbaijani is written in Latin script — three different reading problems in one circuit. When a host sends you an address, keep it in the script they wrote it in as well as in transliteration. A driver who cannot make sense of a Latin version will often recognise the original at a glance, and a screenshot of both takes ten seconds to make.
What you will actually spend data on
A circuit like this leans on a narrow set of apps, used hard:
- Maps in old towns where street signs are sparse and lanes bend — Tbilisi's Sololaki, Baku's Icherisheher, the Kumayri quarter in Gyumri.
- Transport that changes — shared minibus departures, the night train, the driver who wants to confirm a pickup by message.
- Translation and menus, done standing up, several times a day.
- Opening hours and tickets for monasteries, palaces and museums that keep their own seasons.
- Ride-hailing between districts, which is how most people move after dark in all three capitals.
- Photographs going home from the Cascade, from Sevan, from the ridge above Stepantsminda.
How much, and for how long
The regional ladder tops out at 50 GB and opens at 1 GB, with windows ranging from 7 days to 180. On a fortnight-long loop that makes duration as pressing a question as allowance. Horizon's guidance for two weeks of border-crossing travel lands around 8 to 12 GB, against 3 to 5 GB for a single week, and this circuit normally sits in the upper bracket.
Weight it up rather than down. Daily navigation in unfamiliar old towns costs more than a week spent in one hotel, and the return swing through Georgia adds days to the same package rather than starting a new one.
Your usual number, and the setup
If your handset carries two lines at once, leave your own SIM or profile exactly where it is so your number keeps taking calls and messages, and hand the data job to the Horizon line. What you spend on the home line remains your operator's business, priced by the contract you already signed for use outside your country — read that clause once before you go. Tethering is conditional in the same way: package, handset and settings all get a vote, so the package terms are the place to settle it before a laptop joins the itinerary.
Do the setup while you are still at home, on Wi-Fi you know. Store the QR image and its confirmation on the handset so both open without a signal, and show them to nobody.
If the loop is only half the trip
Plenty of people carry on east instead of flying home. The long run from here into the Silk Road cities is laid out in the Central Asia guide, and the arc read end to end, Tbilisi through to Tashkent, is in the full six-country walkthrough.
If Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are the whole plan, set up a Caucasus and Central Asia eSIM before you fly, checking first that each of your exact stops appears in that package's live list. Then the only route problem left is the one the closed border already decided for you.
