In the morning we left the greater part of our belongings to
be stored in the classy establishment where we had spent the night and headed
back to the railway station to catch to train to the great unknown called
Batumi on the Black Sea coast with only the bare essentials on our small backs.
Well OK, we had read something about the place on Wikitravel and seen Haapasalo
travel there on his TV show , but a new place is always a great unknown to an
adventurous mind, and you can never claim to know a place until you have been
there.
The five-hour train journey itself was just as spectacular
an experience I had hoped it to be. We were spotting monasteries and castles on
top of the steep peaks and marvelled at the efforts of the long-forgotten
builders who had hauled the materials up the near-inexistent paths. We were
gazing through the train windows the clear mountain streams along which the
railway tracks were winding in the pristine landscape of the ravine that cut
through the mountains. We saw many a crumbling building and castle ruin as well
as abandoned soviet-era mining community rendered useless by the end of the
communist rule and centralised economic planning. And when we arrived among the
fruit groves of the wide plateau between Greater and Lesser Caucasus mountain
ranges where trees were laden with late autumn persimmons, the great
snow-covered peaks with altitudes of around 5000 metres never left the horizon.
Was one of them the mighty Mount Elbrus herself? Perhaps, but I cannot be sure.
At the end of all this we were greeted by the sparking waves
of the Black Sea and palm-lined pebble beaches of the Georgian coast. The brand
new Batumi passanger railway station is not actually within a city itself, but
a few kilometres up the coast, but we waived off the taxi drivers and hopped on
to one of the numerous (mini)busses shuttling locals along the coast. Easy,
cheap and full of that famous “authenticity” so many travellers yearn for, the
bus took us to the delightful coastal city in no time.
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| Panoramic view of Batumi from the surrounding foothills |
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| Old Batumi |
Batumi is a fascinating coastal city. At the same time it is
the all-important port where the Azeri oil arrives in pipelines and is pumped in
tankers to be exported to the European markets, while it is also the most
important recreational center and seaside resort of the eastern shores of the
Black Sea. It is a hybrid, and it is a successful hybrid: despite the heavy
shipping activities and the oil storage facilities on the northern parts of the
city, the old city centre of Batumi is a lovely quaint place and the long
beautiful seaside promenade with sky-scraping hotel and apartment towers is a
fully-flexed holiday resort abundant with green areas on the shore. The city
also has a unique atmosphere and its very own character somewhere in the
blurred borderline between oxident, orient (Turkish border is just a few tens
of kilometres south) and soviet legacy. Luckily the Soviet legacy is mainly
visible in the apartment complexes and some of the outdated hotels which stand
side by side with very modern contraptions, and the old city has been spared from
the architectural antics of Stalin and his cronies.
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| Batumi beach promenade in twilight |
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| One of the seveal open-air artworks at early sunset |
We spent our day taking a cable car to the foothills of the
Lesser Caucasus that rise just behind the narrow expanse of land at the shore and
admired the bustling city from above. We walked along the narrow streets of the
old town, We ate a quick snack on a very Turkish Kebab shop. We marvelled the
innovative architecture or the Alphabet Tower and other modern buildings
occupying the immediate vicinity of the Black Sea waves. We wondered at the artistic vision invested in several statues and sculptures in the public spaces. We took a stroll on
the pebble beach and dipped our feet into the cool waters. We rented bicycles
and cruised along the beach promenade enjoying the pleasant autumn evening and
stopped to gawk at the sun setting beyond the waves. And when the night had
settled, we still enjoyed the audio-visual show of the dancing fountains before
settling down for the night in a small family-run guesthouse where we might not
have had a common language with our hosts, but with mutual friendliness, smiles
and international sign language that little inconvenience was overcame with
ease. The room was also extremely comfortable and prices outside the tourist
season more than reasonable.
Because there was so
much to see in Gerogia and so little time we had only that one day in Batumi,
but boy what a great day it was. In retrospect, it is strange to think how few
Europeans have ever even heard of this gem of a city right at our borders.
There were tourists, of course, but the overwhelming majority was from the
ex-Soviet states. This makes sense, since Batumi indeed was a “Soviet Riviera”
during the cold war and has been a regional holiday destination surely even before
that. For me, it was a city of discoveries and I am very happy I had the chance
to visit it. Maybe one day I will be back, but the next day the train was to
take us back inland...
I.
