Georgia on my mind – Part two, Beautiful Batumi

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.

Panoramic view of Batumi from the surrounding foothills

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.

Batumi beach promenade in twilight

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.

Georgia on my mind – part one

Georgia on my mind. Great song and undoubtedly a place worth visiting, yes, but this blog entry is not about the US State – it is a whole different Georgia I have on my mind. My Georgia is the fantastic little country nestled in between the peaks of the Caucasus mountains somewhere in the borderline between Europe and Asia. We had the privilege to pay a short visit to this country of amazing landscapes, mind-bogglingly rich history and mouth-watering cuisine in late 2015, and the warm Georgian memories have prevailed ever since.

We were looking for a destination to make the best possible use of our early November mini-holiday, and after trying and failing to find a satisfactory schedule and price for more conventional European destinations such as Portugal, Netherlands and Croatia, I ran into an airline ad about flights to Tbilisi, Georgia. Thanks to web-cookies for that, turns out they actually can – occasionally – be useful. Too bad for the advertiser Ukrainian International Airlines, but we ended up booking the flights from Turkish Airlines due to more convenient schedule...

 I had just a few weeks earlier seen a Finnish travel show where the actor Ville Haapasalo travels in Georgia and had been impressed about this small nation that has mostly made headlines as a stage of war since the break-up of Soviet Union. We sat down with O and said “I’ve never heard of anyone making a spur-of-the-moment long weekend trip to Georgia. Sounds like something we gotta do!”

We booked the flights, and a few weeks later we descended upon Tbilisi together with the golden sun setting behind the peaks of the Lesser Caucasus mountain range. We took a slow, low-key train directly from the airport to the city – a convenient connection and a hands-on inauguration to the authentic Georgia with local commuters and other daily travellers, but only if you happen to land exactly at the right time, since the train only runs a couple of times a day. Certainly there are also taxis and buses readily available in case your flight does not coincide with the little train.

Georgian letters on a Coke bottle

After finding our way to the hotel, we took the underground to the city centre to have a first glimpses of Tbilisi in its Friday-night mood and have a bite to eat. The underground in Tbilisi works very well and is a convenient and cheap way to move around as long as your destination is close enough to a station. A definite bonus for a foreign traveller is, that the signs and directions are written in both Georgian and English, unlike in the buses, where only Georgian is used. This can be a major issue, since Georgian is a Kartvelian language that has its own writing system in which even the name of the language looks like this: ქართული ენა. I had tried to study the Georgian alphabet for a couple of hours on the way, but I can tell you that it was not quite enough to master it.

Narikala fortress seen from a bridge over Mtkvari

Already during our first night in Tbilisi we started to get a feeling we had come to the right place: the grand architecture of the Rustaveli Avenue, the winding alleys of the Old Tbilisi, the ancient Mtkvari river slowly winding through the city in the bed it has cut through the rock over centuries, the beautifully lit Narikhala fortress sprawling  on the hills next to the magnificent  Mother of Georgia statue (Kartvlis Deda) standing guard over its children and welcoming friendly visitors with a bowl of wine in her left hand while the right hand holds an unsheathed sword ready to fight those who are foolish enough to brand themselves as enemies of the Georgian nation.

We certainly did not want any enmity with this country and its friendly people, so we opted for the wine and our first taste of the Georgian cuisine – famously delicious among all those who know about it. On this first night we had a very pleasant encounter with one of the national dishes of the country: a cheese-filled egg-topped bowl of bread known as Khachapuri. Khachapuris come in slightly different versions in different parts of Georgia, but all versions we tried were really tasty and absolutely worth trying. I do strongly recommend it to everybody (unless you are a vegan or allergic to milk, eggs or wheat, of course).

Traditional Khachapuri and a cool Georgian beer

With full stomachs and blissful smile on our faces we headed back to the upscale Holiday Inn we had chosen for the first night of our Georgian adventure. A good rest was needed, because early next morning we were to board a train that would take us through the mountains, pine forests, pastures, fruit groves and vineyards through the the entire east-west span of the country to the old Soviet Riviera, the Black Sea resort and port city Batumi. At least we hoped the tickets we had bought upon arrival to Tbilisi would be good for the journey, since the purchase operation had been a bit of a hassle and scramble over the language barrier and the characters on the tickets we were given were all Georgian to us...

I.