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.