Helen is again caught reading the Georgia guide book while we’re still well inside Turkey. Why is it more tempting to read about future destinations rather than present surroundings? “It says here we’ll cross into Georgia near Batumi  - ‘a subtroptical town resembling the capital of a Caribbean banana republic.’  Caribbean! Three hours from freezing Turkish mountains. Whatever. Lonely Planet, Lying Planet.”

 

But then we got on the bus. Winding down from the mountains the rain stopped to reveal bushes of tea rather than pine trees and a surprisingly warm and humid breeze started to blow in through the bus driver’s window...

 

First impressions of the Caucasus came at the border where we were given a bumpy lesson in ‘contact queueing’ and where we watched a couple of drunken truck drivers enjoy a mid morning punch-up. A few hours later, after our snazzy new computer chipped passports had been admired by every border guard on site, we were in Georgia.

 

And sure enough there they were - big, tall palm trees! “He says they grow bananas here too” points out Helen, translating the taxi driver’s tour guide information in Russian.  “Yes, real bananas, but only small ones,” continues the driver as he avoids a heard of cows ambling across the road and grazing amongst the ruined concrete buildings of the abandoned Soviet airport. Everything was suddenly very different to Turkey we but not quite as Russian looking as we’d expected.

 

Batumi looked a bit like Havana in places. Back streets with ladies leaning out of once grand balconies and old men sitting outside watching kids playing football in the muggy night air. Bigger roads lead out from the crumbly 19th century houses and apartments to much newer but even more run down looking Soviet tower blocks.

 

The seaside area however, looked a little brighter. The day long Coldplay/Dire Straits soft rock compilations coming from the beach front tannoy system sounded fine after a month of Turkish pop. And the plastic cafes selling rich flavourful Georgian food, were fine indeed after a month of roadside kebabs.

 

The guide book probably had a few paragraphs about Batumi’s history as a popular resort in Soviet times, its subsequent decline and its current efforts to attract the handful of recently wealthy Georgians. But I didn’t read the ‘Batumi history’ section, by that time I was too busy reading about the next stop - Tbilisi.

JL

 

 

PS

sorry there aren’t any other photos of batumi. there was an incident. the mini hard drive we were using to store photos ‘fell’ off the bed. despite it being called a ‘toughdrive’ it died there and then and we hadn’t yet moved the batumi and tbilisi pictures onto the website. we realised in tbilisi so there are a few photos on that page. after that is back to the usual over long photo selections.