We got last minute tickets to Batumi and found ourselves sitting on the top deck of a double-decker train. We were joined by Anas, a Jordanian student who had given up his dentistry degree course to bum around the capital wondering what to do with his life. He devoured every bit of food we gave him like he hadn’t eaten for a week.
The train ride was long – over 5 hours – and the conditions were cramped. If you wanted to stretch out your legs, the legs of people opposite you would have to give way. From our top deck seats we could see snow-capped mountains, hillside villages, fields of crops, ramshackle dwellings and densley wooded steep-sided valleys.
Where the land flattened out, the Black Sea emerged and the first view we had of Batumi was a shimmering city of high rise hotels.
When we reached the city, it felt like we had entered a different country – it’s actually an autonomous part of Georgia. Wide tree-lined boulevards with palm trees providing much needed shade, beautifully laid out parks with trees, duck ponds, fitness machines, and sculptures.
The beach is pebbles rather than sand and the pebbles are all the colours of the rainbow. We sat looking out across the water and when the sun went down, thought about all the other humans who must have sat in the same place and watched the sunset from the beginning of time.
The following day the sun brought out the young in their bikinis who lay along the waterline toasting their bodies on the hot pebbles.
First impressions of Batumi are very positive. There are not the myriad of wine cellars, souvenir shops and dilapidated buildings that we found in Tbilisi. Here everything is green lush, warm, new, bright and uplifting. All along the waterfront immense new hotels are rising into the clouds and more casinos than I have ever seen. Russians are everywhere and everyone seems to seem Russian alongside Georgian. Although they don’t like the Russians much, they like the money they bring to Batumi.
A change of plan was forced upon us by our failure to find a route to Armenia from Batumi so we will spend another day here and then a few days in Kutaisi which we had not intended to visit. However, it is a tourist destination so we’re hoping there will be enough to interest us there for a couple of days.
Batumi is my new favourite place – the parks, the sculptures and the beach, the sunset, the climate, the relaxed vibe.