From Mestia, we went to Batumi. Batumi is on the Black Sea coast. It’s Georgia’s main port and, for sure, it’s like port cities everywhere, with many trucks, containers, and other loading and hauling facilities in that part of town. Travelers don’t need to explore that. They will go downtown, to the old town, the parks and the rocky beach.
We went out the night we arrived. The shoreline is a popular stroll for visitors and locals alike. Since it was after dark, we didn’t take many pictures. Nothing is lit up that you could photograph during the day. There is one attraction meant to be viewed at night, the Ali and Nino statues. In short, “Ali and Nino” is a tragic romance novel about a Muslim Azerbaijani man and a Christian Georgian woman during the tumultuous Russian revolution/World War One years. The brightly lit, mechanical statues oof the ill-fated couple come together and separate, like in the novel.
Well, these pictures don’t do it justice, but it is pretty cool, the way these maybe 40 foot tall statues, made of strips of metal move through each other. I cannot figure out how they did this.
After sitting in the big park for an outdoor opera recital with live orchestra, the weather started to deteriorate, so we went to our airbnb apartment and rode out a pretty wild thunder and lightning storm. The weather was bad for a couple of days, after which we went out to the shoreline.
I don’t know what that geodesic dome is. The rocks here are actually pretty nice.
Just off the beach is a nice park, very large for a city of only 155,000.
That general area is Old Town with, you guessed it, old buildings.
Note the Bolt car. Bolt is a European equivalent to Uber. It’s cheap and easy. We used it a lot.
Much of old town is uninspiring. In fact, there are a lot of casinos and faux upscale restaurants (as well as real upscale restaurants). I think Batumi city is a one-day town.
By far, the best thing we did there was go to the wonderful botanical garden, a few kilometers out of town. It’s big, and a nice afternoon walk,
After doing the stuff I described, it was time to go. Since we were back in Korea, Myung had been talking about crossing the border, 13 km south of Batumi, to visit around Trabzon, Turkey. So that’s where we went next and where we are now. We’ll stay around here until it’s time to return to Tbilisi and fly home. We’ll be going back through Batumi and killing an afternoon and night there before taking the train, but I doubt we’ll do anything worth posting.
I’ll blog about Trabzon and around there in the next post. Meanwhile, until then…
