A new world is taking over this gate to the miraculous Caucasus. Weird alien creatures populate the coastal line of Batumi in Georgia, ready to suck out culture and money.
Those absurd giants, glittering with steel and glass, seem to have emerged out of the evergrey and misty mysterious Black Sea, charging for the portal city Batumi, which is almost as gray, somehow faceless, even disorientated. They unite themselves by a milelong paved beachwalk, ready for joggers, rentable eBikes and rollers, with a sort of green stripe along dotted by the standard kids and gyms playgrounds and worldwide spread FastFoods. If your smartphone didn’t tell, you wouldn’t know which sea nor which country that might be.
The beach itself, the leftover 50 meters of rubble into the mournful black sea, seems to be untouched by this. Cabins and sports facilities of the late 60s and 70s, kiosks improvised since those times with ice and beer and snacks, rusty carrousels and pale weathered parasols.
The concrete monument from soviet era being straight phallic imperialistic, I wonder what this new giants might stand for?
This imported new lifestyle breed keeps creeping closer towards the town center and goes towering over the worn out last centuries' concrete blocks.
Them large and thin uniform housing slabs had conquered the town already decades ago. Once shiny and clean, they aligned along green avenues that end abruptly somewhere in the suburbs. In rows and squares these walls encircled the few tiny old churches, some classic administrative or museal buildings, sparse remnants of a former beauty.
In the meantime most of the blocks turned brown and gray with negligence, some already devastated with dark glassless windows in the upper floors, others vivid and lively with the skyfilling washing lines stretching between them coloring their tristesse.
Somehow these huge slabs remind me on the fortress of Gonio we just passed – incredible thin dark walls in a flat field…
Don’t try and drive in Georgia
Kassandra entered Georgia, and thus the Caucasus region, via the Turkish boarder along the black sea, just a few kilometers south of Batumi. Like many many others do. More than 10 kilometers standing and waiting trucks in one row warned us. Turkish boarders don’t want you to come in nor even to leave their country. So hours of waiting to get checked, one hour to get somebody writing a protocol and make us pay a fine until we were free to go to the -in comparison- very friendly and welcoming Georgian customs.
Thick traffic rolling through that gate to the Caucasian multi-state multi-culture region and beyond. Lots of trucks from Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, some Armenian; and plenty with German or Dutch ads and names on it. But they are mostly Georgian, imported when they got too old to keep on driving there. A narrow and bumpy road reminds you of entering an ex-Soviet state. Despite chronic traffic jam and the very present police the Georgian cars drive speedy and adventurous, overtaking left and right where they guess space enough to do so. Of which they are often mistaken, looking at the plenty of beaten and bashed cars. Lots of them already missing all plastic bumpers. These wild drivers stop only for one thing: pedestrians. Reckless and speedy as they drive, you can cross at a zebra almost without looking; everybody will stop for you.
Road signs in Georgia are in the nice decorative though illegible Georgian letters, but mostly as well written in English. Unfortunately they are very rare, especially in the cities practically nonexistent. Main roads just might take you into a dead end, while small winding roads would get you through the city. As we, on our years long tour with the campervan Kassandra, do not use any navigation device other than a printed map sometimes, we got “lost” straight away; that is, led to a place we did not know of. So we stayed the first night in Batumi under a bridge somewhere in the outskirts. One of the plenty big bridges and tunnels that will make a semicircle outer ring around town one day. That day being far ahead, for that bridge was at least ten years old but had not seen any tar on top nor any car passing over yet.
Batumi Backside
The “backside” of Batumi is not the low comfort housing in the suburbs, the factories from the first industrial revolution nor the plenty Russian war refugees.
Locked between the coast and the Mountains of “lesser Caucasus”, the back side of Batumi are the lovely but steep green hills, typically with a church on top and rural villages of big one-family houses with large green orchards plastering the slopes. You will see even lemon and tangerine trees.
Further up we saw thick rain forest and they do even winter sport in the high mountains.
But back to town for breakfast we found -with our intuitive navigation system- one of my all time favorite places of Batumi: the central market. Which is not at all central, but somewhere between the tiny port and the impressive huge oil reserve area.
Vivid and busy, humming with people getting their fresh fruit and veggies, flowers, lots of amazing georgian specialties and spices amongst tobacco and meat and clothes and whatever. We learned there is a lot of Turkish in this local culture, and here on this overwhelming bazaar you see it alive. Laughing and singing and welcoming strangers in that warm, misty and often rainy fertile province.
Another day I stepped over this pic near one of these giant new hotel/casino money machines; what is he shouting out for? Independence? Justice? Casino gains? Or just the next goal to championship?
Just opposite this, entering the nice park with a big lake, our intuition took us to this stone. Not marked, nor famous, I knew straightaway that this one had made my day.
A Dragonstone lost in the new city. Marking the portal site where Armenian Highlands kissed the Black Sea. The landing of Noah and the Argonauts, origins of many big steps in human history came down here from all the Caucasus, from Siberia and Altai, even India and ancient Persia, much more than we are told in our present history books.
More abouts
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