Batumi or Bust!

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• Entry from Tbilisi

  Tbilisi, Georgia
Friday, August 13, 2004

"Nice cap," said Mike.

I fingered the edge of my new North Face cap. I was quite proud of it. Getting a suitable hat for a journey takes a lot of looking around and has to fulfill several strict parameters.

"Its my new lucky hat. Well, that is if I don't lose it. Then I'll have to find another one to be my lucky hat."

We were waiting to board our flight to Antalya, Turkey and were killing the time with idle chit chat.

Though we were flying to Turkey, our goal was Georgia. Mike had restrictions on how long he could spend in the region so instead of wasting days in Turkey, we wanted to get to the Caucasus as quickly as possible to maximise the amount of time we could spend trekking.

After a broken night's sleep on a bench in the departure lounge of Antalya airport, we headed into town and jumped straight on an 8 hour bus to Ankara. We has just enough time to down some soup and bread before jumping on a 12 hour night bus to Trabzon.

Dazed and bleary eyed we faced the morning sun and struggled up the hill to a cheap hotel in the center of town. Down with the bags and to the Georgian embassy to play the visa game.

We'd been formulating any number of possible scenarios depending on how long it took me to get my visa (Mike already had one). 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 1 week... we were both surprised when it took 5 minutes for the grumpy consul to issue a 1 month visa for $60US. This is almost unheard of. Fearing a prank we took my passport and ran.

The visa stamp didn't dissolve or anything similarly sinister so we rested up for the day before leaving first thing the next morning for the border.

Bus, mini-bus, walk. We soon stood at the border post, the Black Sea languidly moving to our left, sharp jungle covered hills rising to our right.

The excitement of crossing a border was rising, the sense of breaking through an unseen wall, stumbling into a new world with only a few steps.

"Its not raining. Its rained every time I've crossed this border." Mike was looking up at the sky hopefully.

"Let's go, dude. Batumi or bust," I replied.

A slow drizzle began to descend and we walked through the gates.

Half an hour later we were dodging cattle on the road in a taxi as we headed towards Batumi, the capital of the province of Adjara.

After the civil wars of the 1990s Georgia settled down to a tense peace, minus 3 provinces: Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Adjara.

Adjara was ruled by Aslan Abashidze, the latest scion of a long line of powerful nobles in Georgian history. He treated Adjara as his own personal fiefdom, paying little more than lip service to Tbilisi's demands and dictates.

That was until the current president, Mikhail Shashkavili, overthrew the previous president in what is now called the "Rose Revolution", a bloodless coup later legitamised by a democratic election.

On his ascendance he declared he would bring the 3 rogue provinces back under the control of Tbilisi.

His first target was Adjara.

After a handful of tense standoffs and heaped political pressure, Abashidze fled to Moscow and Adjara rejoined greater Georgia.

It was under this legacy that we arrived in Batumi.

I've never been to an ex-Soviet country, nor a country which has just had a revolution so I didn't really know what to expect.

The first impressions were ones of decay. Huge, severe building lay in ruins, lavish colonial houses with sweeping staircases crumbled and sagged under the weight of decades of neglect. Vast military bases lined with T-72 tanks and lumbering Hind helicopters dotted the verdant landscape. Faded paint peeled from billboards proclaiming the long forgotten "positive heroes" of Lenin's revolution.

Everything looked as if it had been brilliant and new in 1970. And nothing had changed since, just fallen apart.

The best analogy I could come up with was of a beautiful woman who had grown old and finally given up pretending, surrendering herself to the ravages of age.

Later, Mike and I sat under an umbrella on a deserted street and had a celebratory beer.

"What do you think then?"

I looked around.

The boulevards with their proud, severely decorated facades were oddly familiar. I was definitely in Europe but... there was something odd in the air, something decisively alien.

"Its like some sort of parallel dimension. The same but different. Normal with a twist."

Mike laughed.

"I met a Canadian here in june who described it the same way."

The sky clouded over and we leaned back to drink beer in the rain in Adjara.

The rain grew and grew in intensity. As we sat in the hotel later the storm enveloped the city with fury. It was fantastically surreal reading Wuthering Heights while Mike chatted to the lady who ran the hotel in fluent Russian. The weather was almost as angry as the woman's viciously dyed red hair.

Morning and it was still raining.

We fueled up on a breakfast of "khachapuri", piping hot bread with melted butter, cheese and a raw egg on top. It was surprisingly nice but I couldn't finish it due to my heart beginning to hurt from all the cholesterol it sent coursing through my system.

We left and found a "marshrutka", the common form of mini-bus transport here, to Tbilisi.

The rain by this stage had reached a ridiculous level. Mike described it as malicious. It was as heavy as any African rainy season.

Through the limited visibility we pulled out of Batumi into the lush vegetated hills above. Soon we were white water rafting in a transit van, dodging livestock, potholes and the occasional T-72 tank pulling out onto the road (their imperviousness to damage seemed to allow them to completely ignore giving way to other traffic).

We passed 2 accidents on the way caused by the weather. One mashruka driver had managed to park his van on top of a road barrier, while another had driven off a 2 meter high bank and into someone's front yard.

Nearer Tbilisi the weather settled a little, affording views over the countryside. Forested hills and golden corn fields were punctuated by industrial wastelands from the Soviet era. The damage was so extensive to the empty tomb-like factories that you wondered if they were in severe disrepair, had been destroyed or perhaps not even completed before the union dissolved.

In road-side stalls and cafes, Georgians went about their everyday lives. Huge men, with sun-blasted faces and arms as thick as my neck, drunk beer and smoked copiously, surrounded by their families.

The Georgian women stared with great black eyes, pools of oblivion which you just want to dive into.

We arrived in Tbilisi under an amazing renaissance sky, lapis lazuli blue, streaked with gold and vermilion.

"Thats the famous Georgian sky. Imagine what it will be like in the mountains," said Mike in reply to my muttering "wow!" over and over again.

We jumped off at the sprawling market outside of the center and got on the metro.

Happy we'd arrived in the capital, we stood at the end of the train with our backpacks on, joking and laughing in triumph.

Something didn't feel right though.

"Shit! I left my bloody hat on the mashruka!!!!"

"Guess it wasn't meant to be lucky then," said Mike.

Oh well! I'll have to get myself one of those Russian ones with the fake fur ear flaps. Maybe I'll have a little more luck with that.

Off to the mountains early next week so the next post will be in 3-4 weeks time.