Day 40 (5 July)

So... the last of the Konak Hotel's excellent breakfasts... Kars is famous for its cheese, and every morning we have a choice of six (two yellow, two solid white, one stringy white, and one crumbly white). Plus fresh pastries, and a really nice, spicy thing they do with fried potatoes and capsicums...

Then we're off again, trotting the pleasant streets of Kars to the bus station in the town centre (not the one on the outskirts). Here we boarded a bus to Hopa, this being the first of three stages on the journey to today's destination: Batumi, Georgia. Tickets to Hopa cost TRY 80 each.

Very helpful for this part of the journey, by the way, was Barry's post from late last year. Like him, we'd been pretty unclear on the minutiae of this leg, and it was very useful that he recorded the trail he blazed.

The bus seats were, frankly, cramped. So it was not a comfortable journey. And it took pretty much 6.5 hours. We had a major stop where you could grab some lunch, plus two minor stops. We also had a police-check stop, where we all had to show ID. (One person was invited off the bus at this point, and we didn't see him return...)



On the upside, the road was spectacular. We started with more of that Mongolian-reminiscent scenery we'd seen on Thursday. And then we followed river valleys: some rocky, some wooded; some still containing floors big enough for strips of agriculture, some occupied by dams -- but all lined with towering mountains.






After lunch, the route clung to the massively-dammed Coruh river, on which work is obviously still taking place on a gargantuan scale. This is the stretch where the tunnels become more frequent. It's all quite impressive, in an I-hope-we-know-what-we're-doing sort of way.


And finally, Hopa. Which is on the Black Sea, a stretch of water entirely new to us.

But journey's end is not yet in sight. You still need to get to the border. As Barry explains, you can catch a minivan from outside a certain hotel in Hopa. But first you have to get there, and then you have to wait for the minivan to fill up.

So, given that the day was advancing apace, and Georgia would be an hour later because of the time difference, we decided to short-circuit this process by engaging one of the taxi-drivers who wait at Hopa bus station (this cost TRY 70). The snag here was that our driver was a major speed-merchant...

It's 20 km from Hopa to Sarp. We covered them, waits at traffic lights included, in 15 minutes. Nigel spotted the speedo hitting nearly 170 kph -- and that was in one of the tunnels. Thoughts of Princess Diana flitted through both our minds, as we afterwards confessed...

The dual border post is modern and pleasant, and it was all pretty easy. We breezed through the Turkish checkpoint (I heard one official saying to the other, "Cesme," which was where we entered. I hope he was impressed that we'd covered the entire length of Turkey).

Georgian immigration gave us the impression that not so many New Zealanders arrive via this border crossing... There was enough of a delay and enough of a backwards-and-forwards parley between the two officials dealing with us to make me think, "Uh oh, I checked the visa regs before we left the UK. Has something changed since then?" But no, it's all OK, and we're stamped, and in.

It's then another 22 km from Sarpi to Batumi. We again opted for a taxi (GEL 25). We haven't needed to resort to taxis since Newark, and now two in one day... But we were buying ourselves an evening...

Our driver coped admirably with my diabolical Russian (which has receded again since Kazakhstan, having been swamped by attempts at French, Italian, and Turkish in the interim). And it was nice to get more of a view of the Black Sea.

The Guesthouse Gantiari is kind of incognito. We stopped outside the correct house number, and looked bemusedly at the gate and the total lack of signage. Then, somewhat disconcertingly, before we had even caught up with what was happening, our luggage was being borne upstairs by a cast of staff who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere.

It's actually a really nice room, at a very reasonable rate.

Then out to find food. We ordered Georgian cheesebread (khachapuri -- an imeruli khachapuri, to be precise, which is the circular one with cheese between the top and bottom layer); a tomato and cucumber salad with walnuts (the walnuts, rather than appearing whole, are ground to make the dressing); and a Zedazeni draught beer. All scrumptious. You couldn't find a better introduction to Georgia...


We also had some time to explore a bit of Batumi. Which is lovely. It is fringed by mountains (neighbours of the giants we travelled among today). It is still very much a working port. It has a wonderful "boulevard" by the sea (8 km of it all told), which you can walk or cycle. And the atmosphere is highly cosmopolitan and laid-back. When we hit the seaside, there were still late bathers in the sea and sunset-watchers on the beach. As well as Georgian, you could hear Russian, Turkish, and Arabic, and dress varied from the briefest of bikinis to full-scale niqab.








A lot of effort seems to have gone into making Batumi the "something-for-everyone" seaside destination. There are open-air gym areas, chess boards, and table-tennis and snooker tables. There are boat trips on offer, along with all kinds of watersports. There are games arcades and funfairs. And there are numerous casinos and night clubs, but they didn't bother us in our little guesthouse.

It all feels very different. We've moved again...

Day 41 (6 July)

There's no breakfast on offer at this accommodation, so we started the day with bread, and hazelnut spread and ayran from Turkey. (There are lots of Turkish products and restaurants available in this area.)

Our major achievement today has been to track down a launderette, and deal with the backlog of laundry I mentioned in my last post. (I need to do a "laundry" post soon. No-one ever talks about laundry, but it's one of the constants of the traveller's life.) At GEL 10 for washing and drying, this wash was quite a bargain (even if one or two items needed "finishing off" at home).


But there's also been plenty of time to walk some more of the boulevard; check out some of Batumi's fine architecture; and try three more kinds of baked cheese items (which -- I THINK, because I'm not an expert yet -- were rachuli khachapuri, the square, folded-in one, which seems to be more pastry-like than bread-like; guruli pie, a crescent-shaped bread package stuffed with cheese and boiled eggs; and megruli, which is like imeruli except that there's cheese on top as well as in the middle).














Batumi has hugely exceeded my expectations. From the descriptions I'd read, I'd expected it to be more garish and in-your-face. Instead of which, it's been very relaxing.

I'm sorry we're not stopping longer. But tomorrow -- Tbilisi...