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| The Caucasus - My Journal |
Crossing the Georgian Frontier
Trabzon (Turkey) -> Batumi (Georgia), 19th August
Well, getting across that border, the Turkey/Georgia one was very easy! Much easier than the tales of 10 years ago with bribes and grumpy officials the norm! Entry to Georgia is now free for just about every western country, no visas required, and the government seems to have done an excellent job of stamping out the backhanders and corruption that were once seen at the border. So with nothing more painful than a slow queue, I found myself staring blankly at big signs with squiggles on that are what the Georgians call their alphabet! But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit here...
On my penultimate day in Turkey, I'd bumped into two friendly Americans staying at the same hotel as me and I'd gotten to know them over a few drinks. They were just spending a few weeks travelling in the former USSR after two years working with the Peace Corps in Moldova, before heading back after their extended absence in their homeland. They had a lot of interesting tales to tell, and as they were heading to Georgia on the same day as me, we decided to combine forces.
It's possible to do the Trabzon - Batumi journey on a single big coach that takes you the whole way. However, it only leaves infrequently, with an inconvenient arrival time in Georgia and the hold-ups at the border tend to drag on for hours. So, the better way to do it is to break the journey into little chunks. Our first coach was from Trabzon to Hopa, the last major town on Turkey's Black Sea coast. We then needed to change to a small dolmus to get to the village of Sarp, which straddles the Turkey/Georgia border. However, it wasn't exactly clear where we needed to pick this dolmus up. Luckily, the American guy had learned to speak Russian during his two years in Moldova, one of the principle languages there and invaluable in the Caucasus region where Russian is often the langua franca and English is still very rare. This immediately proved useful as he struck up a conversation with a friendly Georgian on the same bus as us. They rambled away in Russian and in the end, the Georgian guy adopted us into the large family group travelling with him and helped us handle the border formalities.
Our Georgian friend jumped of the Hopa bound bus at a small petrol station, taking his family and us with him. We then needed to wait for about 20 minutes until a dolmus with enough empty seats arrived, and we all piled in. The sons of the Georgian guy even helped us to get our luggage onto the roof of the dolmus. Admittedly, they did this by throwing the bags up, which inevitably didn't work the first few times, and the bags came crashing back down to the ground. Luckily there's nothing breakable in my bag!
The dolmus took us right up the border, where we all jumped out and walked through the check points to the official gates and their very dour guards. The process was pretty simple, if a little slow due to the massive crowds of passport waving locals that surrounded the desks. A little pushing eventually got us through, however, and we got all our stamps with minimal problems. My passport, in the new British style that had recently been released, caused some confusion, and to everyone's annoyance, the official disappeared with my passport for a long while. She eventually returned, with the same dour expression, and returned it to me. Good job I didn't take up the suggestion of a Georgian who said "We look similar, it'd be funny to swap passports while we cross"!
We were safely through the bureaucracy and now we were standing, slightly bewildered but excitedly, in a new country. Our Georgian friend waved goodbye and wished us good luck as we sought a taxi to take us the final few kilometres from the border to the nearest main Georgian town of Batumi.
My first impression of Georgia was how rich and green the environment looked. It could've been part of the dense foliage found in Indonesia. The abundant heat and water obviously favoured the dense growth and very little of the land near the border seemed developed. The road was in very good condition and the traffic was as busy as any European country. A healthy mix of modern Western cars and old Soviet bangers could be seen though! And the funniest sight was the large number of cows walking nonchalantly along the road. Many of them chose to stand, looking very bored, in the middle of the road. Of course, the traffic had to negotiate this hazard like any other. Hitting a cow with a car is likely to do much more damage to the car than the cow!
The taxi driver dropped us off at the first hotel we'd picked, Hotel Bebo. Hotel Bebo was actually a homestay, but came recommended by the Lonely Planet as one of the best places to stay in the whole of the Caucasus. However, to say we were underwhelmed would've been an understatement. We were closer to "disgusted". The place was dingy, there was no running water, the hosts were pretty miserable and it all seemed very run down! (I was to find out later that my guidebook to Azerbaijan, with a little bit on Georgia on it, described Bebo and a horrible place and definitely a last resort. That's 1-0 against the Lonely Planet.
We quickly decided to try a different place, and jumped up a few categories to a mid-range hotel within walking distance. Despite the best efforts of the misleading map in the guidebook, we quickly found the hotel, Hotel Beso (the one letter difference makes all the difference). The hotel was clean, air-conditioned and actually was a hotel. It was a little dingy and a bit overpriced, but we went with it. It was in the Americans' budget, but I could always find a different place for my second night. As the staff spoke no English, we checked in with the American guy's Russian skills and quickly settled into first hotel rooms in Georgia.
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To know the road ahead, ask those coming back
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