| The Caucasus - My Journal |
A Communist Seaside Resort
Batumi, 20th August
After a comfortable night's sleep, I quickly packed my things up and moved to a different hotel I'd found yesterday. Although still pretty pricey by my standards, 10 pounds, the saving on the current hotel was substantial, and the cheaper hotel seemed equally as nice, just without air-conditioning.
At first, I had a little trouble checking in as the lady I'd spoken to the day before, who'd promised me a room, couldn't be found. The two ladies in her place, presumably the staff for the day, couldn't speak any English and kept indicating that there were no rooms available. I managed to insist that there would be a room and left my bags there while I set off to explore the city. Hopefully the other woman would return later and I'd have a bed by then!
Batumi is a small seaside town, its actually the 2nd most important town in Georgia, but it's a manageable size and easy to walk around. Over my two days there, I walked pretty much everywhere and found it to be a juxtaposition of 3 places. There's a nice beach part of town, almost like an old-fashioned English beach resort but in a Mediterranean setting. Everyone was out having a fun time, with candy floss, volleyball and beers on the beach. It seemed a fun, laid back place and was clearly where the Georgian's go on holiday. However, at the other end of town, the place seems like a big concrete mess, real Soviet style, with massive old concrete tower blocks, torn up pavements, crumbling buildings and bored men with big moustaches watching the world go by. It had a very different feel to the sunny beach side of town, almost as though a permanent cloud was hanging over this part. But, in another part of town, near the busy harbour, the tightly packed buildings were actually very quaint. Small, clean, well-maintained house, narrow, quiet streets and old iron lampposts gave the place a Victorian feel.
The whole town seemed a little surreal though, very fleeting and not quite there. It was almost as though Communism ended last week and Capitalism was building slowly, which probably was the case, but it gave the town a "not quite
finished, not quite here" feeling. You could really feel the cloud of Communism (the grey, dispirited feelings of people with hard lives) starting to be blown aside by a younger, freer happier air. Hard to explain, but that's roughly how
it felt. Either way, it was a nice place to spend a few days, very walkable, a smattering of sights and a good beach part of town to chill out in.
However, there only seemed to be about 2 others tourists in town, and I was back to getting lots of stares from the locals. However, it didn't feel as friendly as Turkey, not because the locals were less nice, just because no one could speak English. Russian is the lingua franca for international communication, and as I didn't know any Russian, it was a lot harder to get to know the locals...
I also paid a quick visit to an ancient Roman fort just outside of the city, and it was quite amazing! The walls of the fort were pretty much completely intact, with no restoration having been done. I walked slowly around the walls, looking at the foliage which has grown to surround the walls, both from outside and inside the fort. It was amazing to think that on these exact same walls, Roman sentries used to march when protecting the fort. And as my ticket was only number 2005, it appears that only a handful of tourists have done the same thing!
When I returned to my hotel, I was happy to find that a room had opened up for me and my bags were in a clean, breezy and comfortable room. I spent an hour or so catching up with my e-mails and relaxing with some reading before calling it a night.
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