We began the day with free morning, so Di and I completed a lovely walk along the waterfront and back to the hotel through the old part of the city. We enjoyed lovely sunshine and were grateful that we did the walk when we did as the skies started to become overcast as we concluded our walk.
We checked out from the hotel at 11:00am and then joined the others to undertake a guided walk through the old city – fortunately almost totally different from the walk we had conducted ourselves. This walk, the entirety of which saw us accompanied by a pack of very friendly, protective dogs, included a walk along Batumi’s boulder beach fronting the Black Sea, marking our completion of an east-west transect across the Caucasus region from the Caspian Sea in Baku to the Black Sea here in Batumi. We finished the walk with a ferris wheel circuit which provided great elevated views of the port and old areas of Batumi near us with the ultra-modern, futuristic high-rise sections of Batumi in the distance to the south.
Having explored the historic areas of Batumi, we drove to new city, seeing the many futuristic buildings at close range. Unfortunately, we didn’t really explore this area in detail as our destination was more focussed, being the Garden Restaurant in the Euphoria Hotel for our lunch.
Having finished lunch, we drove to Batumi’s railway station to take the 4:50pm train back to Tbilisi. The train ride was smooth and comfortable, and we arrived in Tbilisi at 9:45pm. A short 5-minute bus trip and walk brought us to our to hotel, the Hotel Twenties where we had stayed during our earlier stay in Tbilisi. After a very long day, we were finally in bed by 10:45pm, perhaps not quite ready for the 6:00am alarm we had to set for our early departure the following morning.
