The bus from Trabzon blew a tire, so we had a bumpy journey and then a two hour delay. We also had an unscheduled stop at a petrol station because some idiot foreigner got food poisoning and needed private time. It was dramatic. But we made it in the end.
The good news is that I have a ticket to Istanbul, or actually to somewhere called Bayrampasa, which probably means Istanbul. With luck, no unscheduled stops this time, but I'm not going to risk eating anything for a while.
I'm still on the Black Sea, this time in Turkey. Trabzon is probably an ok city, but tourists mostly come here to change buses. It's the easiest stop between Georgia and Istanbul.
Except, wow, it turns out that every seat on every bus to Istanbul is booked out for the next _three days_. I managed to get the very last ticket to Ankara instead, leaving tomorrow night. It gets me closer at least!
Ankara is six hours by bus from Istanbul (if there are any seats left) and I get there around eight hours before Joel lands in Istanbul, so this can still work... *cue dramatic theme music*
"A khachapuri please. What's the difference between Imeretian style and Megrelian style?" "Imeretian has cheese on the inside. Megrelian has cheese on the outside too". Wow. You have to admire a cuisine whose food options are "lots of cheese" or "seriously, tons of cheese".
I'm in Batumi, a port town on the Black Sea, just north of the Turkish border. The Stalin museum is sadly closed for the season, but I took a bus out of the town to see the Roman fortress at Gonio, then went to the beach and added the Black Sea to my short list of maritime firsts for this trip. (Also on the list: the Yellow Sea; the Pacific Ocean from this side. I could have added the Caspian too, but I decided against touching that. I don't know where it's been.)
I think a lot of people fall madly in love with Tbilisi on their first visit. That didn't happen to me. It's a nice looking (though kind of decrepit) town and I liked it plenty, but I was waiting for the magic that entices everyone and it never appeared. Maybe it's weather related. We had miserable sleeting snow, and power outages kept taking out the streetlights, so that didn't show the city at its best. It's probably more magical with dry socks.
I dutifully saw some churches and I got a violent massage at the sulphur baths, but mostly I spent my two days in Tbilisi randomly getting into conversations with strangers. That always happens a bit, but it was unusually constant in Tbilisi (maybe that's the magic, actually), and I had fun dialogues on subjects as diverse as Armenian politics, spoons, special relativity, nomadic dog ownership, the Norwegian film industry and evangelical hitchhiking. The last was enlightening: I didn't know that being a Hitchhiker (as opposed to just hitchhiking) was a Thing, but apparently they have events and competitions. Behold:
Tomorrow I guess I'm going to Turkey somewhere, but I don't have anything approaching a plan. Three sleeps until I meet Joel in Istanbul!
