It was funny how much leaving Armenia felt like leaving home.

Between the family there, and the routines I built for myself, I found it harder than expected to leave. This is a funny thing to me, to have a home so far from everything I have ever known, and to know it intimately in its own way.

But I was ready for the next chapter as well.

I took the night train back to Tbilisi.

I have had fun getting to know Tbilisi over my time living in Armenia, it’s a beautiful old Georgian city (as seen below) with its winding streets and brick buildings. I was excited to be on the road again and I was ready for something new, and found myself itching for the next place quickly. As beautiful as the city is, and as much as I loved spending time there, it too was familiar, and I had the growing itch for the unfamiliar.

I took another train through the lesser Caucasus to the city of Kutaisi. Kutaisi is a beautiful little Georgian city, nestled right up in the foothills. You don’t have to get too far out of town to start seeing beautiful mountains, and even canyons and waterfalls.

In town the people are very kind and helpful, which was refreshing after so long in the big, ex-soviet cities. There are beautiful churches, a turquoise river, and the streets are much quieter than I had grown accustom to in Yerevan. I ate amazing Georgian food as there are many very good restaurants serving all of the classic Georgian food. Some of my favorites were Ojakhuri, a dish of veal, potatoes and onion served sizzling hot, and Khinkali, Georgian Dumplings that I could eat endlessly.

I stopped here for a little while, relishing in the excitement of a new place, and exploring every alley and road I could find. The quiet city energy was perfect, and I enjoyed less crowding in the bazaars, and cleaner air in my lungs. When I decided to move on I was sad to leave the city, but that urge for the unfamiliar had come back, and it was time.

I took a bus to Batumi, a Georgian city on the south eastern coast of the Black Sea . It was a beautiful bus ride and I watched out the window as the landscape changed and we went in and out of mountain ranges and valleys. Eventually I started to see palm trees of different varieties, which was shocking to me, and I realized that the people in Kutaisi had not been kidding when they told me I was going to the topical part of the country.

Eventually we reached Batumi, a beautiful coastal town with a weird twist of tourist/vacation attractions scattered throughout it.

I was noticed immediately how much I had missed water. The humidity in the air and the smell of the ocean were calming in a way I did not expect. I just walked the city for a days, simply enjoying being by the ocean again. I had no plans or destinations in Batumi, but I ended up loving my time there as it was so different than the past months of my travel have been.

Also check out this sunset shot I got over the water… I really like it.

On my last day in Batumi I took a bus out of the city to the botanical gardens.

It was my first break from city life since my hikes in the mountains of Armenia and it was very calming just to wander through trees again. I have never been a city person, and as interesting as they are while traveling, getting a break every once in a while is important for me. I spent the whole day there, wandering on and off the trail. At one point I even got lost in a bamboo forrest… but the good kind of lost, where you have nowhere to be and all the time in the world to figure it out.

The next day, I took a bus from Batumi to the border with Turkey, a few miles south. From there I wandered down the road a bit until I found a bus station with some sweet old men playing cards who invited me to have tea with them. I used google translate to ask how to get the right bus, and eventually caught a van that took me down the coast to the city of Trabzon.

Trabzon is a weird city full of automotive repair shops. I mean seriously Ive never seen so many. Blocks and blocks in every direction of garage after garage, and the streets in between carry the smell of gas, oil and paint.

Not quite the scenic experience Batumi had been, but an experience nonetheless.

From Trabzon my route will take me through southern Turkey, with a couple stops before reaching the city of Gaziantep, where my family lived for generations leading up to the genocide in the early 20th century. From there I expect I will have more to report.

Thats all for now,

All the best