Friday, October 15

Batumi, Georgia. I haven’t been near a single shop in about eight days now. The last time I had an opportunity to buy even a postcard much less any other souvenirs was in Kusadasi. Of course, part of that is due to my not being able to hike around much, but in the other places I’ve visited around the world, there were always souvenir shops and street-side entrepreneurs near the docks. This is probably just as well as I do not really need more souvenirs, but I would like to send some more postcards to some of my friends.

There are still a few of the little birds hanging around the ship. Last night at dinner, two of our tablemates told us that, after we had told them about the bird getting into our cabin, they wound up with six of them in theirs. It started with one, and when they tried to evict it through the veranda door, more came in. They finally closed the veranda door and shooed the birds into the interior corridor. From there the little pests either found their way out or were captured and removed, although one seemed to find its way down several decks and appeared in the up-scale dining room at breakfast time.

As we arrived in Batumi this morning, there was a very strong smell of oil. Batumi is the terminus for both the Transcaucasian Railroad and the Baku oil pipeline. Evidently once in a while there is a leak while a tanker is a tanker is being loaded, and we happened to sail through a patch of it.

Batumi is a beautiful city. Lots of towers, spires and minarets, and even a ferris wheel on the horizon. Like Sochi, it occupies the space between the Caucasus mountains and the sea. There is a great deal of building and restoration of buildings going on. Also the great majority of the roads, streets and sidewalks are torn up, and the ones that aren’t torn up are riddled with potholes. I believe much of this is the result of a massive flood that occurred in 2008.

Some of the older buildings are quite ornate, and there is a geat deal of wonderful ornamental iron work throughout the city. The newer buildings and monuments are very imaginative and modern in style. The one you see here is still under construction, but is going to be a hotel. I was fascinated by its multiple zig zag shape.

Jill stayed on board today, but I took an afternoon tour of the city. Our first stop was at an artist’s studio. The man is a woodcarver of excellent talent. His studio is actually a small museum of his work. There were scale models of several local churches and synagogues and life-sized vignettes of people doing their jobs like basket weaving, and how a room in a rich person’s home would have looked in the old days. Plus he had interesting carved goblets, flasks, trays and other decorative objects.

Our next two stops were at churches: one, a tiny little Catholic church named St. Barbara’s, and the other a large Armenian Orthodox church. We then went up Mt. Batumi to a hotel terrace for tea and a fabulous view of the whole city. We were offered tea or coffee, and the tea was so strong that it looked like coffee, but several lumps of sugar made it drinkable.

The weather was mostly cloudy, but the sun came out for our tour in the afternoon, although that made things quite steamy. When we arrived back at the ship there was a brass band playing Georgian tunes an a girls’ chorus singing folksongs...a happy send-off. As an additional send-off, a group of dolphins escorted us back out to sea.

Saturday, October 16

Trabzon, Turkey. For about the first time in 36 cruises, I was up, awake, dressed, had breakfast and out on the veranda to watch us dock. This was because Jill’s tour leaves very early. For only the second time on this whole trip, there was actually a little rolling motion to the ship ... just enough to let you know that you’re on a ship. There was some rolling the very first night out of Rome, and a lot of people thought it was rather severe, but it certainly wasn’t for us having been through that hurricane in Drake’s Passage on the South American trip in 2007. I suspect that most of this past night’s motion was due to our doing some “creative drifting” between about 3:00 and 7:00 a.m. since Trabzon is just not that far from Batumi.

My tour set out in a light rain this morning. Our guide, Hakan, was part of a group of guides flown in from Istanbul for today’s tours as there are not enough guide in Trabzon. He told us that it rains 300 days a year here. We were lucky, then, that it cleared off some for the majority of the time we were touring.

Hakan told us that the Black Sea Coast area of Turkey is quite different from the rest of Turkey, and that elsewhere in Turkey they tell Trabzon jokes like people in the U.S. tell Polish or Aggie jokes. He provided several examples during the tour.

This was billed as an “easy” tour, but everywhere we stopped, the thing we were to see was a rather long walk involving either a steep hill or lots of steps. As a result, several of us opted to stay with the bus, but we had a good time chatting while the others wound up exhausted.

Back to the ship, and it had clouded over again. I grabbed some lunch and used the afternoon to catch up on photos and this blog.