Day 10: Batumi Botanical Gardens

When we got back to the hotel after dinner last night, the guy on reception alerted us to the fact that the hotel bar and roof terrace was open. We knew the hotel was supposed to have a bar, but booking.com had said it was closed for several months, so this was a surprise. We went up to explore and found that we had the most incredible views out across Batumi.

We climbed up a slightly shaky spiral staircase to the outdoor roof terrace and could see all the towers we'd walked past during the day illuminated at night.

In one direction we could see the mosque, which Helen and I had walked past earlier in the day...

...while in the other direction we could see the Alphabetic Tower and Ferris Wheel, both of which seemed to be lit up in a display of changing colours.

When we woke up this morning the weather was forecast to be bright, warm and sunny all day, which was a relief after yesterday morning's rather dramatic rain. It was a relief in particular because our plan for the day was to visit the Batumi Botanical Gardens, which are located on a hill a few kilometres to the north of the town. Helen booked us a Bolt to get there; the driver drove a bit more quickly than we might have liked, but we made it there in one piece.

On arrival our first mission was to try and get a proper cup of coffee. There is coffee in the hotel at breakfast, but only instant Jacobs out of a jar, which you have to make yourself with hot water. We'd noticed when in the bar last night that the hotel does actually appear to have a proper espresso machine, so we'd come to breakfast armed with cash in the hope that, if we paid, we'd be able to get something stronger than instant. Unfortunately, the waiter told us that the machine was broken, so we were stuck with a cup of instant after all.

There did turn out to be a cafe outside the entrance to the botanical gardens and we caught sight of a coffee machine inside it. This was manned by an old lady, who in return for 7 lari each (about £2), pressed buttons on the machine to dispense americanos and cappuccinos for us. It probably wasn't the best coffee we'd ever had, but at least it was something!

We bought tickets for the botanical gardens and went inside. The main path began to climb uphill almost immediately, but we were soon rewarded with fantastic views back towards Batumi and the snowy mountains behind it.

When reading reviews about the Batumi botanical gardens last night, the main theme coming across was that it has a lot of trees.

Some visitors seemed quite disappointed with this, having expected it to be the sort of botanical gardens that features flowers.

It's true that we didn't see many flowers over the course of the day, but the trees really were interesting and beautiful.

The gardens loosely seemed to be laid out by continent, although it wasn't always entirely clear which area we were in. Sometimes there were helpful signs, like this one which proclaimed that we were in front of a collection of maples.

And they were really pretty.

We must have been in a North American zone, because shortly after that we passed a Californian sequoia tree.

Most of the views had been inland up to this point, but after this we began to reach more viewpoints down to the Black Sea.

The sea looked really lovely today with a blue sky...

...so we took a family selfie

The wire which you can see going across the photos behind us was from a zip line.

This seemed to be surprisingly big business at the botanical gardens and for the price of 70 lari (about £20) a succession of people were shooting across it, some of them screaming quite loudly!

The path continued along by the sea for a while.

We could see back towards Batumi and the mountains again.

You'll struggle to make it out on this photo because it's just a speck in the sea, but we also stood for quite a while watching a dolphin, who kept surfacing out of the water surprisingly close to the coast.

We progressed from the lower part of the gardens to the upper part.

Some of the plants looked quite tropical at this point.

In particular, there was some absolutely gigantic bamboo. The photos do not do justice either to how tall it was or how wide the trunks were!

After that we did reach some of the rare flowers in the garden when we came across the rose garden.

The rose garden looked beautiful so we attempted to walk down to look at it, but got send back by a woman shouting at us in Russian. There was a man spraying the roses with chemicals, so probably for the best that we didn't get too close and breathe them in!

We did find some other pretty places. There was a pond with lots of goldfish...

...some bottlebrush trees like we'd seen in the street the other day, except these were pink...

...and lots of lovely palm trees.

I think we were technically in the New Zealand part of the gardens at this point, although as I said the descriptions seemed quite loose.

At some point we must have ended up back in Asia, because we passed some tea bushes.

There were also some Japanese gardens...

...and some nice formal gardens where we sat down for a short rest.

After that we passed the trunks of some enormous trees which had fallen over in the past.

This one was forming a tree-bridge, which some people were walking across. We weren't that brave, though!

By this point we'd reached the far end of the gardens and sat down at a cafe to have lunch. I had some more cheesy Georgian bread, which was nice. The experience was marred slightly by several stray dogs running around. There is a huge quantity of stray dogs in Georgia - more than I've seen anywhere else - and they mostly haven't been a problem. The vast majority of the dogs we've seen have a tag in their ear, which means they have been vaccinated against diseases like rabies. A couple of the dogs in the gardens didn't appear to have anything in their ear and I wasn't particularly happy when one of them came sniffing round our table.

After lunch we retraced our steps through the gardens.

We took a few different routes on the way back to our original starting point.

We came across this very scenic viewpoint...

...and the fumigating of the roses seemed to be over, so we were finally able to explore the rose garden

We passed more enormous trees...

...admired the Black Sea through binoculars...

...and finally began to have more downhill paths than uphill as we got closer to the exit.

As we made our way out we passed some gorgeous lilies, growing alongside a stream...

...and got a rare glimpse of a passenger train on the railway line which runs past the botanical gardens. We'd been hearing trains all day, but they had all been cargo trains.

By the time we got out of the gardens we thought it would be nice to sit down and have some coffee. We found a nice terrace to sit on...

...having been enticed into this cafe by a sign promising iced coffee.

Unfortunately, it turned out that not only did they not have iced coffee, they also couldn't do lattes, americanos or anything else mentioned on the sign; only Turkish coffee. We gave up and caught a Bolt back into the centre of Batumi to have coffee there. That turned out to be slightly more of an adventure than intended, when the taxi driver started driving off at the end of the trip before Mom had finished climbing out of the vehicle! But we all just about survived the experience and eventually managed to get some coffee back in the Batumi Piazza, where we'd had coffee the day we arrived

It was a fun day in a really beautiful spot, and a nice end to what has been a great holiday. Tomorrow we will be travelling back to Birmingham via Istanbul. Fingers crossed the flights go more smoothly than our KLM experience on the way here!!!