Batumi to Dublin, via Istanbul

The last day always arrives like a thief — not with the clamour of a border crossing or the solemnity of a mountain pass, but with the quiet inevitability of an airport departure lounge. Batumi International Airport is a modest building of glass and faded ambitions, a liminal space where sea-salted dreams meet the fluorescent lights of departure gates. At 10:35, Turkish Airlines flight TK391 lifted Lorena and me from the Black Sea’s humid embrace and, with the indifferent efficiency of modern aviation, carried us back toward the West.

Istanbul appeared in the distance, a sprawl of minarets and megacity ambition, and for seventy minutes we lived in the purgatory of transit, caught between Black Sea hinterlands and Atlantic archipelagos. Then came the second leap — TK1977, a steel bird bound for Dublin. Four hours and thirty-five minutes later, as the plane arced over the Irish Sea, I felt the narrative loop close: from Dublin to Georgia and back again, sixteen days carved into memory like script into stone.

What remains? Not the flight schedules or the tiredness of waiting rooms, but the marrow of the journey: the patient rhythm of night trains rattling through Anatolian darkness, the silent majesty of the Svaneti mountains where glaciers crouch like ancient gods, the Georgian wine that tasted like it had been fermented from sunlight itself. There was food — oh, the food—from the earthy generosity of Turkish mezze to the molten decadence of Adjarian khachapuri, a bread boat cradling its egg-yolk sun.

And then there were the people. A farmer offering directions with a hand still dirt-stained, a fellow traveller on the Tbilisi night train sharing almonds and improbable optimism, the quiet smile of Lorena when fatigue gave way to wonder at the summit of a trail. These are the true cartographies of travel: not the maps printed in guidebooks, but the unplanned intersections of lives.

Yet, beneath the poetry, a darker undercurrent. Georgia, beautiful and fragile, bears scars of occupation: Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories cleaved away by Russian presence, their names whispered like wounds that refuse to heal. The government in Tbilisi, populist and uncomfortably aligned with Moscow, has recently suspended the nation’s European integration — despite nearly 80% of its citizens yearning for Brussels, not the Kremlin. In Turkey, another paradox: a land of intoxicating landscapes and ancient civilisations, yoked to an autocracy that imprisons its brightest opposition, including the mayor of Istanbul, on charges as nebulous as smoke.

These contradictions shape the terrain as much as rivers and ridgelines. Travel, after all, is never just about landscapes — it is about the precarious politics that shift beneath them, the currents of history that run alongside the trains and hiking trails.

What, then, to say of this journey? That it was slow — deliberately so. That it was human-scaled, stitched together by rails and footpaths rather than airports and motorways. That the act of walking four days across Svaneti, or surrendering to the cadence of a night train, is a form of resistance in a world addicted to speed.

If there is any advice to offer, it is this: take the train. Shoulder a pack. Trust your feet. The world revealed itself more generously when we surrendered to slowness, when we allowed fatigue and discomfort to make space for awe.

As Dublin came into view, slate-grey clouds gathering like an old friend, I felt no sadness at returning. The journey had not ended; it had simply transformed into memory — a story to be told, a reminder that there are still rails to ride and trails to follow.