Mestia to Batumi – From Towers to the Sea

In the high thin air of Mestia, the morning began with the feeling that we were standing at the edge of something old and unspeakably resilient. The mountains here still carry an aura of fortification: they do not just exist, they defend. Lorena and I took the ski lift, an improbable machine of cables and steel grafted onto this medieval landscape, and let ourselves be hoisted slowly into the sky. Above, the Zureli Mountain offered a panoramic walk, the kind where each step feels like trespassing into eternity.

We stood at the ridge, the wind slicing across our cheeks, looking out on the kingdom of towers that scatter the Svaneti valleys like stone punctuation marks. I thought of how so many generations before us had looked from these same summits, not with our appetite for “views” but with vigilance: watching for enemies, avalanches, omens. Lorena squeezed my hand and said nothing; sometimes silence is the only accurate response to mountains.

Later, at the Mestia Ethnographic Museum, we climbed into one of those ancient Svan houses, part home, part bastion. The machubi downstairs was both a barn and a living room, a single room where men, women, children, and oxen endured the frozen winters together. The wooden partition between humans and cattle was carved like lace, as if to declare: survival may be brutal, but beauty remains obligatory. At the centre, the hearth—kera—blackened the ceiling with smoke, an eternal reminder that life here revolved around fire and endurance. Upstairs, the darbazi opened like a summer reprieve, while the tower itself stretched skyward, a stone exclamation mark against the sky. To stand inside was to feel the thickness of history pressing close, as though the walls still remembered whispers, quarrels, births, and avalanches.

By four o’clock, we gathered near Credo Bank, number 38 Tamar Mefe Street, a decidedly unromantic departure point, to board our shared minibus for Batumi. The fellowship of the road assembled: Georgians returning to the coast, a French couple still glowing from the glacier hikes, and a trio of Italians who had chosen to see Georgia without the blisters, without the sweat—air-conditioned transfers and direct hotels. We compared itineraries: theirs was smooth, curated; ours had been raw, exhausting, and at times excruciatingly beautiful. I wondered, not without irony, whether fatigue is the hidden tax one pays for authenticity.

The journey unspooled for five hours through winding roads that slid gradually from alpine austerity to subtropical lushness. Each curve felt like a transition between worlds: stone towers fading into banana palms, peaks dissolving into the sea’s humidity. Lorena dozed on my shoulder while I watched the road, hypnotised by the endless switchbacks. Travel, I thought, is mostly about waiting—waiting to arrive, waiting for fatigue to recede, waiting for the world to reveal its next face.

At nine in the evening, Batumi appeared: sudden, vertical, illuminated. A modern, cosmopolitan skyline, glass towers reflecting the Black Sea’s blackness, neon signs in Georgian, Russian, Turkish, English. The city seemed almost implausible after the mountain villages—like walking from the Middle Ages into a science fiction novel.

Our lodging, the Hotel Elegant Garden, stood slightly aside from Batumi’s new glamour. Built in the last century, when Batumi was still a seaside destination for a discerning few, it carried an air of faded dignity. The staircases creaked, the plaster peeled, but in the courtyard, magnolia trees breathed out their perfume. I liked it instantly—hotels with too much gloss never allow you to feel history’s breath on your skin.

That night, before sleep, Lorena and I whispered about the day. We were both exhausted, sunburned, and a little stunned by the dissonance between medieval towers and neon skylines. “Tomorrow the sea,” she said, half-asleep. I thought of the mountains behind us, already mythologised in memory, and of the sea ahead, which promised another kind of vastness, another kind of test.