This is the twenty-second part in a series about riding night trains across Europe, Turkey, and the Near East to Georgia and Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, to wag the dog, Trump dispatched B-2 bombers to lay waste to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, although my feeling is that the sneak attacks will no more end the conflicts in the Middle East than the air attacks against North Vietnam in 1964, following the Tonkin Gulf Resolutions, wound up the Vietnam War.)
Boarding the 8 a.m. Batumi-Tbilisi express train, to make the six hour run across the republic of Georgia to the capital. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
My train for Tbilisi left the next morning at 7:45 a.m. I had tried several times to book a ticket and reservation online but each time, when it came time to pay with a credit card, the website of Georgian Railways crashed. In the end I decided I would take my chances on buying a ticket in person at the Makhinjauri station, just before the train left.
Well before 7 a.m. I was biking to the Batumi railway station when I remembered that the hotel staff had demanded to keep my passport (as ransom?) and that it was back at the hotel, in the possession of my front-desk tormentors.
I turned the bicycle around, flew back to the hotel, and demanded the passport, which—I should have known—was still inside the Xerox machine on the front counter.
With it back in my pocket, I took off again for the station, wondering if I would have enough time to line up and buy a ticket. Fortunately, it was a clear, warm morning, and there was no traffic in the streets.
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The distance to the “new” railway station in Batumi was about four miles, which I covered in fifteen minutes. Along the way, to my delight, I went past the Sochi-Batumi hydrofoil ferry in dry dock.
For years I had been wondering if it was still in operation; now I knew it existed—although I must say it had the look of yet another draft dodger from the Russian war in Ukraine.
Buying a train ticket took longer than I had budgeted. There was no one ahead of me in line, but the dilatory agent said it was impossible for me to book in first class (as Paul Theroux likes to say, “Better to go first class than to arrive”), and she even had issues about finding me a place in second.
I explained that the bicycle folded up into a bag and did not need its own place on the train. It all took time, and I had to run, pushing the bike, to board the train before departed.
Then it dawned on me that I was traveling on Easter Monday in the Orthodox world, and the reason the train was sold out in nearly all classes was because many families were returning to Tbilisi after their holidays.
I was lucky to have made the train and lucky to have a seat. Everywhere in the new passenger car were stacks of luggage, including my own. But those on the train were mostly Georgians, not Russians fleeting his commissar’s service in Ukraine.
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My plan had been to take the train from Batumi to the regional Georgian city of Gori, but in various internet searches I figured out that the the morning express train from Batumi did not stop in Gori, and that the local train that did—via Kutaisi International Airport—only arrived at 22:13, never a great time to arrive in a strange city.
I decided, therefore, to travel directly to Tbilisi, check into my hotel, and then, the following morning, to see Gori on a day trip out from the capital. On the train Gori is 90 minutes from Tbilisi, but it’s faster in some of the small vans that crisscross the country.
Even though the Batumi-Tbilisi train was crammed with luggage and families, it departed on time and rolled slowly through Batumi suburbs before turning east into the depths of Adjara, the province that surrounds the city.
I was prepared to like Adjara, because in 1976, on a family vacation to Europe, we traveled on a Soviet steamer, M.S. Adjaria from Athens to Istanbul, passing through the Dardanelles at first light.
The ship was evacuating Russian diplomats from the Lebanese civil war, but it called in Piraeus (outside Athens) to pick up passengers, including us and a Swiss family who had a daughter my age, who was happy to dance to the rhythms of the Russian band.
At 5 a.m., just before dawn, my father and I got up to see the straits at Gallipoli where the 1915 World War I battle was fought. Leaning over the rail of Adjaria, he cast his eye over the landscape as someone who had led amphibious assaults in the Pacific during World War II.
At one point he said, “I’m glad I missed this landing,” although places such as Guadalcanal and Peleliu had many of the same elements that made Gallipoli the nightmare that it was.
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In early springtime, this Adjara had a softness that I was surprised to find in otherwise mountainous Georgia. Some of the fields that the train passed had small family-sized vineyards and houses that looked like summer homes, either for Russians or Georgians.
As the train headed east through the valleys that connect the coast to Tbilisi, the landscape had a more a broken quality, like parts of Turkey. When I looked to the north I could see the peaks of the Caucasus mountains, which loom over Georgia geographically much the way Russia does politically. (Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, as part of Putin’s desire for Lebensraum.
There was a stop in Kutaisi, which has an airport used by a number of discount airlines, including Wizz and Pegasus. In thinking about my return to Switzerland, I had thought about flying from there, but in the end I decided on one more night train, from Tbilisi to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
I had read in one of my magazines that the night train had new Russian-made sleepers and on some nights a dining car, and it sounded more romantic to take a night train to Yerevan than to double back to Kutaisi and fly out on something such as FlyArystan, a Kazakh discount airline.
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Having finished The Towers of Trebizond, I was casting around for another novel to read on the train ride, and I came across Mikhail Lermontov’s celebrated 19th century novel, A Hero of Our Time, which is set in the Caucasus mountains.
The book appealed to me partly because it is short—less than 200 pages—and in Tbilisi I wanted to read more about the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia. I had thought of Tolstoy’s novel The Cossacks, but I had read it when I was on my way to Crimea in 2021 and wanted to try something new.
Much like The Cossacks, the Lermontov novel tells the story of a Russian officer on his majesty’s service in the Caucasus in the 19th century, when it was one of the tsar’s colonial frontiers and in a state of permanent unrest (as the local tribesmen and Muslims didn’t fancy Russian fealty).
A Hero of Our Time is an ironic title, as the book, for all its swashbuckling (there are love affairs, duels, and blood lusts) draws a portrait of the Russian military class as adrift on a tide of boredom and ennui, as though military adventurism was part of a cure for Russian existential drift.
The “hero” is Grigory Pechorin, who journeys to the frontier with all of his Moscow cynicism, at one point noting: “Women love only those whom they do not know!”
In between Kutaisi and Tbilisi, I stayed with knight-errant Pechorin on his noble engagements across the Caucasus, and I confess all I thought about were the children of Russian oligopoly who I had seen on the boardwalks of Batumi and those now killing Ukrainians with cruise missiles—both equally adrift.
Lemontov describes how easily Pechorin could easily “move on” from his involvements, emotional or otherwise:
“I will tell you the whole truth,” [Pechorin ] answered. “I will not justify myself, nor explain my actions: I do not love you.” Her lips grew slightly pale. “Leave me,” she said, in a scarcely audible voice. I shrugged my shoulders, turned round, and walked away.
I would not be surprised if the Ukraine war ends in the same abrupt manner..
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