This is the twenty-first 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 make the point that his domestic opposition is the moral equivalent of a foreign invasion, Trump ordered the U.S. Marines and other combat forces into the streets of Los Angeles, where demonstrators were protesting unconstitutional deportations, if not Trump’s wish to be king.)

In the Turkish town of Hopa, along the Black Sea, the driver hardly paused in traffic to see me off. I climbed down the bus steps with my two bags, grabbed my bicycle from the hold, and he was off in a sputtering trail of exhaust. I was a good mile from the center of Hopa, and without a bicycle I would have had a twenty minute walk back into town.

On the bus ride I had studied maps and wondered if I could ride my bicycle from Hopa to the Georgian border town of Sarpi—and then further north to Batumi. The road ran right along the coastline. With luck, I reasoned, it might well have a shoulder that could be used as bicycle lane.

It was 25 miles from Hopa to Batumi, and nearly all of the riding would be on the coastal road. I set off, but almost immediately, after riding past a long line of parked trucks (clearly waiting for border processing), I came upon a tunnel carved out of the seaside mountains, and in that tunnel there was no room to ride a bicycle.

Not wanting to share a dark tunnel with careening trucks, I turned around, biked back to Hopa, and found a small passenger van (in Turkish, a dolmuş) that for $2 would take me to the Georgian border.

The driver wedged my folded bicycle into the back. I sat on a small jump seat with my two bags jammed around me. About every six hundred meters, the dolmuş stopped to pick someone up or drop off passengers in villages along the route.

To my left was the sun setting over the still waters of the Black Sea, which bore no traces of the war between Ukraine and Russia being fought off shore. (Most Crimean wars are fought for control of the inland sea.)

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Customs and immigration between Turkey and Georgia take place in a modern, mall-like building that is accessed with an escalator and which is filled with duty-free shops on both sides of the border.

I pushed my bicycle through the long linoleum corridors, but then had to fold it so that the Georgians could X-ray the frame. I ate a makeshift dinner at a kiosk in the great immigration hall and then passed into the Georgian night, where I wanted to assess whether it would be insane to ride into Batumi.

The staff in a money-changing kiosk said Batumi was “only ten miles up the road,” which corresponded with the distance shown on my maps. As I had spent much of the day sitting on buses, I decided to ride it, hoping that the coastal road on this side of the border would not have any tunnels.

I am glad now that I made the ride, but at the time it had nerve-racking aspects, as when a dog chased me (unsuccessfully) in the town of Gonio and when I got lost in the darkness (despite following GPS) near the Batumi Airport.

Finally it dawned on me that the ride into the center of Batumi was closer to twenty miles than to ten (the distance from Sarpi to the city limits), and Batumi is a sprawling resort city.

I made the ride longer by hugging the coastal road, as it seemed more bicycle-friendly than the route GPS was promoting, which went through suburbs clogged with cars and small trucks, all of them spewing exhaust.

At least it was a warm spring night, and on my left I had the Black Sea, which that night was a still as a mirror.

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Only once I was close to the beachside sections of Batumi did I enjoy the ride, even though I found myself biking through what felt like a summer resort from the departed Soviet empire.

Nearly all the cars I passed parked near the beaches or the restaurants along the road were Russian. And I came across many cars packed with young, teenaged Russians who were out joyriding or just beginning their evening of partying.

I had read that Batumi was a popular destination for Russians seeking to avoid military service in Ukraine, but nothing prepared me for their numbers, nor for their wealth (as expressed by the late-model SUVs they were driving).

Someday in Russia I imagine there will be a reckoning between those who fled to places such as Georgia, and those who were fed to the canons in Donetsk.

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By now it was close to 9 p.m., and while I needed dinner, I decided to press on to my Hotel Old Town, which I had picked because of the excellent reviews that were given to its restaurant and bar. I knew that I would be arriving late, and I didn’t want to begin foraging for food at 10:00 p.m.

If the beachside strip of Batumi felt like the Russian resorts of Yalta or Sochi (if not Fort Lauderdale during spring break), the old town of Batumi was sedate and beautiful, lined with manor houses (many are now hotels and shops) and streets of cobblestone (which played havoc with my small bike).

Eventually, after what felt like hours of pounding, I found the Hotel Old Town, which I immediately hated. On the outside it was clean and pleasant looking, but in no way matched the reviews on Booking.com. Nor was it serving dinner or breakfast; the restaurant was closed.

The two men in the lobby hardly stirred when I asked to check in, and they gave me all sorts of grief for having the audacity to bring a bicycle into the lobby. (I silenced their moaning when I folded it up and placed it in a bag.) For dinner, I was on my own.

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At least I was familiar with Batumi from my stamp collecting. After World War I, in 1919, the British briefly occupied the city. They were there long enough to issue postage stamps that a hundred years later are in some of my albums. It was then spelled Batoum or Batum. My stamps have the words “British Occupation” printed over ordinary Georgian stamps.

Prior to the arrival of the British, the Soviet Union had granted independence to Batumi, Kars and Ardahan, although a few months later the Ottomans decided to annex Batumi, until they passed it to the British in 1919.

In 1920, Batumi became Georgian until the infamous 1921 Treaty of Kars gave Batumi back to the Bolsheviks, when the city-state was briefly the Adjarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic—neither Turkish, nor Georgian, nor Russian, but an independent Muslim-leaning enclave in the Georgian world of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union failed in 1991, Batumi became part of the Republic of Georgia (much to the disappointment of Moscow, which also claimed Abkhazia and South Ossetia as more Russian than Georgian). And those disputes can been seen as preludes to the current war in Ukraine, where Russia has also asserted its claims to ethically-mixed borderlands.

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