Why Batumi needs a local guide
Batumi is Georgia's Black Sea city. The skyline is all glass towers and the Alphabet Tower, a 130-meter structure shaped like a strand of DNA spelling the Georgian alphabet. But walk two blocks from the boulevard and you are in a crumbling 19th-century town with grapevines growing over courtyards.
Batumi has transformed from a fading Soviet seaside town into Georgia's flashiest city in under two decades. Casinos, glass towers, and the 130-meter Alphabet Tower now line the shore. But 2 million visitors a year mostly see the boulevard and the beach, missing the old town two blocks behind where 19th-century wooden houses sag under grapevines and courtyards smell of churchkhela drying in the autumn air. To become a tour guide in Batumi is to show people both versions of the city. You walk them from the neon casino strip to a backyard where an 80-year-old woman rolls walnut paste into grape juice for churchkhela the way her mother taught her. You take them to the Botanical Garden, 9km up the coast, where subtropical plants grow on cliffs above the Black Sea and the path is usually empty. The Adjarian khachapuri was born here, the boat-shaped bread with cheese, butter, and a raw egg that you stir together at the table. Every restaurant in Batumi makes its own version and a guide who knows which one to order is worth the price alone. If you want to become a tour guide in Batumi, you need to love the contrast. Becoming a tour guide in Batumi means walking between the future and the past in the space of one city block.