I was relieved to find that the bus station I was looking for has actually been moved from where the website has it listed, and is now only a few blocks from me. I walked over there and got into the bus that would take me to Hopa on the Black Sea coastline, just south of the border and Batumi. The drive was about 6.5 hours and one of the best I've done yet. At first, the terrain was mostly flat, open expanses covered in a few inches of snow. Nothing grew at all and it looked like something out of the Canadian Arctic. Somehow, there were still occasional settlements out here. They mostly looked incredibly poor and run down, where almost every other house would be in ruins. Yet somehow, it was clear that life went on in some of them. I can't imagine what the industry would be here - while it's possible that the huge plains are farmable in the summer, they certainly aren't for the other half of the year, and I somehow doubt that these people are all working fancy remote jobs.

Eventually, the pseudo-tundra gave way to hillier landscapes. Here, pine trees could grow on the leeward side of hills, though the other side would always remain bare. The road tracked the course of a partially frozen river as it meandered through the uneven terrain. I don't know if the road was bad or if the bus's suspension was awful, but it was a bumpy ride and I could barely type while we were driving. We made a few stops to pick additional people up along the way and I once again found myself marvelling at the fact that towns can survive out here. I used the bathroom at one of the stops and a guy waiting outside demanded "one money" for the privilege. I didn't have any lira anymore so I handed him a bill for some North Macedonian denar and he seemed happy with that. Sometimes we'd pick someone up, only to drop them off just a few minutes later at the base of what appeared to be a long dirt road, but I couldn't tell where they went because they'd disappear into the fog before any features were visible.

The hills became mountains, and our drive got very slow. I thought we were making great time up to this point, but that seems to have only been because our speed would be dramatically reduced in this section of the drive. The road here made me appreciate civil engineering, because there was very little of it here. Obviously the road itself was there, but in most places you'd have bridges or tunnels that might allow you to go over a valley or through a mountain rather than all the way around. Not here though, and we had to either take a ton of switchbacks to get over something or take a hugely roundabout path to avoid it altogether. I wasn't too upset about this, though, because the views were absolutely incredible. I got my first glimpse of what I think must have been Georgia, and the mountains are amazingly beautiful. We stopped on the elbow of a switchback at one point to visit something that I guess was a restaurant - it was a hollowed out old van with some sort of counter inside and a big wood stove smoking away next to it. Who's visiting these places and how is it possible to make this work as a business model so far from any towns? A cat tried to stow away on the bus during this time and we had to stage a mission to remove him, and then we were off again. Our next landscape was along a lake that I think was the product of a dam. My pictures don't do a good job showing it, but the water was a brilliant turquoise. Mountains still rose up on either side of us and this time there were actually quite a few tunnels through them that shortened our route. I think things were getting more developed now that we approached the big city of Artvin, which actually does seem to be a sizeable mining city hidden built into the side of a mountain.

The last leg of the trip was less exciting and the snow started to fade. It was interesting to see how quickly it transitioned from totally snowy to totally clear as we approached the Black Sea. In Hopa, I bought some kebab from a woman in a Boston sweatshirt. I complimented it and she looked very confused, but a moment later I heard her reading what sounded to be the Boston Wikipedia page and exclaim with understanding. I don't know why you'd own that sweatshirt if you don't even know what Boston is, but here we are. I tried to catch the next bus to the border, but the driver got mad at me for putting my bags on the seat (there was literally nowhere else to put them other than the aisle) and then even more mad when he found out that I didn't have any more cash. After driving for a minute he kicked me off and I had to walk back into town to find an ATM for the roughly $1.50 fare they were charging. Since I had time until the next bus, I made a rather halfhearted attempt at hitchhiking, but I wasn't in a good spot and it was dark enough that I didn't expect great results. I ended up just getting the next bus.

Eventually I made it to the border, where a friendly old man asked me if I was going to Batumi. I said I was and he offered to help me get there for ~$15, which seemed pretty fair given that I didn't know what the transit situation would look like on the other side and that the drive was about 45 minutes. Customs here was weird - it's almost like you go through a normal airport security, including many long moving sidewalks and security checks. He took me though and offered to take my bags, so I went through with him in tow. The Georgian customs agent made a big deal of looking very suspiciously at my passport while paging through it, but I noticed that he was staring at blank pages most of the time. Maybe he was reading the classical Americana quotes that are on each page. When we got to the other side of the border, the old guy asked for the money and I went to get some from an ATM. Eventually someone else came over asking if I needed transit to Batumi, so I told him no - but then old guy started asking questions that made it clear he had no means of taking me there. Turns out that his offer was just to help me get my bags through customs and he was demanding money for it all the same. I felt very mislead and I suspect this was a scam, though it is true that his English was poor and I can't entirely rule out an honest mistake. That said, I refused to pay and the other guy offering me a ride started translating a dialogue between us, with frequent additional comments like "he says x, but that's false". Even if there had been an honest misunderstanding that got us here, he certainly wasn't being honest now and it steeled my resolve to not pay him. I honestly didn't care that much about the money, but I hated the idea of letting someone get one over on me. He resorted to classic scammer tactics like "if you pay me, I'll leave" that even further entrenched my stance. I had nowhere to be, so I figured I'd just wait it out. He had my bags so I couldn't just take them back without assaulting him, and I wasn't going to leave him behind with the bags to find border police (I didn't have any proof that I'd been mislead and lied to anyway), so I really just had to wait for him to give up. We sat there for maybe an hour while he tried every tactic in the book to get me to pay, until my first translator gave up trying to offer me a ride (he was very sympathetic to my position but saw that this was going nowhere) and some other guy came through. For whatever reason, this guy took old guy's side and I found myself in a 2v1 position where I couldn't really do anything other than pay my way out of it. I didn't give him the full amount that he wanted, and I did it with a credit card so I can dispute the transaction, but even if that doesn't work out I take a sense of grim satisfaction in knowing that his victory was undoubtedly a Pyrrhic one. No way the hour plus he wasted was worth the $10 he got.

The first translator guy found me again and offered me a ride to Batumi for ~$15, so I accepted and got into his car. It wasn't really a taxi at all and I got worried that this was going to be another scam - he wasn't affiliated with any company so there was no reputation to damage, and I know firsthand how much taxi drivers, even those affiliated with companies, like to scam clients around these parts. But I had already committed and figured that as long as I was vigilant, I'd be able to get out without paying too much. The guy was probably around my age and very nice. He started off by apologizing for the behavior of old guy and assured me that most Georgians are better than that. He then talked about his role in the recent protests and some of his favorite spots in the area, including what he claimed to be the 4th largest McDonald's in the world. When we got to the hostel I'd booked, sure enough there was some confusion and we'd have to jump through some hoops before I could pay him. Classic scam technique. He let me out to drop my bags off in the hostel and I thought about not returning, but figured that on the off chance that he was being legitimate I owed it to him to try and settle the balance. But when I went back out, it became clear that he was being totally honest. When an ATM gave me trouble with withdrawing money, he just asked me to buy him an equivalent amount of cigarettes and energy drinks from a local convenience store. I was more than happy to do that, so he rung up slightly under the total we'd agreed to (I told him he was welcome to buy an extra pack or two for the inconvenience but he declined) and I paid. No scam at all and he was one of the most fair people I've ever worked with.

I chatted for a few minutes with people from the hostel and then went to explore Batumi by night. It's a ridiculous city that's clearly entirely gambling money, mostly from wealthy Russians who want to go somewhere *slightly* more foreign than Sochi. There are lots of skyscrapers, one of which has a giant Ferris wheel embedded in the side of it halfway up. The architecture of everything is clearly designed to be as over the top and eye-catching as possible. I liked looking at the Georgian and realizing how completely incomprehensible it is. Greek and Cyrillic both take a little learning, but it wasn't so hard for me to get a general sense of words said in those countries because I'm generally familiar with a lot of their unique letters and many of the Latin characters are shared. But Georgian is entirely separate and I know I'll never be able to read it even slightly. I also noticed that I never once saw a Georgian flag without an accompanying EU flag, which I found interesting. Anyway, Batumi is basically trying to be Black Sea Vegas or something and it didn't appeal to me, so I figured I'd get the first train out to Tbilisi tomorrow morning.

I also booked flights home - very sad about that one. Tuesday will be my flight to the UK and probably also the last day of the blog. I expect there to be fun things still happening in the UK since I've built in some time to see Shane, but it's not going to be the same trips as this, really. I've booked my flight from Armenia and I'm hoping to have Sunday and then all of Monday to explore Yerevan, after giving myself Thursday Friday and Saturday in Georgia. Hard to believe that this chapter is almost over, but I do think it's probably for the best. Retiring at 25 doesn't seem like it was a very realistic financial goal.