St. Petersburg, Sochi and Abkhazia

During the last month, we've been doing a lot of travelling and visiting. We've been very busy, and we're not done yet by far. First, our trip to St. Petersburg.

My wife has a cousin living in this city, so they invited us to see them and to be able to visit. We used some national vacations in May, and went there.

St. Petersburg is a big city, with wide streets, public transport, big buildings, etc. The city itself is pretty new, it was made around 300 years ago, and you can notice it. Even in the centre, streets are wide and nice, with lots of space. The city is beautiful, but the streets are like any other big city. Maybe the architecture resembles Paris, since lots of buildings were done by French architects.

The thing that really makes a difference is the palaces. In the centre, if you raise a stone you will find a palace. These palaces are all impressive, loaded with details, and really luxurious. We visited several of them (including the Ermitage, which doubles as huge art museum), and we did so in the right order: when we thought that we had seen the most crazy luxurious palace, the next one was always proving us wrong.

We were very lucky, and we had lots of sunny and warm days. We were told that was some kind of exception. With the palaces, several big and curious churches, museums, the streets of a big city,the water channels, the tours and the family visiting, we had a great time, and we did lots of things.

After St. Petersburg, we had two visits in Adler in rapid succession. First it was Fatima and Marius, two of our friends. Then it was my uncles, Jose and Silvia.

In both cases we played games, spent time together and had fun. But the other effect of their visit is that we finally spent some time visiting Adler, Sochi, and the places around them.

Adler is small, and we really could not offer much to visit apart from a small tour in the centre and around the coast. Sochi is bigger, and we manage to see some more things (not many, but some). Sochi really gives the impression of a small coastal city, not unlike the ones you can find in Catalunya's that are not extensions of resorts (those resemble Adler).

The best discovery was what's around these cities. We knew there were forests and excursions, and we knew that it was considered a nice area, but we had not checked personally.

We did several trips around, organized and otherwise, and now we know what's around. There is lots of very beautiful and dense forests, small rivers, lots of waterfalls, mountains and nature. It's really awesome.
Some of the places were clearly too touristic, charging you to enter an area of forest and with annoying shops and people. However, they were still very nice. We also discovered two things:

1-Most excursions spend a huge amount of time passing by small areas that produce wine, honey and other things, and make you try them. This becomes bothersome, specially when you spend too much time in then. However, its a price to pay to have a cheap excursion, and its true that the products are handmade and usually very good.

2- This one I suspected it, but we confirmed it. Culturally, lots of Russians seem to be afraid of silence somehow. In restaurants, they put music channels with very loud music. In touristic places, they sometimes put speakers and some background (or not so background) music. And when you're in a tour with a guide, the guide NEVER shuts up. They speak constantly, in a stream of words, repeating themselves, advertising stuff, explaining what's around at that moment...but without pauses if they can do so. It gets tiresome really really fast, and plenty of times you would prefer a shorter explanation and more quiet time to just enjoy the place...

Anyway, around Adler and Sochi there's lots of things to see, lots of nature, specially lots of small rivers that look awesome.

Finally, during this weekend that is ending, we went to Abkhazia.

For those who do not know about this place, Abkhazia is a region inside what's considered to be Georgia. However, this region is independent from Georgia, and considers itself another country. Russia recognises it, among other countries, but Georgia doesn't, and in general it's not officially another country. Georgia and Abkhazia made war against each other several times, and rather recently (it seems the main war was at the beginning of the 90s, but there was another one 5-6 years ago). Right now you can't cross the border between them.

Abkhazia, therefore, is a country with not many laws, and not much money. It survives for the moment, until next war. During USSR times, it was part of it, so it has buildings and stuff from that time.  Between the wars, the location and all that, the country is half abandoned, half being reconstructed. However, people said it was very beautiful, and worth a visit (in Adler, we live around 8 km away from the frontier with Abkhazia).

We booked a hotel in the capital, Sukhum, and we went with Jordi Gomez, Jordi Nadal and Misha (who had the car to go there).

It's one of the most beautiful places i've ever seen.

First, the country is half abandoned. There's not many people around, much less than in the Sochi area, and you notice it. Second, since it's a poor region, there's less industry, clearly, less things going on. There's construction, and lots of places are not maintained, so there's trash sometimes, or really bad and rusted structures, but the nature is extremely clean. You don't feel the dust that covers everything in Sochi.
The water in the sea shore, and in the rivers and lakes is extremely transparent. When the place is deep, the water looks blue, as in light clean blue, incredibly intense.

The mountains are very green, and there are high peaks and awesome views. The zone lives from tourism and tours, so there are zones with some people and lots of guided excursions, but still there are looks clean and impressive.

The main road is in a very good state, much better than the Russian ones. Smaller roads are much worse, half abandoned and destroyed, but you can see that there is some effort of rebuilding, at least in the main road.

The driving is crazy in here, people go very fast, they advance people with no visibility, or with cars coming from the other side. It's also normal to find cows and goats in the middle of the road, just laying there. The buildings and structures, as I mentioned, can be half new or almost abandoned, in very bad shape. There is no security whatsoever in lots of places, and clearly if you do something stupid and hurt yourself (like jumping to the sea from one dock), well, nobody is going to stop you, and it's your problem. There is lots of surreal things. You get the feeling that most things are abandoned, and people is using ruins. Nature is clearly taking back some areas, while there's some constructions going on too.

However, even some buildings look beautiful abandoned (but not all, of course). The cities are like some kind of mixture of classical structures with some soviet buildings and lots of ruins and half-build things.
The things that are new, like some lights, buildings and roads, look very new, clean, much better than anything you can find in Sochi. The dust cloud that you can notice in Adler is nowhere to be seen in here.
In the capital, the street next to the coast was full of people, occidental-looking and apparently happy. It's a poor region, but it seems they live relatively well. The only thing is a permanent war thread, that paralyses things. It seems some buildings are abandoned because they don't want to waste resources in them to be destroyed again soon (and you can see bullet -or shrapnel- holes in some of them).

Of course, not everything is perfect. I mentioned the crazy drivers, the animals in the middle of the roads, the secondary roads in extremely bad shape, the region insecurities with Georgia...but there's also the lack of personal security, the trash, the burned and destroyed things that are common around the region, or the recommendations to not go around alone, specially if you're a foreigner...

However, the feeling we have gotten in the end is that it's an extremely beautiful area, calm, very clean, with gorgeous nature and landscapes, old ruins, and "funny" things happening around you. We liked it a lot, and we would recommend to go there, if you manage to make all the paperwork to visit it and go back to Russia and you have a local guide...