Our Frugal Trip To Georgia, Day One: Vani Sulfur Hot Springs and Batumi

Hello there from Georgia! As I wrote in my post yesterday, today we left on a 6:45 am flight (meaning we woke up at 3:30 after only getting to sleep at midnight after a late arrival to Cyprus) from Larnaca to Kutaisi, Georgia. It was a 2 hour flight and, fortunately, I managed to sleep for some of it.

When we arrived in Kutaisi, the guy from the car rental company met us at the airport and he told me the price of a SIM card at the airport was a good price, and it was- 15 GEL, or $5.27 for a sim card for 7 days with unlimited data. I paid for the car- 210 Euros, or 220 dollars for a week, and then we were off.

Driving from the airport to Kutaisi felt like I was driving in Seattle, almost, because of the constant snowcapped mountain that filled my view anywhere I turned, just like it happens with Mt Ranier in Seattle.

We stocked up on groceries and necessities at Carrefour, which is, in my opinion, Europe's version of a Walmart Supercenter with the same type of variety of items and good prices.

Then it was time to drive to Batumi, where we'd be staying for the next two days. Batumi is a city on the Black Sea, also called the Las Vegas of the Black Sea, and it is a long drive from Kutaisi there. But on the way, we first had an important stop to make.

One of the things that Georgia is most known for is its hot baths, sulfuric geothermal springs that you can find all over the country. These hot baths generally are either private ones that you can rent for lots of money, or they are cheaper public ones that are gender segregated (and people often are in the nude). Since I was coming with my son, gender segregated ones weren't an option. But it felt weird to pay for a private hot bath with my son, not to mention the cost. 

However, I found out about natural hot springs that are out in public, and this one, the Vani Sulfur Pool, was the most conveniently located based on where we were traveling, and it seemed like the nicest option anyhow.

We drove there through winding roads in the countryside. The beautiful fall colors everywhere made me nostalgic since we don't have that where we live.

One thing I noticed already from the start is all the dogs everywhere. Wild dogs everywhere you turn. If you're afraid of dogs, Georgia is not the place for you. 

But at some point, as you go more into the countryside, you stop noticing the dogs as much, because instead there are cows everywhere. 

And I mean everywhere.

 Blocking the road entirely so you can't drive until they move. 

Parading down the road in droves. 

Sometimes it's on back country roads, and sometimes in the middle of towns. It is hilarious. There are so many cows on the road that there literally are cow crossing road signs. 

I was thinking of counting how many cows I saw on the streets but it probably was over 50, maybe even into the hundreds.

Eventually we made it to the turnoff to get to the hot springs. I knew it was in the middle of a field, but that didn't prepare me for just how ridiculous the road would be to get there. Google maps says that that stretch of road is 1.9 kilometers and takes 10 minutes, and my son was surprised that it took that long to get there. 

However, we ended up going probably less than 5 kilometers an hour because of how many small ponds we had to cross to get there. Yes, ponds. While they'd be giant potholes if the ground wasn't wet, there were nonstop potholes filled with water every meter or two, some of them only covering part of the road but much of the time you had no choice but to drive through the pond. I was scared that the water would be high enough that it would get into the car, but fortunately that wasn't a problem. 

There even were areas that felt like rivers that merged into the road, making it almost hard to see where the river ended and the road started. Or maybe it was just from flooding from recent rains? How am I even to know. It was just ridiculous.

As we drove we were sure no one else would be there because of how terrible the road was, but there were a few people there who'd arrived the day before and had been camping in the area. Apparently in Georgia you can just come and pitch a tent and make a fire anywhere wild basically. 

A few more locals came in while we were there.

I wore my bathing suit under my clothes even before we arrived because I knew there would be no place to change there, and my son changed in the car.

It was really hard to get from the car into the water in just a bathing suit because of how cold it was, but inside the water it was blessedly hot and you didn't want to leave. 

(That is why I have no pictures of me inside, I wasn't going to have my son get out to snap a picture of me.) 

It smelled so much like hard boiled eggs there, but you ignored the smell after a while. The pool was big enough for a few of us to lay out and not touch each other. And deeper than I thought it would be, about waist high on a short person.

After we got out we ran to the car, putting towels down on the seats to keep them dry, and blasted the heat so we could dry off. We drove to Batumi, about 2.5 hours from there, and my son slept a large part of the way. (He didn't sleep on the plane.) At a certain point I started feeling tired, so pulled over and napped about 30 minutes or so in the car to get my energy to drive the rest of the way.

We arrived in Batumi, and the contrast between that and where we'd been earlier was stark. Batumi was lit up like a Christmas tree, with bright, colorful lights covering most of the buildings, many changing colors in front of your eyes. 

Batumi feels like a city of skyscrapers. The building I'm staying in has 45 floors! Google tells me there are 31 skyscrapers (over 25 floors). There are many casinos there and fancy hotels including many American brands like Sheraton, Hilton, Marriot, etc... 

We got to the Airbnb that we're staying at but there wasn't parking anywhere nearby so we had to park further and lug what we needed in from the car and going back to get stuff we realized we needed. And then we made supper, did a little work, and headed to bed. (I started writing this post yesterday and only finished it today.)

Have you been to hot springs before? Would you go to one outdoors like this with absolutely no amenities? If you drove on country roads to get to a spring like this and then saw the road there was like this, would you go on or just pass? Have you ever driven on roads this bad? And if it was really cold out, would you be willing to step into the cold to go to a hot spring like this?