Poti and the Black Sea Experience

After arriving in Poti, the usual endeavour to find a place to sleep started. The guidebook spoke of a very shabby hotel full of Abkhaz refugees and an apartment which we couldn't find: the prospects looked rather dim... Until we were spotted and stopped by a yellow Pepsi van: the men joyfully hijacked us and brought us to a nice small hotel that wasn't in the book ("Gastinitsa, Ulitsa Tsarina Tamara 20", for anyone with a particular interest). They even haggled down the price for us!

Later, they came back to our hotel with some food and some drinks, vodka of course. We learned about the Georgian way of drinking: long, elaborate toasts (in our case mainly to the friendship of the peoples), lots of vodka and a sip of radioactivity-coloured soft drink to wash it all away.
One of our hosts was the former chief of police of the town of Poti, and this encouraged his friend to drink without limit: upon our enquiry whether drunk-driving wouldn't lead to a traffic fine, he laughingly answered "Omari (his friend) chief police, problem no!". Avoid yellow Pepsi vans in Poti...

The ferry from Poti to Ilychevsk was great. After our experiences in Central Asia and the Kaukasus, we anticipated a dilapidated ship ready for the scrapyard, but the MS Greifswald turned out to be a quite modern RoRo-ferry that could easily sail somewhere between EU-countries (even quite up to DNV standard...)
The beds were comfortable, the sea was very calm and the weather was fantastic. We even saw a very clear halo around the moon (e.g. here)! The only real drawback was the late arrival time in Ilychevsk: we passed immigration around 21:30, and arrived late evening in Odesa. Luckily, a nice Japanese fellow traveller knew of a good hostel near Odesa's main station, where we were very welcome even at 23:00...