I paid a taxi driver to take me to the train station in Mineralnye Vody and caught the overnight train to Sochi. Trains are an excellent way to explore Russia. A town’s train station is generally near the center and connected to other forms of public transport, while the trains themselves are comfortable and pass through Russia’s picturesque landscape.
Sochi, where the Caucasus Mountains meet the Black Sea, has been a resort town since the Tsarist era. Stalin’s enjoyment of the seaside climate resulted in a sustained period of development after WWII. Russians still flock to Sochi’s beaches and seaside restaurants in the summer, but the forests and mountains just above the town (and right behind my hotel) are also a major attraction.
I spent two days in Sochi working from my hotel balcony and venturing down to the seaside for lunch. One morning I made an excursion to Stalin’s dacha (summer home) in the forest near Sochi.
The guided tour took us to Stalin’s office (he often slept on a cot here) and the main dining room with its enormous fireplace. Much of the dacha remains unrestored. Stalin spent extensive amounts of time in this dacha and in another outside Moscow, where he died on March 5, 1953.
When the weekend finally arrived, I decided to make a day trip to Abkhazia before catching my flight to Moscow in the early hours of the morning. Abkhazian separatists backed by Russia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s and almost immediately forced all residents of Georgian ethnicity to flee. Apart from Russia and a handful of other nations, Abkhazia has no official recognition as an independent state. However, it has its own government, police, and visa system, so it is essentially independent from a traveler’s perspective. There are regular buses to the border post from Sochi and nearby Adler. I crossed in the late afternoon and took a second bus to the town of Gagra, a beach resort since the Soviet period. I almost immediately wished I had spent more of my time in Abkhazia. The lush forests come right down to the shoreline, and the beaches were pristine and almost empty. It had all the beauty of Sochi with none of the overcrowding.
As I walked to the beach, I came across a disused train station along an active rail line. Though the sky-blue paint was now peeling, it spoke of a grander time before violence and decay.
I wished I had spent more time in Abkhazia, but I returned to the Russian side of the border to catch my late night flight back to Moscow. There were just a few more days of sightseeing left before I had to return home, and I didn’t want to miss Russia’s capital city.
