Kumisi Lake

Kumisi is not a beautiful lake in the ordinary sense, and it is better to know that before setting off. It lies twenty-four kilometres from Tbilisi in a treeless steppe basin: yellow hills, salty ground, wind and near-total emptiness.

The lake is shallow and saline. In the Soviet period its mud was used for treatment and a sanatorium stood on the shore; the remains of the buildings are still there. Over recent decades the lake has shrunk sharply, and in dry years it becomes half salt flat, with a wide dried margin and a white crust. That is an environmental problem rather than a characteristic. After a wet spring the water returns and Kumisi briefly looks like a proper lake, with the bare hills reflected in it; by August of a dry year the same view is a white pan crossed by tractor tracks.

For birds, though, it matters. Kumisi sits on a migration corridor, and in spring and autumn waders, gulls, ducks and a shifting cast of passage migrants stop on the shoreline. For birdwatchers this is the nearest patch of open steppe to Tbilisi, and a morning with binoculars is usually productive.

For everyone else it is a strange, emptied landscape — litter along parts of the shore, abandoned buildings, silence. Anyone looking for scenery should go elsewhere; anyone who wants to see a completely different side of Tbilisi's surroundings will find an hour here worthwhile.