Why go
Kolkheti National Park guards the drowned world of western Georgia's Colchis Lowland, a landscape unchanged since Jason's Argonauts rowed these same waters seeking the Golden Fleece. The park encompasses Paliastomi Lake—a brackish, shallow expanse where reeds grow three meters tall—and the labyrinthine wetlands where the Rioni and Pichori rivers surrender to the Black Sea. This is one of Europe's most significant peat bog systems, storing millennia of carbon and hosting endangered Colchic water snakes, pygmy cormorants, and hundreds of thousands of migratory birds. Here, the boundary between water and land dissolves entirely; fishermen still pole narrow boats through submerged forests as their ancestors did three thousand years ago.