Rize sää — elokuu

August in Batumi is hot, very humid and genuinely wet - our row carries 218.4mm across 20.7 precipitation days at 89.7 percent humidity, making 28.9C feel like 35C. Regulars in Adjara describe humidity high enough that washing never dries properly, nights that stay warm, and a raincoat as a necessary item alongside summer clothes. Their accounts of the rain range from a few wet days inside a good month to one visitor's week with a day and a half of sun. The consolation they offer is that the city itself is worth walking when the beach is off, which in this month is a real possibility. The record: 22.8C nights, 11.5 hours of sun and a 28.6C sea.

Rize's own forum doesn't oversell November: it's one of the wettest stretches of the year here, with cold, rainy evenings down in town, while real snow is mostly reserved for the yaylas (highland pastures) above. Posters warned that unpaved roads up to those highland areas can turn muddy or close outright this time of year, needing 4WD if passable at all, and that a fair amount of accommodation outside the main towns shuts down for the season. The main coastal highway stays open and reliable, so the town itself and a Black Sea coastal drive remain doable even if the yaylas aren't.

Forum posters name May through October as the ideal weather window for Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast, including Rize, though posters visiting in May specifically describe conditions as still pretty cold despite sunshine, with a lot of rain and even snow still piled up along the nearby Zigana mountain pass. Posters consistently flag Rize as one of the greenest, wettest parts of the country - rainfall here is described as exceeding even notoriously rainy Singapore - so real rain on any given May day shouldn't come as a surprise. Posters note the region's tea, hazelnut and kiwi agriculture depends on exactly this wet climate, framing the rain as a defining, expected feature of a Rize visit rather than an unlucky exception.