Rize sää — joulukuu

Forum posters describe December as cold and rainy, with the city running at a fraction of its summer liveliness - Batumi is fundamentally a Black Sea beach resort, and posters are candid the winter version is a much quieter, less interesting place than the bustling summer season. Several posters recommend Tbilisi instead for a December trip, or suggest pairing Georgia's winter with mountain destinations like Gudauri (skiing) or Bakuriani/Borjomi (hot springs and mineral water) rather than the coast. That said, posters note real day-to-day variation - one reported a comparatively mild 20C stretch in a recent December - underlining that Georgian Black Sea winters can swing between genuinely unpleasant and surprisingly mild.

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.