Rize sää — heinäkuu

July and August are Batumi's sea season and the forum's description is two-sided. The beach is working - stony rather than sand - and the days are warm enough that regulars tell you not to sit in the sun through the middle of them: before noon and after six is the local rhythm. The other side is that it rains a great deal here and the humidity on the Adjara and Guria coast is high enough that, as one poster puts it, clothes never dry completely. A raincoat travels with the swimwear. The record agrees on both counts: 27.9C days that feel like 33C, 21.8C nights, 18 precipitation days carrying 210.5mm, humidity 89 percent, 11.6 hours of sun and a 25.7C 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.