Almighty Armenia

15th October

We woke the next morning to sunshine which soon obliterated the blues of the night before.  We raised the roof to air Seline out and made some porridge and strong Turkish coffee to get our own engines running.  The Armenian landscape was like nothing we had seen before.  Mile after mile of desolate and arid agricultural land, backdropped by hills with odd looking formations and high snow-capped mountains in the backdrop.  All of this was interspersed by gigantic soviet era flat blocks rising out of nowhere, with no rhyme or reason for being there, except that someone far away had put a dot on a map and decided that would be a settlement point. There was hardly a sinner about.  The devastation left over from an earthquake in the early nineties and the brutal Karobakh war with Azerbaijan was clear to see everywhere- much of the Soviet era infrastructure and housing was broken down and deserted.  It was saddening, but we were, indeed, very glad we had come 🙂

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 The roads on the Armenia side of the border were just fine if a little bumpy and after a short stop off for coffee and buns, Yerevan (the capital city) arrived fairly quickly.  We drove straight into the centre of town and found a parking spot just off a little park.  The first night in a new place is always a bit nerve wracking because you don’t know what the “wild camping” rules are but we hadn’t had any problems with parking up for weeks; the further we’d come from Europe, the less interested the Police or anyone else had been in why or where we parked up (except in curiosity; we still get a constant stream of interested locals looking inside!). In Yerevan, the main fascination was the bicycle on a rack on the back of the van. The parking warden was so enamoured by this he forgot to take ask us for parking payment 🙂

Yerevan was a total revelation.  Despite the rather brutal Stalinist architecture, this was a lovely leafy city full of cute quirky cafes and nice restaurants.  The Armenians seemed like super friendly and helpful people; every shop we went into they couldn’t do enough for us.  It was more organised and orderly than Tbilisi and you could almost imagine being back in a European city (except of course the huge price difference! This place was cheap!).  After a few admin jobs we spent the rest of the morning sightseeing at Cafesjian Centre for the Arts which is a really awesome modern art museum.  We followed this up with some tasty lunch in a café and then moved on to the History Museum of Armenia.  Armenian history is so very complicated! We couldn’t hope to remember much of it except that this area of land has been fought over for centuries and consequently is a very rich and interesting ground for historians and archaeologists to study.  The museum had a huge collection of Stone, Bronze and Iron age paraphernalia, like cookware, jewellery, clothes and weapons.  This is an excellent history museum!  The final part of the museum dealt with the more recent history: Armenian Genocide, Soviet Armenia and the Karabakh war.  We left moved and with a bit more understanding of why this little country of friendly people seems to have so few friendly neighbours.

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 By pure luck, we happened to have arrived while the Yerevan Jazz Festival was in full swing! We scored tickets to an evening performance of Armenian Jazz  to take place in the Opera House… At the bargain price of 8000 Drams each (16 Euro), we were seated near the front of the theatre.  Before the gig we wandered over to the opera house bar to try and get a beer in the 10 minutes we had before the start time.  Nothing doing- apparently booze is not sold at the Yerevan Opera House!  However, just as we turned to leave, the barman gestured for us to hang around a bit and keep quiet.  Sure enough, when the other punters had their backs turned, he poured out two enormous glasses of brandy for us.  We gratefully accepted, drank them down, had a chat about London, and then made to pay, only to find our money refused!  We humbly scuttled before the effects kicked in too hard!  Turns out Armenians operate on Irish time….it was another forty minutes before the performance began!  It started out lively, with a performance from an instrumental quartet but suddenly the music came to a halt and a compere came on stage.  He started droning on in Armenian, people were invited to speak on the stage, awards were given out and suddenly we had the creeping suspicion that we’d bought tickets to an award ceremony rather than a concert… oh God!…But then, luckily, the awards trickled out and we were treated so some excellent music!

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 We finished our day with a fine meal of Armenian cuisine (which is very similar to Georgian and similarly delicious!) and settled into Seline for a well-earned rest!

16th October

We rose to more sunshine, grabbed some takeaway coffees (I’d had my fill of “Turkish” coffee and was craving one made with espresso and milk!) and hit the road bound for Tbilisi once more.  We needed to be back in time to submit visa applications the following day and after our experience coming into Armenia we didn’t want to take any chances with how long it might take to get back out!

After about 2hrs we stopped at Lake Sevan to make some breakfast and go for a swim!  Lake Sevan is an enormous high altitude lake and, with easy access to Yerevan, is something of a Summer resort.  A seriously tacky resort, we found out (sorry Armenia!) Apparently, it has been in decline since Soviet times; the Soviets lowered the level of the lake by using the water for industry.  Nowadays, most Armenians holiday on the Black Sea coast in Georgia.  Anyway, when we arrived it was still sunny although bitterly cold.  Aoife sensibly elected to stay in the van and make porridge, however I had decided I would swim and so I swam; Aoife abandoned breakfast making to film my painfully cold immersion 🙂

After the swim I felt invigorated for the drive, and we set off for the border.  We had decided early on that a different route back would be best because the road in had been so, so horrifically bad.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be a case of “better the devil you know”…. The main highway to the border was closed for reconstruction works! So we were diverted along a road which progressively turned from bad to worse to absolutely dire to ‘this can’t possibly be the way’; There were fields to cross, dirt tracks down through woods, narrow rickety bridges over rivers and other crazy, crazy stuff!  We kept stopping to ask for directions because we were sure we must have gone wrong, but all the locals seemed to point the same way when we tried to ask directions. Not one person we passed had a word of English. We had only a place name to go on. One little Lada stopped for us in the middle of one of these ‘field roads’. We rolled down the window and smiled. They rolled down the window and about seven eager heads looked out! This was one wild, rural-looking bunch of men, with gregarious howls of laughter and about 5 teeth between them. We said the place name. One older man spoke up, ‘Can you speak English?’, he said. ‘Yes!’, we chorused, very excited by this prospect. Then he howled with laughter and started chatting away to the other boys in Armenian, and they all cackled hysterically. This was clearly the mans’ only learnt sentence of spoken English. But it gave us a great laugh anyway, as they drove off in hysterics, still waving back at us with great enthusiasm. This was typical of so many of our encounters; well meaning gestures-but not an ounce of comprehension from either side 🙂

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 After a painfully long 3-hour detour, we finally saw some real road! I almost got out of the van to kiss the potholed tarmac, flabbergasted that Seline had made it without getting another puncture (or several)!  I made a promise there and then never to curse the UK roads again for as long as I live 😉

The rest of the journey passed easily apart from the usual stops for donkeys, cows and chickens. We amused ourselves by recording videos of these :).  We made it back to the border just before nightfall.  The guards informed us of an exit tax of $15! Of all countries we traversed, an exit tax was never asked for! A bit of a dent in the Armenia experience, but hey, we were on our way to Tbilisi again.  We made it back to our parking spot in the old town and headed out to enjoy the last of the Tbilisi Autumn Festival which was going on in the city. There was a great party atmosphere about the place, with food, live music and fireworks to enjoy!

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