The drive thru Armenia

In which Bilbo leaves the Eastern City and ventures south on the long and winding road with his new friends.
For 70kms out of Yerevan the highway is a two lane dual carriageway barrelling straight along the plains, crossed by foot/road bridges every couple of kilometres. Not that this prevents it from being crossed as if it wasn’t there by men smoking, women carrying groceries, kids on bikes or with footballs, dogs, cats, goats, sheep, in fact everything seems determined to ignore the fact theyre on a road full of overloaded trucks or cars travelling as far above 100km/h as the potholes will let them.

I was in a 4WD with 4 guys I’d just met and barely understood who they were – “the engineer” bearded and respectable, “the boss” all arrogance and authority in sunnies, and “the interpreter”. The last two had raced into the hotel, settled my bill by pulling out a wad “you could choke a dozen donkeys on”, driven me to the office weaving through traffic, walked me around and put me back in the car and then high-tailed it out of Yerevan. I was asked what music I liked “Rock?”. Sure I said. Maybe some dance. Its your car though. So about 10 minutes in a tape was held up “This is for you, its English” and the dulcet tones of Sade “this is no ordinary love” wafted through the car. I heard that entire album about 6 times that day.

The next 50-60kms are single-lane but still straight, driving past dams for aquaculture and broad sweeping plains for grazing with the bulk of Mt Ararat fixed and unmoving on one side. Thats Mt Ararat ie the one Noah left an ark on. It was in Armenia but Turkey annexed it in one of the numerous conflicts and it remains just over the border. I am very grumpy I don’t have a good photo of Ararat to share. It is impressive, massive in size, dominating the landscape. It gives you the feeling that if there is a God (or Allah, or Buddha) that this is the sort of place he’d live in, especially with the top shrouded with cloud to make sure you cant see him/her/it too.

And then the road starts winding its way up and down the first mountain pass, shrinking to one and a half lanes in places where the roads collapsed into the ravine, hairpin bend after hairpin bend, hugging the side of the mountain.
Just as quickly we were back down off the mountain driving through a narrow gorge next to a river. Coffee time – Armenian coffee, half full of the grounds. This is the roadside café- note the dogs.
The changes in the road made absolutely no difference to the driving: weaving in and out of lanes around potholes, waves and waves of identical Ladas and Skodas, lines and lines of old Russian army lorries straight out of a Cold War thriller, honking all the time - *honk* overtaking *honk* get out of my way slow coach *honk* don’t cut me off you idiot. The bullshit meter got its first test too – “These potholes are because of the winter snow&ice. They will be repaired soon”. I present to you a pothole which I suspect has been "missed" for many summers:

These are the gates to the province of ??? ("Dead flat frozen bit" I suspect - for half an hour the view was identical to the photo below). They appear from nowhere as they’re in the middle of nowhere - at the top of a mountain range just before you start crossing the frozen plateau. Very random. As was the “that is a 13th Century church over there”. The Armenian church celebrated its 1700th anniversary in 2001. And yes I meant to put the 1 at the front of that.
The man made influence was more commonly a negative one on the landscape – town after town of grey concrete flats and cube-shaped houses, impossible to determine which were abandoned, falling apart or new (the fact that the bricks were grey here doesnt help), litter everywhere, rusted steel gates, signs, fences. We stopped high above Goris to refuel and I was led to the edge of the road and told that “this is the most beautiful town in Armenia. All the roofs are red”. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not. Instead I agreed and took a photo. Theres dragon holes at the bottom of the hill in the middle of the photo.
The rest of the drive left the plateaus behind and concentrated solely on roads wrapping around hills, ranges, mountains, snowy passes (again we stopped so I could be shown the highest point in Armenia). It was like a constant roller-coaster, up, down, around, twisting, turning, snaking. The 370km from Yerevan to Meghri took us about 6 hours. It certainly couldn’t be accused of being dull, or lacking scenery. This is the city of Kapan which was built by the Russians for the huge copper mine (you can see the benches on the left).