I started the day with a little detour to a monastery 10km outside of Akhaltsikhe. It was a lovely ride over some (again) mountainous streets although the beginning, i.e. to find the right way out of the city was not as easy as expected. I asked the first person I met for the way, and fortunately the Sapara-monastery is pretty well known and there is also little room to mispronounce the name in a unrecognisable way 😉 He pointed in one direction and said “1km, then right”… I did that any ended up in some rural area that would, for sure, not host a monastery. I asked again and was sent back to where I started… but I don’t travel for the first time in areas where I cannot communicate easily with local people so I remembered a technique that I first developed in India and that had been of very good use in several occasions after the initial development… I ask three people for the way and take the direction in which the most of the interviewees point. This has not always really brought me where I wanted to go, but it reduces the risk of failure substantially…
The monastery was lovely and what was really an experience in one of the main sights in one city (or surroundings) was that I was the only tourist visiting. In fact there was only one more person at the site, namely a monk who was guarding the inner part of the monastery with some relicts, which I assume were of some (also) monetary value…
Then I hit the road to the Armenian border… not having a navigation system anymore …it was not stolen, just the countries on the system do not include the countries east of Turkey 😉 , I had to ask my way through again, in particular after every parting of the ways… one of the guys I asked at the side of the road asked me back if he could come with me… I said “yes”, and took on the first hitchhiker in my life… I wanted a change and some company, and also there was a practical component as a local would for sure know how to get to the Armenian border, especially given that he said he worked at the border, also was wearing a uniform with Georgian flags and other symbols… my plan of the human navigation system worked out, if only for 1h when he said that he would have to get down at his family’s house. The second part, where I wanted some company, was not so successful… he was not the talk-active type and the fact that we didn’t have an overlap in languages was, what seemed to me, a real advantage for him. Anyway, he fit into the picture that I got so far from people working at borders… they never smile! I already started thinking that there might be special training centres for border patrol and customs clerks where they unlearn how to raise the corners of the mouth… 😉
The road to the border on the Georgian side was extremely bad and reminded me of the mountain road that I had taken the day before… it almost felt as if Georgians want you to never leave again, seriously, sometimes it was hard to make meters and I was going a zigzag course on the road to avoid (most of) potholes. The border (Guguti/Gogavan) was almost empty. At the Armenian border there was only one more car in front of me, but Armenians, very customer-service-oriented, had two processing lines for cars operational and so there was literally no waiting time at the border… but there was processing time, as for the first time ever I had to temporarily import the car, including all the customs formalities… although I didn’t have to wait for the processing I spent some 1h at the border until all the papers were filed, stamped and paid for. The car insurance was for 6,000 Dram and, as always, I asked for a tax invoice. Not because I wanted to make the guy’s life more difficult than necessary but because I really needed it… It was a long process, involving several people and translations back and forth until I was finally explained, that an invoice is never issued, in fact can’t be issued… but, they also found out that there apparently was a mistake in the charging because the cost of the insurance was for 5,000 Dram only…
I arrived in Yerevan in the evening hours and got a wonderful welcome at Ed’s parent’s house with a lot of hugs and tons of incredibly delicious food. The table was so fully covered with different dishes that one wouldn’t see the actual table anymore and when we were still eating a little bit off what was already there, Ed’s mom already brought the next dishes, almost putting the plates on top of one another because there was no other space left. When we finished food, I said that the table looked still equally full as when we started and Ed explained to me that it is considered a host’s blunder if the guest manages to eat everything that was offered… not in 1,000 years could we have eaten all of it 😉 …so if there is a scale between “mission completed” and “blunder” the result was clearly fully: mission completed 😉 THANK YOU VERY MUCH !!!
Later we did a little sightseeing of Yerevan by night and had a drink in one of the restaurants in the centre! It was a lovely welcome, and it would continue that way the next day too…
Nomads4Children 