Only The Wide Sky

From the top of the Cascade Complex. Mount Ararat can be seen in the distance

To approach Yerevan from the north is to enter a mildly hallucinatory state. One has just passed through the exquisite foothills of the Lower Caucasus and is faced with a valley where zoning rules do not reach and where whatever can be built is being built, wherever there is room. The outskirts of the city resemble nothing so much as the pieces of a child’s model town set thrown into the air and left wherever they landed- here a McMansion that would not look out of place in the more vulgarly wealthy precincts of the US, sidled up next to corrugated tin shacks; there a primary school with a splendid view of a cement factory. Brand new Audis cut off Lada Nivas  as they tear towards downtown. It is as lawless a suburban landscape as could be imagined. Looming over it all is Ararat, the spiritual symbol of the nation despite the fact that it is ruled over by a bitter enemy. The visual confusion resolves itself as one nears the outskirts of the city proper: rows upon rows of deeply stereotypical Soviet buildings, the architect’s brief calling for his usual grey, forbidding and dilapidated. Even an optimist begins to fear the worst for this town.

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I have always been drawn to cities. To a detached mind they offer unparalleled scope for observation; there is simply more stuff to consider in the course of a walk than can be found in the countryside. They also provide the individual with a greater opportunity to have what might be called “positive unanticipated social interactions”, or as James Howard Kunstler puts in his work The Geography of Nowhere,

“You are able to see other people along the way. You may even have a conversation with a stranger. This is called meeting people, the quintessential urban pleasure. (Or else it is called a mugging, the quintessential urban calamity.)”

I have further been drawn to cities as laboratories for how built environments influence human activity- how they affect how we work, how we socialize, how we express our political rights (or lack thereof!). Visiting six different national capitals in a short period of time offers the amateur urbanist a great opportunity to examine what, in the physical landscape, is privileged and prized in each and to consider what this may say about the societies that built them. It is even more interesting, to my mind, to be able to case study five capitals of countries that all received their independence, from the same central government, at the same time. Interwoven in these relatively new national capitals (though most were SSR capitals) is a story about the past 26 years, about fledgling countries coming to grips with their independence and with their relationship to their history, to Russia and to the rest of the world. So let’s begin with the first one appropriately first.

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I begin by sharing two stories, both from Kyrgyzstan.

The first is that while horse riding along Lake Song-Kol (I believe Kol and Kul merely mean “lake” in Kyrgyz, so this is a bit like saying Lake Song Lake but it is what everyone calls it in English), we stopped at a yurt camp with our guide to sleep for the evening. Shortly after we arrived a large number of middle-aged Kyrgyz entered the camp. These were, we learned, friends of the patriarch of the family that ran the yurt camp, and they had come for a big party. A little while later, while Grace was off to the privy, I was standing outside when some of the party spotted me. The loudest of the bunch, a man with an impressive array of gold teeth (if he had any real teeth remaining, they weren’t obvious) approached and asked where I was from. I told him I was American and he shouted “TRUMP” in my face, assaulting both my ears and my nose with the scent of pure booze. Older Kyrgyz men frequently shout TRUMP upon making my acquaintance; one earlier that day declared me “SON OF TRUMP,” causing peals of laughter from the assemblage and a deep sense within me of having gotten clowned.

Back at the yurt another of the men declared, “Trump хорошо, Obama хорошо, Putin хорошо” (Trump is good, Obama is good, Putin is good). While I couldn’t quite get on board with his judgment of world leaders I appreciated his broadmindedness. Thus acquainted, I was taken by the arm towards where their cars were parked to try “schnapps”. At this point Grace returned and we both had shots of vodka pushed into our hands with the instruction to down in one. This repeated twice more in short order. The men seemed particularly impressed with Grace’s fortitude and all wanted to take pictures with her.

Grace and our new comrades

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We arrived in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, at around 5 AM, our flight from Athens having been delayed by about an hour. Our first day in the city was spent recuperating from the ungodly flight time and exploring the old city and the modern east bank of the river. I think we will have more to say about our time in Tbilisi as we revisited this vibrant and beautiful city several times over the course of our travels in Georgia, so I won’t dwell on it too much in this post except to say that our first days were spent wandering the streets of the city and getting acquainted with Georgian food and drink.

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As Chris has said, we arrived in Santorini on Wednesday 12 July 2017. What he did not say was that I was the first person through passport control. It was great, it felt like one of those days in London when you are the first person off the tube right by the exit and therefore the first person from your train onto the central line/the street. Except better, because you’re on holiday, rather than on your way to work.

We then left Santorini for Athens on Sunday 16 July. My key observations from Santorini are (in no particular order):

• Sunsets: fantastic, never seen any better. We had a 160 degree view of the sea from our balcony and scheduled our evenings around being home for sunset, save for one night when we watched it from a catamaran (thanks to Chris’s brother Rob for that beautiful and memorable wedding present). This is us, on the boat, at sunset, by the Red Beach (no prizes for guessing why it’s called the Red Beach):

• Food: delicious. Whatever vitamins there are in tomatoes, we have exceeded our recommended daily allowance. According to a fellow tourist we overheard at a restaurant, this is because American tomatoes are picked under-ripe and injected with nitrogen…The feta was also delicious, which I cannot explain as the marvel of the EU means that feta in Greece should be the same as feta in England…

• Animals: everywhere. It is impossible to eat a meal out in Santorini without some dog or cat trying to badger you. I saw some idiots feeding the animals from their plate and glared at them. We also saw a donkey making its way up Pyrgos at a fair pace. It would have overtaken us had we not gone a different way.

• Beach: not worth it if you have your own cave jacuzzi. Seriously, get a cave jacuzzi, it will be your best ever holiday decision.

• Culture: we were very pleasantly surprised by how much there is to do in Santorini and how much of it has yet to be tainted by mass tourism. We stayed in the medieval capital of the island, Pyrgos. There are clearly tourists there, but we also saw plenty of local people, including our neighbour. He enjoyed the sunset with us on the first night, whilst blasting out Greek folk music, but on other nights clearly determined early on that this wouldn’t be a perfect sunset and simply gave us a wave and listened to his tunes down in his house (still loud enough for us to hear – don’t you worry). Following a recommendation from the captain of our catamaran, we also had a great time exploring the extremely narrow “streets” of the village of Emporio. We also visited the ancient city of Akrotiri, destroyed by an earthquake in c. 1613 BC and the two museums in Thira which include artifacts from the site.

Doorsteps in Emporio (you’d better like your neighbours):

A storage room or an ancient “bank” in Akrotiri, the experts can’t decide:

So for all of the above, and many more, reasons, we had a wonderful fun, relaxing and eye-opening time in Santorini. After that R&R we were ready to start our backpacking adventure…