Month: September 2017

We only spent five days in Armenia, for several reasons: (i) Georgia was so great that we ate into a significant amount of time allocated to Armenia; (ii) the main attraction of Armenia is its monasteries, and we were fearful of suffering monastery fatigue – which was already threatening in Georgia; (iii) any other activity which involved spending much time outside was off the cards: it was 40 degrees C every day; (iv) it’s very difficult to get around Armenia as an independent traveller unless you have your own car; (v) Armenian driving is euphemistically described by Lonely Planet as “erratic”; (vi) both our arrival and departure dates were dictated by the infrequent transport from Tbilisi and to Astana. However we saw a lot in those five days and really enjoyed our time in this country.

We took a small tour from Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia) to Yerevan (the capital of Armenia) so that we could see the sights in northern Armenia which we would inevitably be going past if we took public transport. A small hostel chain, Envoy, ran a tour from their Yerevan hostel to their Tbilisi hostel every Friday and then did the return trip every Saturday (somewhat surprisingly the third hostel in the chain is in Phnom Penh…). So on Saturday 5 August 2017 we jumped in a minibus with our excellent guide, a young Armenian woman who spoke great English having spent an academic year in Colorado as a teenager. She was a recent university graduate who knew a sufficient amount about her subject, was keen to share it with us and even keener to enjoy the company of our international group. After a dearth of Americans (which Chris normally likes as he then feels special) we found ourselves in the company of four, including two Peace Corps volunteers who were taking a short holiday in Armenia before returning to teach English in Georgia. Most of our conversation was either with these two guys or our entertaining guide.

After only an hour or so we were at the border. This was my first ever controlled land border crossing and it was pretty straightforward, although there was inevitably a decent amount of queue jumping, including the border guard allowing some people to come to the front.

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On Saturday 22 July we had a truly excellent breakfast at our guesthouse in Gori. Breakfasts in Georgia were pretty much all great. You would arrive to find the table laid with bread, jam, ham, cheese and obviously the  Georgian classic: tomato and cucumber salad, at some homes the breakfast version thankfully didn’t include coriander. Just as you would be tucking into that, your hostess (or occasionally host) would appear with some additional items, ranging from eggs to khinkali (meat dumplings, a national delicacy). Sometimes your hostess would then come back with a second round of hot food. We never finished all the food we were given at breakfast in Georgia. On this particular day our hostess arrived not only with omelette but also with pancakes which she appeared to have fried in sugar – they were absolutely delicious.

Stuffed we then headed off to the train station and this time managed to successfully get on the train to Kutaisi, where the Georgian parliament was recently moved to.

The train was an old Soviet train, with signage all in Russian. It was packed full of Georgians leaving the heat of Tbilisi with their children to spend the rest of the summer in the countryside. The journey was long as the train went painfully slowly, stopped at every tiny village we went past, and then it took 45 minutes to reconfigure the train as only one of the five carriages was going all the way to Kutaisi. However the journey was comfortable, there was a decent toilet by train standards and we got to experience the renowned Georgian hospitality.

We shared a compartment with a man around our age and a woman with her two sons aged 10 and 8. The boys were playing around and we smiled at them whenever we caught their eye and said gamargoba (“hello”, not to be confused with gamargos – “cheers”). After about an hour, Chris and I were standing in the corridor of the train, looking out of the window when the older boy came over and offered us what turned out to be a bean pasty. We weren’t hungry due to our massive breakfast, but knew it would be rude to refuse. We sat down in the carriage and realised that the boys were each eating a pie, but the mother wasn’t – she must have given us her own lunch. We tried to return it, but without success. This conversation did reveal that the woman and the oldest son spoke excellent English, and we spent the rest of the journey chatting to them.  The boys showed us videos of their performances of traditional dance, and we in turn showed them our wedding photos. We got on so well that apparently the old man in the next compartment thought that we were guests of the family.

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