After a good night’s sleep at what we thought was an abandoned filling station, we were awakened at 07.00 by banging and shouting and peeked out of the window to see a tyre repair enterprise at work. The owner was very friendly and indicated that he was happy for us to have our breakfast surrounded by trucks having their wheels removed and tyres changed but we thanked him and moved on after he shouted at his queue of customers to get out of the way.
Driving out of Marneuli, I took the wrong road and drove down the lesser of the two roads from Tbilisi to Yerevan. We stopped at Dmanisi because the tourist blurb said that the museum had a bone from the missing link between ape and man (who I thought lived in Tolsta Chaolais) about 1.7 million years old. Turns out it doesnt. We struggled painfully slowly past a huge flock of sheep being taken down the road, although the Georgians just drove straight at them and the sheep were bright enough to get out of the way at the last split second. After returning to the main road after our detour to Dmanisi, we caught up with the sheep again to much mirth by the shepherds.
The road to the Armenian border was appalling, with large numbers of huge potholes full of water. We expected the border post to be manned by one man, but the Caucasians seem to observe a law whereby the smaller the amount of work the larger the number of people needed to do it. We got stung for £33 on the Georgian side for not having insurance despite the fact that nobody told us we needed it when we crossed from Turkey, and getting through the Armenian side of the border was a nightmare. I lost track of the number of bits of paper I accumulated and number of signatures I had to give. Had to pay £18 for “ecology” and, on asking “what ecology?” was told it was for “road building!!!”.
Had to get insurance and an extremely pleasant young man from the Russian Rosgosstrakh company spent ages typing all the details about the van into his computer and, after giving us cups of coffee to soften the blow, asked me for 3,000 drams. Gulp. Erm… how much is that? £4.78. We could afford that. Had a most pleasant discussion with two Finnish bikers, Ulla and Heikki Mustonen from Turku, who are travelling to Uzbekistan via Iran, and a Spanish gent wh is biking to Vladivostok and across to Alaska. Makes our little journey seem pathetic by comparison.
Armenia has a lovely landscape of rolling hills covered in sparse grassland. Vanadzor was an old Soviet-era industrial town where all the factories went bust after the break-up of the USSR and trade with Russia stopped. Quite the most poverty-stricken town we have yet been to. A poignant moment was when we passed through Spitak where an earthquake killed 25,000 people in the early 1980’s. It has now been rebuilt but the pillars of the huge flyover which collapsed during the quake have been left standing as a memorial. Yerevan was a pleasant town and we are grateful to HSBC for letting us sit outside their bank and use their wifi to get the blog up to date.
We pressed on to Artashat and spent the night outside a huge building which, when we woke up in the morning, we ascertained to be the Ararat Region police station. A friendly man came out in the morning and told us we could stay but we moved on to the edge of the town and were confronted by a glorious view of Mt Ararat from the Armenian side.
