Armenia, Georgia and Turkey all in one Day

Yerevan is a modern city, laid out by an architect so it all works, or at least the centre does. The middle is full of parks and boulevards with many outdoor cafes and restaurants. At night it is a very nice place to hang out. In the city centre, everyone obeys the traffic signals, even pedestrians; probably because there are a lot of police about. The suburbs are a different story where you get back to the communist era shabby concrete apartment buildings and worn out potholed roads with people charging about all over the place. I headed north back towards the Georgian border and was glad to leave the dust of the suburbs behind me.

I passed some very scrubby looking villages, with many empty houses and piles of rusting machinery. Armenia has a population of about 2.7 million with 1.1 in Yerevan so that leaves a whole lot of space for everyone else. Most people in the countryside make a living farming from what I could see though this part of the country didn't look especially fertile. Like in Turkey, you see people working the fields by hand rather than with machinery and women seem to do more than the men….who seem to be very good at backgammon and tea consumption.

As I went north, the countryside got more and more stark as I got nearer the border. The are almost no trees so I guess that is why people use anything they can find to make a fence. This place is a scrap metal merchants dream. People are poor up here an it shows.

I had been saving my last bit of Armenian cash to buy petrol and was running a little low but I didn't see any petrol stations for the last 30k. At the border, I asked the customs official and he told me to backtrack 200m and there was one on the right…..funny, I thought, I don't know how I missed it. The petrol station was a man in his shed with some jerricans and a bucket and funnel. Never bought it like this before…and he sold in units of 5L, the size of his little bucket.

Over the border, I had a fantastic 50 mile descent over some steppe and the last part was through this amazing gorge with a fast flowing river in the bottom, like a little green grand canyon with the occasional castle perched on a rock.






I arrived in the same town I had stayed two days previously and looked for a Georgia sticker for the luggage. The usual crowd of interested people gathered and chatted. Then this chap stepped up and just gave me a lovely loaf of fresh bread. Next, I asked where I might change some money and another chap walked me a couple of hundred meters to a kiosk and translated for me. They have to be in the running for the most hospitable people on the planet.

I headed for the Turkey border and arrived at very quiet crossing point which seemed to be used by truckers only. There were lines of them lined up outside the border post, I guess taking their mandatory break.I am now pretty familiar with the procedure for the Turkey crossing so it only took 20 minutes this time, thats one stamp every 5 minutes. It was late evening when I cleared and the road climbed up to 2550M on this high grassy landscape before descending to my pit. I seem to had lost my 'Rough Guide to Turkey' book somewhere so that will make life a little more challenging tomorrow.