retiredmartin

June 2026. Armenia.

I’ll be honest, by the 5th day of our Armenia trip last week I was knackered. Or specifically, my legs were.

Sunday afternoon – 4 hours drive down to Waterbeach then Luton Airport.

Monday – 5 hours in window seat on Wizz plane to Yerevan

Tuesday – 3+ hours on packed train to Gyumri

Thursday – 3+ hours on return train to Yerevan

Friday – Wake up at 5:30am to catch sixteen (16) hour minibus tour to Tatev monastery.

I just wanted to walk.

Well, at least I got to see Mount Ararat.

I won’t bore you with history, but you learn a lot about important “stuff” in Armenia. I’d always assumed those majestic twin peaks were within their boundaries, rather than just over the border in Turkey.

Ararat dominates the Yerevan skyline, the local team (which last season “shared” eight goals with Chelsea) is named after the mountain’s most famous resident,

and the second city brewery has a beer named after it.

Even the marked viewpoint on our neverending coach trip (20 tight seats, ouch) is technically in a little bit of Azerbaijan, which I’m now claiming as an official if very wrong country tick*,

as Wikipedia confirms I’m entitled to do.

“Karki or Tigranashen  is a village that is de jure an enclave and exclave of Azerbaijan, de facto under the control of Armenia, administered within the Ararat Municipality of the Ararat Province.“

Well, you try telling that to our Armenian guide, by some distance the most impressive tour guide I’ve ever met, giving us the reality and the insight at every stop and somehow not losing her cool with the folk who always got back on the bus late.

So you’re clear, that’s apricot in the Armenian flag, not orange.

What you get for your £34, apart from deep insight into the extension of the age at which Armenian girls marry from 17 to 30 is a trip to Tatev where you ride on the the world’s longest reversible cable car (5.7 km) across the gorge to the monastery, rather closer to the Iranian border than you might imagine.

I’m all monasteried (?) out, so I’ll let Mrs RM fill in the detail on One Small Bag soon. The most striking feature were the wild flowers and immaculate gardens.

One of our party was a cable car inspector from Germany who we had to return to the base to collect. Actually, he was the one who was always late for the bus.

The journey seemed a little featureless in large part, but these pictures of Khndzoresk Cave City (that should be a football club name),

and the waterfall at Shaki,

may suggest otherwise.

The highlight of the day came at the rope bridge at Khndzoresk, where Mrs RM decided that she wasn’t walking that hill back to the park and paid the gruff driver of a red Lada 2,000 dram to drive, terrifyingly, in first gear the 200 metres up a potholed track back to the bus.

I know some folk who’d pay rather more than £4 for the visceral thrill of being hurtled uphill in what felt like a dodgem car going over bumps.

We arrived back at 11pm, too worn out even for a beer.

* _{A bit like claiming a GBG tick when you only drank Guinness, but it’s going on the world map as country 81.}