The Month of June, Part V: Yerevan

Emilie and I spent our first day in Yerevan exploring the city, which really just meant boarding random city buses and finding ourselves lost over and over again. Mostly, we spent the day reveling in the fact that we were finally in Armenia. Just by chance, we ran into some LDS missionaries on the street and were invited to attend the 10-year anniversary celebration of LDS missionaries in Armenia and Georgia, which was taking place that afternoon. It turned out to be a very spiritual experience. We met some amazing local people, watched a few presentations on the history of the country and the Church, and ate lots of cake.

Almost every morning in Yerevan, I took a walk across the aging Victory Bridge over the Hrazdan River in the shadow of the city’s renowned Ararat cognac factory. Aside from a few rainy moments, the weather was awesome, and the bridge offered an unobstructed view of Mount Ararat on the horizon. The city of Yerevan has been rebuilt nicely over recent years and can be very charming in certain areas. But, of course, it was out in the countryside where we experienced the stunning beauty of Armenia.

The purpose of the Armenia trip was to do a story for LDS news outlets on LDS Charities’ clean water project in the region. The current project, once completed, will provide clean water to about 40,000 people in 14 villages. (I’ll post the article I wrote here as well.) During the week that Emilie and I spent in the country, I was able to spend three days with the Blotters (the LDS humanitarian missionaries overseeing the project) and Nshan (the chief engineer involved in the project, a local Armenian) out in the countryside visiting the various villages involved in the project, and meeting the mayors and people of the villages. It was such a fantastic experience, and to be able to interact in that way with these people living in the remote parts of the country made my stay in Armenia one of the definite highlights of the entire summer.

Plus, never, till this summer, did I know that I had never tasted a real apricot before. The difference between an Armenian apricot and the imposter fruit we get here in the States is like the difference between tiramisu and a twinkie.

One of the highlights of the Yerevan stay was our visit to the Armenian Genocide memorial. I had never learned much about the Armenian Genocide until I read Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell a couple years ago. Between 1914 and 1918 at least 500,000, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, Armenians were killed by the Turks. The museum was very informative and the reverence of the memorial grounds was moving. The beautiful monument stands on a hill overlooking the city, a giant spike piercing the sky. In my mind it stood as an ominous warning of man’s inhumanity to man, a somber reminder that this vicious tendency towards malice and barbarity has played itself out on such a large scale time and time again, even in recent history.

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The Month of June, Part IV: Akhaltsikhe to Yerevan

We awoke in Akhaltsikhe to find that the majority of the buildings in the town had electricity again. I ran across town to a bank with an ATM and was able to withdraw some local currency to pay for our hotel and the bus ride to Yerevan. We called the old cab driver from the day before and made our way to the bus station, where we boarded an 18-passenger van for the four-hour drive to Tbilisi.

Forty minutes into the ride, in the middle of the Georgian countryside, the driver began to yell loudly at no one in particular and we pulled quickly to the side of the road. Most of the passengers filed out to stand on the curb and light a cigarette. Emilie and I sat and watched as our driver pulled out the spare tire from under our bags in the back.

We didn’t have too much time to explore Tbilisi, as our main objective was to get to Yerevan by the following day. But we did see quite a bit of the big, bustling city through bus windows, although Emilie and I quickly found that getting around on buses is more difficult than it should be. The ticket machines on the buses cost 40 tetri (the equivalent of cents) and only take exact change. We had a really hard time trying to find anyone who would give us change for the big bills the ATM gave us, and ended up mostly riding around town without paying.

We finally found a van at the train station that was making the trip to Yerevan in a couple hours, left our bags on our seats and ran to find some food. It was then that I remembered that I didn’t yet have the required visa for Armenia.

At that point a little bit of panic set in. Emilie was better prepared and had purchased her visa online before she left the States. The electronic version of the Armenian visa can be printed and stapled into the passport. We ran down the streets of downtown Tbilisi, stopping anyone willing to speak either Russian or English, to ask for the nearest internet café.

After growing more and more frantic, as our time was growing short and no one seemed to know where we could access the internet, we stumbled upon a small sign no bigger than a single sheet of paper, that said “Internet” with an arrow pointing to the building’s entrance. We climbed the stairs of the seemingly abandoned building with some trepidation, doubtful that an internet café was hidden somewhere in its concrete rooms. But sure enough, behind an old wooden door, rows of preadolescent kids sat playing violent video games while yelling across the room at each other. We asked the woman in charge if we could print something from the internet and she agreed to let us use her personal computer.

Our next wave of panic came when we realized that the visa was not issued for five days after the application was submitted. I had paid the $60 fee, but would have no visa until four days after I had agreed to meet the Blotters in Yerevan. I decided to print the receipt anyway and try my luck with the Armenian border guards.

The six-hour bus ride from Tbilisi was hands down the worst bus ride I have ever been on (that is, the worst comfort-wise. The 36-hour bus ride from Chisinau to Prague takes the cake as far as length of misery). That includes a ride through a jungle in Ghana, cruising at 70 mph down a road riddled with potholes. That drive, which left every passenger covered in a thick layer of red dirt, was the equivalent of a pleasure cruise compared to this route. And Emilie and I did it twice, to Yerevan and then back to Tbilisi a week later. The roads are so bumpy that there is never a moment when you are not bouncing several inches off your seat. And there are moments when you unavoidably hit your head on the roof of the van. There is no way to hold yourself down, take a nap, or do much of anything besides stare out the window and try not to become carsick as the vehicle winds its way up the perilous mountain paths that seem all too precariously built into the side of the cliffs. That aside, the scenery is gorgeous.

Emilie and I decided that our best chance at my technically illegal entry into Armenia was to claim ignorance. We would pretend like we didn’t know each other (really an absurd trick given that we were the only two foreigners on the bus) and I would go through the customs line well before she did to have a chance to plea my case and claim the website to be unclear and ambiguous. It was neither, but the electronic version of the visa was new enough that it caused some confusion among the border guards. They liked that I had the $60 receipt and that I spoke Russian, and after 30 minutes of debating amongst themselves and sending me to different booth windows, they finally let Emilie and me both through.

The driver of our van agreed to take us to a cheap motel he knew of on the outskirts of Yerevan. We pulled down a dark alley at about 1 a.m. and the driver pounded loudly on the door until the motel owner woke from his sleep and led us to our concrete room. The facilities were Spartan, but sufficient. We adjusted the rabbit ears on the black and white television in the corner until we could hear CNN broadcast through the static, and fell asleep happy to feel connected to the outside world, yet excited for the adventures of Yerevan.

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The Month of June, Part III: Istanbul to Akhaltsikhe

Saturday afternoon, Emilie and I boarded a bus to Kars, a small city in the East of Turkey. We were somewhat apprehensive about the twenty-something hour-long bus ride along the northern half of the country after we realized that outside the touristy area of old downtown Istanbul almost no one speaks any English. But after being served cookies and Cokes and being doused repeatedly with what we came to refer to as “holy oil,” we decided this was probably the best bus ride we’d ever been on. And the scenery was breathtaking.

We arrived in Kars the next day and began our search for a bus to Posof, a town near the Georgian border. Our destination was Armenia, but given the on-going and current strain in the relationship between Turkey and Armenia, the border between the two is closed. So we had to go around. After several frustrating attempts at overcoming the language barrier and then wandering aimlessly around Kars, we somehow managed to secure ourselves seats on a passing bus on its way to Posof. It was the beginning of a string of amazingly lucky events that got us all the way to Yerevan.

Passing into the mountains and into the tiny border town of Posof was one of the most picturesque legs of our journey. Then, after chugging slowly up a steep incline and pulling into the driveway of a small shop, we exited the bus into the pouring rain. A middle-aged man with his young son agreed to drive us to the Georgian border for a few dollars. We raced along the narrow hillside road higher and higher up the mountain, occasionally stopping for a picture moment or a slowly moving herd of cows.

We reached the border checkpoint in the early evening to find the place completely empty and seemingly deserted. We wandered from booth to building searching for an idea of where to get our passports stamped. We might have just walked straight through without talking to anyone if not for our fear of being shot in the back of the head by an invisible sniper. Finally someone spotted us through a window and called for us to approach the building for inspection. The rain continued to pour and our clothes were completely soaked through as we stood outside waiting for the border guards to finish with our passports. At last we were given the go-ahead and made our way to the Georgian side.

The Georgian side of the border was equally deserted and we felt even more lost and confused as to where we were supposed to go. Shivering from the rain, our desperate search for shelter led us to a large barn at the end of a gravel road. As we shook dry and started to think this might be a decent place to hide for the night, we noticed a shed with a window lit at the edge of the inside of the barn. We wandered closer and a gruff border patrol guard emerged. He began muttering something in Georgian, then switched to broken English, and finally I interjected a quick, “Do you speak Russian?” “Of course!” he said. And then we were best friends. We filled out a couple forms, got our passports stamped, and then were quickly ushered into a warm room where we joined three other border patrol guards to watch soccer on soft couches and chat about Georgian politics. They called a taxi for us from the nearest village, but we spent nearly an hour hanging out with the border patrol till our ride arrived. As we loaded our bags into the cab, one of the border guards asked if it was a guitar I was carrying around in my big bag. I said it was, and he said, “Aw, I wish I’d noticed it earlier. We could have played some tunes!”

We bounced along the muddy road to Akhaltsikhe and received a history lesson on the region from our 76-yr old cab driver who spoke in a strange Georgian-Russian gibberish. As we entered the town, it became apparent that none of the shops or buildings had any electricity running. The power had been shut off to the town for the day. Our driver took us to the one guesthouse that had a generator running so that we could have a working light bulb and a warm meal. The host that greeted us at the door led us to our room and told us dinner would be ready downstairs in two hours. The bare walls of our room were eerily marked with droopy pale crosses and the shower water was cold, but other than that, we were just thrilled to have a place to eat and fall asleep.

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The Month of June, Part II: Istanbul

Emilie and I arrived in Istanbul on the morning of the 10^th of June. We had no idea where we were going to stay, but were able to find an information desk and receive directions to the “touristy” part of town. We climbed the hill from the train station completely enthralled just by the fact that we were actually in Turkey and really had absolutely no idea what to expect from this place. Besides the hairs that Emilie found on her hostel bed sheets, I don’t think there was a single thing we didn’t like about our stay in Istanbul. And we have at least 115 new Turkish friends, as the host of each restaurant we passed was quick to call out, “My friends, my friends. I have some good food for you.” Of course, you had to pay, but the food was definitely there for us if we had the resources. We quickly came up with clever strategies for politely denying the host’s offers, but eventually had to use distraction tactics to get ourselves away from the over-friendly recruiters. As we politely said no to one such man and continued to walk down the street, he called after us in a pleading tone but with a harsh Turkish accent, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey.”

I could not get over the beauty of the many mosques spread throughout Istanbul. If you are not used to the architectural style and the colossal size of so many of these structures, the mosques are endlessly impressive and thrilling. The reverent spirit of devotion, humility, and faith that we witnessed in the prayer rooms was striking and unique. The museums were great, the parks were great, the people were great, the food was great, the markets were okay, the Turkish syrupy doughnuts were great, but the mosques—the mosques were awesome.

On our last day, we took an afternoon ferry ride out to Princes Islands. The scenery and view of the city was gorgeous as we crossed the water, sitting with our feet up at the front of the boat, staring at the mosques silhouetted on the hill, and watching the ferry staff carry platters of Turkish tea around to all the passengers. The island we decided to explore only allows horses or bicycles for transportation, and the resulting contrast in atmosphere with that of the big city was stunning. But after Emilie was attacked by bugs and, inadvertently, a man with knives, we decided to head back to the familiarity of our Istanbul hostel and “friends.”

[Our day's supply of Coca Cola rolling by.]

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The Month of June, Part I: Chisinau to Istanbul

Shortly after last November’s Mason Jennings show, Emilie and I went our lonely separate ways and ended up not talking for more than five months. Then, at the end of April as I was getting ready to leave for Russia, to the astonishment of some and the “I-told-you-sos” of others, we reconnected. We stayed in touch as I trekked across the Trans-Siberian and throughout the month of May, and then, as her plans to be a nurse for the summer among Australian Aborigines were slowly dispelled, we decided she should come for an Eastern European adventure. She flew into Chisinau at midnight on the last day of May and I made it there in time to find her wandering through the train station in the morning.

The original plan had been to meet in Moscow, take a train down to Sochi, and then on to the Georgian coast, and eventually Armenia. I had scheduled to visit certain villages of Armenia in the middle of June to see the LDS Charities Clean Water projects and do a story on the Church’s humanitarian efforts in the region. But as Emilie unexpectedly ended up in Budapest and amazingly managed to make her way to Chisinau, we decided we’d skip the Sochi trip and stay in Moldova for a week before heading the long way around the Black Sea to Armenia.

The real adventure began when we boarded an overnight bus to Bucharest. We didn’t really know what we were doing except that we wanted to get to Istanbul. The bus ride across Romania wasn’t unlike other bus trips I’d been on, but Emilie ended up sleeping most of the way with her head in the aisle and feet up on the window. Our bus must have been the luxury cruiser because it featured a small TV in the front (that played an Eddie Murphy movie in Romanian) and got us to Bucharest two hours ahead of schedule. After wandering the streets desperate for some breakfast, we found the train station and immediately bought tickets for an Istanbul train in the early afternoon.



The scenery of the Bulgarian countryside was stunning and it felt horrible to be merely passing through without the time to stop and explore for a week or two. I’ve promised myself a return trip to Bulgaria sometime in the near future. Our one Bulgarian experience involved a creepy train stop in the late evening, three scrappy-looking dudes repeatedly peering into our train compartment, an enthusiastically helpful transvestite named Evelyn, and an angry Turkish train conductor that emphatically insisted that if we wander by ourselves in these parts, we would surely end up dead. Definitely a place I need to revisit.



Since this account is more of a summary of what we did, I’ve left out most details and little stories of things that happened. But the story of how Emilie and I crossed the border into Turkey is worth telling. When we boarded the train to Istanbul, we made an assumption, based on previous train experiences, that there would be a dinner car or onboard vendors or some means of getting something to eat on the way to Turkey. No such luck. Not only were we super hungry, we desperately needed water. Luckily, the car attendant was a friendly man and by agreeing to read the Turkish tourist brochures he gave us, we quickly got in on his good side.

As we continued to gripe to him about absence of food and lack of stops long enough to jump off and find something to eat, he casually invited into his coupe. From his own stash of goods, our car attendant had prepared plates of carefully cut pieces of tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and bread with two tall glasses of mango juice. We were, in turn, shocked, delighted, overwhelmed, and endlessly grateful. An hour later came the return favor. The attendant, a middle-aged Turkish man with a bushy moustache, came into our compartment and closed the door behind him. He refused to sit, but instead guarded the window to the hallway with his back. He explained slowly and in a hushed tone how Emilie and I were going to buy him whisky (he was very specific about brand, proof, and size) at the Duty Free shop on the Turkish border. Turkish law only allows each person to bring a certain number of liters of alcohol across the border, so Emilie and I were to aid him in his smuggling. He thrust the money into my hand and left as Emilie and I sat staring, debating whether this was such a good idea.

We got to the border at about two in the morning and immediately realized that neither of us had enough money to buy the $20 visa to enter Turkey. We scrambled, dug through bags, pockets, bunk mattresses, and came up about three Euros short each. While others were standing in line at customs, we ran around the train station looking for an ATM, but everything was closed and we were told the closest ATM was in the city, however many miles away. Finally, after intense deliberation, we reached the point of completely justifying using the whiskey money. Our smuggling friend was nowhere to be found, but we decided to go for it anyway. Miraculously, he had given us just enough money to buy all the whisky he wanted from the Duty Free shop and to have change enough left over to get our vises—three extra Euros apiece. At about 3:15 a.m., Emilie and I happily boarded the train into Turkey with our new Turkish visas and two liters of J & B whisky in each hand.

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