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.