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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