Came for the bus, and wanted to stay for the bed
Trip Start
Jul 09, 2011
1
9
13
Trip End
Jul 30, 2011
What I did
Kobayr monastery
Sanahin monastery
Haghpat monastery
Vanadzor, Lorri, Armenia
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
And so the microbus (no, not a marshrutka minivan, but an actual bus, the yellow American school bus kind, but 30 years older!) spat us out on the Vanadzor bus station and there we were. In the middle of crumbling soviet apartment buildings, roads full of pot holes and disused soviet factories. Nice!
A B&B with a star
At the bus station, a man climbed onto the bus, and started orchestrating the tourists around; "you need to change to this bus, ow, you already have a hotel, then take this taxi." When he came round to us, he found we didn't already have a place booked, he promptly showed us a nice-looking flyer for his own hotel, and we decided to tag along.
This B&B Maghay turned out to be the best place we'd find in the Caucasus! Our driver Ashod and his wife ran a B&B from home, and had created a couple of nice apartments with balcony and a lovely view over their garden. The beds were soft, as was the toilet paper, which we were allowed to flush down an actual toilet! At night, Marine cooked us a lovely dinner, which we enjoyed in the house, which looked like a mansion with all the fancy furniture and art!
One monastery, two monastery..
Since there is not a lot to do in Vanadzor, people assume you want to do a tour by car around Debed Canyon, a great drive past four old monasteries. Ashod immediately started haggling: "one monastery, 10 dram, two monastery, 12 dram, you want four monastery?". We counted the drams we had left, and decided to do the holy trinity version: three monasteries in one day.
The first monastery, Kobayr was a bit of a surprise. Ashod dropped us by the train tracks, and we had to climb quite some way up to finally find the place hidden in the forest. Like the one in Dilijan, this church was being renovated, but it looked still more like a ruin than a church.
One Unesco, Two Unesco..
Sanahin and Haghpat together form a Unesco monument, though I couldn't really tell the difference between these two places, and all the other nice monasteries we've seen in Armenia.
Cute little fact: 'sanahin', apparently translates to 'older than that one', meaning Haghpat. Is it me, or do you acknowledge the existence of something by referring to it, thus invalidating the name itself..? Ah well...
Falling in love with Soviet crap
We'd actually already seen Debed Canyon itself on the drive towards Yerevan. It's an impressive canyon, which is ruined by the skeletons of some soviet mining facilities, villages and factories.
But you know..? By the time we past these sad-looking rusty retired cranes and bridges for the third time, I had actually grown fond of them, and could really appreciate this spectacle of a view, combining nature's best with human's worst.
Medved
Just before returning home, Ashod had another 'nice' surprise for us: a "mini-zoo". A road-side restaurant apparently thought it a good idea to keep two live bears in a tragically small and bare cage, feeding them on the left-overs from the restaurant.
We didn't really know what to say, seeing as Ashod did not really speak a lot of English, and we couldn't really change the situation right there and then. He seemed to think we would like this 'entertainment'. The bears seemed like they no longer gave a crap, and reacted almost catatonic when the 'care-taker' started spraying them with water (to make them angry?).
Remind me to look into animal rights in Armenia..
