I have quite literally done more stuff in the past two weeks than i think i have done in any two weeks of my life. The last two days i have found myself a nice quiet hotel and just slept haha and watch suits but apart from that just sleep. From tibilisi i had myself a nice little plan which didnt really work out, surprise surprise. But at least the most important thing has been completed and the main purpose of my trip can go ahead. I have my Iran visa!!!! :)
Anyway more on that one later. I have been working on a pretty loose schedule up to now but the d'day of being back in Turkey on 21st May was rapidly approaching so i had to shorten my time in georgia and have some serious journeys if i wanted to check out armenia and see the breakaway republics of Karabakh and Abkhazia. My entry to armenia was one of the more memorable introductions to a country i have had, having two of the cars i was riding in break down and then arriving in the most horrendous storm i have seen in a long time. Soaked bedgraggled and slightly pissed off i arrived at the hostel having had no replies to any of the 20 couch surfing requests i had sent a week prior. Hey ho sometimes you get no luck :( As it turns out as often it does this worked in my favour as i stayed at the best hostel i have ever stayed at, truly amazing service where the only answer was yes!! Anyway i had five days in armenia so one day in the capital Yerevan was enough as its pretty small and the only real things of interest for someone with churchphobia was the genocide museum. I will fully admit to knowing nothing about the genocide aside from the fact that turkey denies it and most countries side with turkey in denying it. All you can say is that prior to 1915 there were 2 million armenians and after 1917 there were 500,000 scattered around the globe. I had been under the assumption that the turks had invaded and killed them but infact the armenians were scattered throughout the ottoman empire and it was in multiple towns and cities a few government leaders compelled to exterminate them. Despite the obvious hatred armenians have for turks in general i will say that one of the most compelling quotes was that this was 'the work of a few not the work of the majority' so i will point this out now.
The museum was an eye opener and the fact that neither the uk or the usa accepts this happened is a shame and a stain. Purely through our alliance with turkey over our requirements for middle east conflicts we skip over this little known event in history. After this it was back to the fashion parade that is Yerevan. I have never seen a city where people take so much care of their appearance, everyone looked like a model and armenia without a shadow of a doubt has the most beautiful women in the world. After Yerevan i took a couple of day trips to the big lake Sevan which looks kinda similar to lake Tahoe and also to some monasterys outside of the city. It was on this excursion with a couple of poles and sammy the irish guy we devised a plan with our taxi driver to take a two day trip to the south of the country ticking off some sites along the way like the worlds longest cable car (bet you didnt know that was in armenia) before entering Karabakh for an evening and a morning. Karabakh claims independence but since 1992 and the fall of the soviet union both armenia and azerbaijan have been fighting over it. Infact, now it is kind of occupied by armenia and in azerbaijan it is a crime to visit the area. So that is why i am now officially banned from ever going to azerbaijan with my current passport. Another first for me!! Anyway Karabakh was kind of interesting, like the genocide i didnt know too much about the war and it was interesting to interact with some of the locals even if some were decidedly unfriendly. Whilst drunk at 2am we nearly got arrested by the secret police but fortunately Jakub the polish guy i was with kissed ass so much my inflammatory comments didnt backfire. But seriously if you want to sit and ask me questions for 40 minutes pretending to want to be my friend and not answer any of mine what do you expect me to say!!
It was cool to see some of the cities etc and experience it but what i really came for was the deserted city of Agdam. It is kind of similar i guess to chernobyl where 20 years ago people left in a hurry and never returned. I had seen blogs and photos from people who had got inside and there is the classic photo infront of the mosque which was the only building left unscathed in the fighting. This was a real anticlimax as we didnt get anywhere near it as the two people we hired to get us around the army and police checks both crapped themselves and refused to take us. Needing to be back in Yerevan and with a 9 hour trip in a lada that had already broken down on several occasions ahead of us we didnt have time to try again. This sucked massively as we had driven all this way largely for nothing :( oh well you cant win every time.
And from there my epic days of endless transport changes and visa chasing began. I really wanted to visit abkhazia on my way back to turkey and just managed to get across the border at 5pm after huge delays waiting in a barbed wire confine, walking across the border i felt like a refugee with people coming past on any form of transport and with loads and loads of possesions. Being after 5pm this meant the public transport in the form of minibuses had stopped which is where the travellers worst night mare starts. Just to get moving i took a cab who dropped me in the middle of nowhere and then i got endlessly harrassed by locals trying to rip me off. With nightime approaching and 50km still to go i finally hitch hiked my way to Sukhumi the capital where i met my next couchsurfing host. Marina was russian and lived with her husband in a very old and rickety house but what it did have was a great location and a hammock in the garden. I had some plans to see stuff outside sukhumi but in actual fact i ended up chilling in a hammock, going to the beach or buying and eating massive amounts of vegetable from the market :) Sukhumi like karabakh was torn apart by war in 1992-1993 and is still only recognised as independent by 5 countries. Infact entering from georgia there isnt even a border post just some concrete blocks in the road. I never really felt too welcome in abkhazia, excusing my hosts and a couple of others i just got questions about why the UK supports georgia and endlessly harrassed for money. Other travellers i met had various stories from being extorted by police to being dragged off buses and mugged. I didnt have anything like that fortunately but it was quite intimidating in places!!!
But after this little sojourn in eastern europe my main goal was still Iran so i hightailed it back to Trabzon on an epic 15 hour day with 10 transport changes!! And after a morning where i could have cried after some heart stopping NO VISA YOUR ENGLISH answers, the afternoon staff after 200 euros and some epic hassle issued me with an Iranian visa!!! I was so relieved i couldnt quite believe it and kept checking it to make sure there was no mistake lol So now I am chilling for a couple of days before heading to Kurdistan and on to Iran. Im guessing most things will be blocked or the interent will be so slow for the next few weeks so dont expect any photos or blog posts haha
catch you later
Tucker
Anyway more on that one later. I have been working on a pretty loose schedule up to now but the d'day of being back in Turkey on 21st May was rapidly approaching so i had to shorten my time in georgia and have some serious journeys if i wanted to check out armenia and see the breakaway republics of Karabakh and Abkhazia. My entry to armenia was one of the more memorable introductions to a country i have had, having two of the cars i was riding in break down and then arriving in the most horrendous storm i have seen in a long time. Soaked bedgraggled and slightly pissed off i arrived at the hostel having had no replies to any of the 20 couch surfing requests i had sent a week prior. Hey ho sometimes you get no luck :( As it turns out as often it does this worked in my favour as i stayed at the best hostel i have ever stayed at, truly amazing service where the only answer was yes!! Anyway i had five days in armenia so one day in the capital Yerevan was enough as its pretty small and the only real things of interest for someone with churchphobia was the genocide museum. I will fully admit to knowing nothing about the genocide aside from the fact that turkey denies it and most countries side with turkey in denying it. All you can say is that prior to 1915 there were 2 million armenians and after 1917 there were 500,000 scattered around the globe. I had been under the assumption that the turks had invaded and killed them but infact the armenians were scattered throughout the ottoman empire and it was in multiple towns and cities a few government leaders compelled to exterminate them. Despite the obvious hatred armenians have for turks in general i will say that one of the most compelling quotes was that this was 'the work of a few not the work of the majority' so i will point this out now.
The museum was an eye opener and the fact that neither the uk or the usa accepts this happened is a shame and a stain. Purely through our alliance with turkey over our requirements for middle east conflicts we skip over this little known event in history. After this it was back to the fashion parade that is Yerevan. I have never seen a city where people take so much care of their appearance, everyone looked like a model and armenia without a shadow of a doubt has the most beautiful women in the world. After Yerevan i took a couple of day trips to the big lake Sevan which looks kinda similar to lake Tahoe and also to some monasterys outside of the city. It was on this excursion with a couple of poles and sammy the irish guy we devised a plan with our taxi driver to take a two day trip to the south of the country ticking off some sites along the way like the worlds longest cable car (bet you didnt know that was in armenia) before entering Karabakh for an evening and a morning. Karabakh claims independence but since 1992 and the fall of the soviet union both armenia and azerbaijan have been fighting over it. Infact, now it is kind of occupied by armenia and in azerbaijan it is a crime to visit the area. So that is why i am now officially banned from ever going to azerbaijan with my current passport. Another first for me!! Anyway Karabakh was kind of interesting, like the genocide i didnt know too much about the war and it was interesting to interact with some of the locals even if some were decidedly unfriendly. Whilst drunk at 2am we nearly got arrested by the secret police but fortunately Jakub the polish guy i was with kissed ass so much my inflammatory comments didnt backfire. But seriously if you want to sit and ask me questions for 40 minutes pretending to want to be my friend and not answer any of mine what do you expect me to say!!
It was cool to see some of the cities etc and experience it but what i really came for was the deserted city of Agdam. It is kind of similar i guess to chernobyl where 20 years ago people left in a hurry and never returned. I had seen blogs and photos from people who had got inside and there is the classic photo infront of the mosque which was the only building left unscathed in the fighting. This was a real anticlimax as we didnt get anywhere near it as the two people we hired to get us around the army and police checks both crapped themselves and refused to take us. Needing to be back in Yerevan and with a 9 hour trip in a lada that had already broken down on several occasions ahead of us we didnt have time to try again. This sucked massively as we had driven all this way largely for nothing :( oh well you cant win every time.
And from there my epic days of endless transport changes and visa chasing began. I really wanted to visit abkhazia on my way back to turkey and just managed to get across the border at 5pm after huge delays waiting in a barbed wire confine, walking across the border i felt like a refugee with people coming past on any form of transport and with loads and loads of possesions. Being after 5pm this meant the public transport in the form of minibuses had stopped which is where the travellers worst night mare starts. Just to get moving i took a cab who dropped me in the middle of nowhere and then i got endlessly harrassed by locals trying to rip me off. With nightime approaching and 50km still to go i finally hitch hiked my way to Sukhumi the capital where i met my next couchsurfing host. Marina was russian and lived with her husband in a very old and rickety house but what it did have was a great location and a hammock in the garden. I had some plans to see stuff outside sukhumi but in actual fact i ended up chilling in a hammock, going to the beach or buying and eating massive amounts of vegetable from the market :) Sukhumi like karabakh was torn apart by war in 1992-1993 and is still only recognised as independent by 5 countries. Infact entering from georgia there isnt even a border post just some concrete blocks in the road. I never really felt too welcome in abkhazia, excusing my hosts and a couple of others i just got questions about why the UK supports georgia and endlessly harrassed for money. Other travellers i met had various stories from being extorted by police to being dragged off buses and mugged. I didnt have anything like that fortunately but it was quite intimidating in places!!!
But after this little sojourn in eastern europe my main goal was still Iran so i hightailed it back to Trabzon on an epic 15 hour day with 10 transport changes!! And after a morning where i could have cried after some heart stopping NO VISA YOUR ENGLISH answers, the afternoon staff after 200 euros and some epic hassle issued me with an Iranian visa!!! I was so relieved i couldnt quite believe it and kept checking it to make sure there was no mistake lol So now I am chilling for a couple of days before heading to Kurdistan and on to Iran. Im guessing most things will be blocked or the interent will be so slow for the next few weeks so dont expect any photos or blog posts haha
catch you later
Tucker
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