Armenia - Monasteries, wine and whinging

We went on a tour of southern Armenia for our second day in the country. We don't usually like taking organised tours but decided to put our prejudices aside and accept the inevitable crowds and annoying tour group members in order to try to see more of the country in a short time. However, the tour turned out to be just as irritating as we'd feared - independent travel really is the way to go!


We were picked up by a Hyur Tours car at 9.40am and shuttled over to the main tour bus in front if their office. As expected, it was full of older, richer tourists. The bus was new and had air con though which felt luxurious after the Georgian marshrutkas. Our tour guide woman then proceeded to bellow at us using a microphone in Armenian, Russian and English about any passing sight that might be of interest (and several that were not) almost constantly for an hour until we made our first stop of the trip at Khor Virap, a monastery. The monastery was pretty interesting and was very near the border with Turkey and had good views of Mount Ararat. It also had a deep hole where Saint Gregory the Illuminator was held captive for 13 years before he managed to convince the Armenian king to convert to Christianity, making Armenia the first Christian country. There was also a second, smaller hole which Rowan climbed down but I'm not sure what that was used for, maybe St. Greg's dog. Neither of us got a chance to climb down the biggest as it was too busy. We did see a French woman having a panic attack after climbing out of it though so it must have been good down there.

Khor Virap monastery.

View to the Turkish border with Mount Ararat unfortunately obscured by cloud in the background. Mount Ararat seems to be immensely important to Armenia's cultural identity even though it is no longer part of Armenia - its been part of Turkey for decades and is another bone of contention between the two countries.

Close up of Khor Virap.

Carving at Khor Virap.

Rowan emmerging from the small pit at Khor Virap.

Some random stranger climbing down into the deepest pit.

Arid hilly landscape behind the monastery.

We all got back on our bus and set off for Noravank, another monastery. We were handed menus for overpriced set meals at a restaurant on the way - this was the lunch that turned out to be offered but not included in the price despite this being an 11 hour trip, a common feature of this tour. As our tour guide always said "You have the option to ..... (have lunch, visit the museum etc.)" but you have yo pay extra for everything. After seeing how pricey the food was we decided not to bother as we had some snacks with us.

We passed through a lot of beautiful countryside on our day trip.

We arrived at Noravank and had to climb a lot of hills to get to it. Its name means new monastery but it looked pretty old to us! The monastery was partly cut into rock and had sone nice carvings. The side chapel looked the best inside. The main church had two levels. The upper level had been recently rebuilt and the lower level had a back wall with coins balanced in crosses.

Noravank monastery building. The monastery dates from the 13th century.

One of several intricately carved tombstones at Noravank.

Noravank monastery is located in a gorge and surrounded by brick red mountains. The weather suddenly turned while we there and we could hear thunder rumbling across the cliffs.

More buildings in the Noravank complex.

More carved crosses.

Inside the two storey Holy Mother of God church in Noravank complex.

Yet more carving above the church door.

Tombstone.

Rowan standing on the steps of the church that lead up to the second floor.

Then it was all back on the bus to go to the restaurant. We were the only people not eating lunch there and the staff did their grumpy level best to make us feel as unwelcome as possible despite the lunch being "optional". We ordered a coke and a beer which the restaurant guy grudgingly opened for us and ate our lunch of bread, salami and disgusting processed cheese.


Then we got back on the bus and set off for the long steep drive through some beautiful mountain scenery to get to Jermuk, a spa town. The air was pretty cool up there and we shivered as we walked around the small resort town which appeared to still be in the process of being built and closely resembled a building site unfortunately. Jermuk had several springs with supposedly health-giving water which actually tasted foul and metallic. We wandered around the town for a bit to kill time but it wasn't particularly interesting. Apart from the scenic route I'm not really sure what the point was in visiting Jermuk.

Giantr grasshopper we saw while in Jermuk. It was the coolest thing we saw there!

Arched promenade that houses several fountains where you can taste the "health giving" Jermuk waters.

View over the green and pleasant countryside around Jermuk.

It was a long drive back along the same road we'd taken to Jermuk. The tour guide continued to screech at us in 3 languages and when she wasn't shouting at us about passing dams or factories we were played awful music at ear splitting volume while many of the inanely grinning tour group numbers clapped along like mentally challenged sea lions. Eventually, we came to the last place on our itinerary, a wine "factory". It was more like a roadside shop, there was no sign of wine actually being made there. We were a but disappointed as we thought we might learn a bit about how wine was made but it was just an excuse to try to sell wine to dumb rich tourists. There was a brief scrum of a "wine tasting" in which those who spoke Russian got decent sized measures while us and another couple of Brits had to fight to get anything at all! The woman tour guide was hogging a lot of the wine to herself! There were several different types of wine for tasting including several blended fruit wines including cherry wine and pomegranate wine which were interesting if a little odd. The straight ordinary wine was rather bitter tasting and bit particularly good.


We took the extremely long journey back to Yerevan and didn't arrive until almost 10pm, much later than we were supposed to. Tired and hungry, we decided to be lazy and went to a pizza restaurant opposite our hostel for dinner. They were really cheesy and really good!


All in all, it was an interesting trip and we went to far more places in one day than we ever could have managed on our own using public transport. Still, the whole tour group experience had been irritating in the extreme and we resolved to avoid them as much as possible for the rest of our trip. Mass singalongs with drunken middle aged tourists, overpriced "optional" extras and random pointless detours to far flung places to stretch out the itinerary are really not our cup of tea!