Armenia - Monasteries & Vineyards

Our first full day on Yerevan and the novelty of staying in the same hotel for four whole nights.  An early start to make it out of town to the monasteries.  Yerevan is a busy town, full of cars and shops and office blocks and light industry.  Even knowing its home to a million people, the scale surprises me.  Sitting on a wide open plain at the height of Ben Nevis, surrounded by distant mountains, its a far cry from the economically devastated towns to the north.  The driving isn't better...

The first monastery sits on a rocky crop of land overlooking a village and the no-mans land of the Turkish border.  Closed, because politics.  In the distance, the snow topped summit of Mount Ararat looks down on the plain.  Once this was the pagan god of the region, now it stands behind the border, inaccessible to the Armenians who still consider it their mountain, lost in the carve up of the region in the creation of the Soviet state.

A brief detour to village full of nesting storks, every telegraph pole topped with a nest of sticks with a bird guarding the hidden chicks within. In Armenia, storks do not bring babies but they bring luck.

Afterwards we climb up through impossible mountains, like the Alps were covered in grass and stretched higher.  Coming down into wine country, we turn into a narrow canyon under towering red cliffs.  At the end, perched on an outcrop, sits the second monastery of the day, a creation for pilgrims who believe you should work hard to earn the right to pray. 

Afterwards we taste Armenian wine at a vineyard; it's too rich for my palate but the connoisseurs amongst us rate it as far superior to the Georgian wines from last week and leave with clunking bags.  Then a feast lunch by the racing river before the long drive back to the city.