Armenia - Yerevan to Dilijan

Nearly at the end now. We left Yerevan this morning, the guide checking that we'd left nothing behind. Thirty minutes up the road, I realised I didn't have my work mobile (its been off all holiday, I just like it as alarm clock and backup). A complicated series of phone calls followed between guide, office and hotel resulting in a taxi arriving at our lunch stop some hours later with my phone. I had to pay for the taxi, an extortionate £2.50.

Another monastery, this time high at the end if a gorge, carved into the stone of the valley wall. A choir had been arranged to sing for us, which was simply spine-tingling. Once again I found myself wondering how such a perfect acoustic space could have been built over eight hundred years ago.

Onwards to an unexpected but apparently world famous Roman temple sitting high on a promontory in yet another breathtaking landscape. A lesson in traditional local breadmaking (and a chance to taste it hot from the oven) before lunch in a wildflower garden under cherry trees with a small black cat purring around our feet hoping for scraps.

Lake Sevan is simply enormous. At 5000 feet above sea level, it covers 1/6 of Armenia's total area, being around 42km wide and 70km long. It feeds both hydroelectric plants and irrigates the Yerevan plains, sustaining much of the country's agriculture. Unfortunately the peninsula is run down and shabby; our guide described the coffee stall owners as crooks and thieves.

The surrounding hills, despite their height, are green and grassy, steeply angled meadow lands. So it was quite a shock to drive through the 2km Soviet tunnel and emerge into a misty rain forest in the Dilijan nature reserve. The hotel is surrounded by forest, in which bears and wolves still roam. So now I'm lying in bed, listening to the thunder and rain compete with the passing traffic climbing up the hairpin bends, and listening for the animals beyond.