Pots and bombs - Armenia to Georgia

 Our view on Armenia had improved overnight thanks to a good meal in a good restaurant - funny that. Nonetheless we found it a strange place from the inhospitable and bleak border crossing, not somewhere you would be promoted to, if you were in that line of work to the very European Yerevan. We suppose it is still trying to come to terms with its post Soviet identity. Most of Armenia is high with an average altitude greater than 1500m - maybe these were some of the bleak parts, but the Alps and Pyrenees have never struck us as being bleak. We were told that the money comes  from copper and other minerals. They spend a lot of it on the war with Azerbaijan in 1994 when they 'liberated' the Nagorno- Karabakh region, which Stalin had assigned to Azerbaijan. The Azeris still have a bit of it, but not the bit that contains the gold mines. It is still a live conflict with rounds being regularly fired off across the current borders. Although intrigued, our route didn't take us there and we would have needed  additional visas and probably a different sort of insurance too.

So we set off positively from Yerevan and even though it started off positively sunny on the way to see another historic monastery, this one perched on a hill overlooking a lake - Armenia's 'coast', it was positively cold. Well it was near enough at 2,000 m again and one wonders if it ever gets warm here - we are nearly summer after all and we were the only ones taking coffee in somewhere that could easily seat 200, but how they would ever serve them we could not imagine.

From there we headed North again and the roads started deteriorating. It became quite stressful and Francoise jarred her back again. We stopped for a breather.

 

They were repairing the roads occasion but the progress seemed to be slow; a kettle for the tar pot not being the best possible solution. We then tried three times to find the evening's hotel. On the first attempt we got within 12km only to find the the continuation was a dirt road. We then did a 30km loop to find that we were ending up pretty close to where the aforementioned dirt road started. So we then did a further 30km loop to be faced with 8km of bad, very bad, road works.

We never got an answer out of our teddy mascot, but Francoise was hurting; the bike was developing rattles and noises that were only adding to Paul's stress levels, so the mascot might have been the only one that was OK with the day. There was also a coach load of Austrian tourists at the hotel, to see we cannot imagine what - they had been ferried in by mini-buses and Lada's as the coach had refused to go through the road works,  so service at dinner was positively slow too. Need to get the towels out on the chairs before breakfast in the morning.

So we left via the same roadworks and the border and having done it once with all the plant working, it was not too difficult to do it again. Though Paul is worrying about the bike. 

It was then straight to the border and past one of those copper mines/ smelters which could probably have doubled as the Orc production plant from Lord of the Rings. Bye-bye, and probably not 'au-revoir', Armenia. Border back into Georgia was pretty uneventful and slightly more hospitable than where we had come in. Then a relatively straight forward run to the wine growing region of Georgia as our next staging post - straightforward as long as we ignore the inside corners on the hairpin bends....

On the way we stopped for a Georgian kebab, which was one of the highlights of the day and a cyclist - from Leeds but living in Tbilisi for five years - started chatting to us and asked us how we found the roads. Bomb holes, not pot holes was the way he described them.