Travels with Tim

It was clear from the outset that Tim from Tomsk was an aggressively enthusiastic traveller. He’d already been to about half of the countries from the former USSR and was methodically ticking them off his list. Straight after his week in Armenia, he was heading to Georgia on a minibus. The morning after he arrived, we decided to look around some monuments in the centre of town. He was so keen to see Yerevan that he was already awake, packed, and sitting in the living room in the morning when I rolled out of my bunk. He gave me a generous five minutes to pack my stuff and brush my teeth, and then we were out the door and speed walking in the direction of the Cascade (a giant stairway made of limestone). The Cascade was cool – lined with little sculptures and art installations on the way up. The view from the top was very expansive, but would have been better without the smog. In the distance, you could just make out a snow-capped mountain which looked totally computer generated. It was Mount Ararat, the supposed resting place of Noah’s Ark. In summer, when the visibility is good, the mountain looms over Yerevan and makes it look like it looks in all the postcards. Now, though, it was just hazy.

From the top of the Cascade, we decided to head towards a huge statue of a woman with a sword that we could see in the distance. It was a colossal war memorial in the centre of a park overlooking the city. There was a remembrance ceremony going on as we arrived, with former soldiers and people who’d lived through WWII laying roses on the main marble plaque at the foot of the statue. Inside the statue, we found a small war museum (yes, it was a very big statue). It turns out that museums aren’t Tim’s forte. He read one sign, got bored, took some photos of me holding the Armenian flag, and then rushed out the museum as if there was a shortage of oxygen inside or something. Next, he wanted to find something to eat. What Tim is very, very good at is asking people things. He stopped at the nearest pizza restaurant (helpfully called Pizza), walked straight up to the first waitress he saw, and said ‘yo where can I get some good traditional Armenian food round here?’ Although she was a bit miffed at first, the waitress soon caught Tim’s infectious energy, and gave us comprehensive directions to a great Armenian restaurant an hour and a half away. She even recommended some specific dishes for us.

An hour and a half later, once Tim had asked another five people for directions, we finally found the restaurant in question. We ordered dolma (stuffed vine leaves), spas (a kind of yoghurt soup with wheat grains in it), and khachapuri (Georgian bready pizza-ey stuff), with Armenian lemonade (which was green for some reason). Honestly the lemonade was the highlight. But it was all quite tasty, and satisfyingly carb-based. We also went to a few art galleries that afternoon (one intentionally, one by accident).

The next day, we headed for Zvartnots, a ruined cathedral from the 7^th century. To get there, we had to walk to a minibus station on the edge of town, where there were about a hundred minibuses waiting to leave. When we got there, Tim did his usual, and asked a stranger which minibus would take us to Zvartnots. The stranger, surprisingly, didn’t know. But he pointed to an old man in a leather cap on the other side of the road. ‘He’ll know.’ He said. How he could tell that this specific man would know which minibus we needed beats me. But he did. The man in the leather cap could tell us not only what minibus we needed, but also when it would come, and where to wait for it.

Zvartnots was amazing, but after a brief photo shoot, Tim was determined to push on and find another three historic churches by foot. Each was about another hour away from the first, and we walked the whole thing on the side of an A road.

Tim’s interest in churches was a new one, and these were the first churches he’d ever been inside. Armenia is a wonderful place to be if you’re interested in churches. Christianity was brought to Armenia in the early 4^th century by Saint Gregory the Illuminator. And it’s still an overwhelmingly Christian country, with new churches and cathedrals still being built. The churches are mostly ‘domed tetraconchs’, made from the beautiful dark stones basalt or tufa, and with very dim lighting on the cavernous interiors just to remind you how old they are. Tim wasn’t so well-versed in church etiquette, which is very understandable. But sometimes I felt like he was pushing it a bit to see how much it took to get told off by a priest. He jumped up onto the altar in one 7^th-century church and asked me to take a video of him for his Instagram story. In another, where a baptism was going on, he walked straight through the nave, stepped over the chancel rail, and took a seat next to the parents of the newborn, just a metre from the priest and the baby. When we reached the cathedral complex which is the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic Church, he handed me his phone and asked me to take photos of him in the papal seat. Then he found a small chapel attached to a monks’ residence, and squeezed past the two chairs which had very deliberately been placed at the top of a stairway so that he could go and explore what was at the bottom. On the way out, he tried to convince me that we should knock on the door of the grand papal residence, but I drew the line there.

'Ah come on, Theo! Let's just knock on the door and see if anyone's in?'

You’ve probably gathered by now that Tim is a pretty outgoing type. Whereas I instinctively veered out of the path of streetside vendors, he would go and inspect their wares, chat with them, maybe haggle with them a bit, and then finally tell them didn’t really want whatever they were selling. He’d go up to pomegranate stalls and cheerfully say ‘hi, I don’t want to buy anything, but can I take a picture of you and your pomegranates?’ And I’m completely behind that kind of tourism. It’s the best way to get the most out of a culture. The only people Tim didn’t talk to was taxi drivers. Taxi drivers seem to be everywhere in Armenia. Tim and I soon developed a tactic for shaking them – we would pretend not to speak English or Russian, transforming ourselves into a different nationality each time. The only rule was that we couldn’t repeat nationalities. We were French ‘quoi ? Je ne parle pas russe, désolé !’, Spanish ‘qué? No hablo inglés!’. Then we tried being Greek, Portuguese, and German using the few words we knew. Tim also speaks Kyrgyz and Kazakh, so we had a good run. But these languages didn’t even last us a day, and soon we resorted to the same old irritated ‘no, we're taking the bus’.

The next day, we aimed for yet another church. When we got to Kilikia Coach Station, I turned to Tim and raised the point that had been bothering me for a while: ‘how do we know what bus to take?’

‘Well we ask someone of course!’ he said. ‘I bet there will be some old person just standing on the corner waiting to tell us which bus to get… oh yeah, there he is!’ Tim pointed to the same corner where the man in the leather cap had been the day before. And there, in the exact same place, was the exact same man wearing the exact same leather cap. But this time, it was bad news. The bus we needed had just left, and the next one wouldn’t come for another two hours. Tim got out his phone and started scrolling furiously through the recommended tourist destinations on Google Maps. ‘How do we get to Lake Sevan?’ he asked. The man gave us detailed instructions. Very detailed. They involved a short walk, another bus, and then a long-distance minibus. But Tim had the idea fixed in his mind now – we were going to Lake Sevan.

Lake Sevan is a massive lake in the mountains. It makes up about a sixth of Armenia’s territory. People normally go there for a few days on a retreat. But we went for a few hours. To be fair, it was very beautiful. There was lots of snow up there in the mountains, and we climbed up to a church on a hill overlooking the lake. At Tim’s insistence, we also got plenty of photos in. Some fishermen stopped us on one of the beaches and tried to get us to go to their houses as guests. The only thing stopping us was Tim’s tight schedule, which didn’t allow for any sidetracks. So we politely declined, and the fishermen urged us at least to drink some of the lake’s beautiful fresh water. It did look very clear. One of them waded over to his boat and got out a plastic container, filled it with lake water, and gave it to us to drink from. It tasted like fish. The fisherman laughed. ‘That’s because I keep the fish that I catch in that container! But the water’s good right?’

 Tim was leaving the next day, but we even had time to squeeze in the History Museum before bed (we weren't allowed to take pictures, so Tim tried touching the artefacts, some of which were more than three millennia old - the attendants weren't very pleased). I was utterly exhausted by the time Tim left, but I’m glad I joined him in his whirlwind tourism. I’ll never be quite as bold as Tim when I’m travelling (his suggestion that we photobomb wedding photos being taken outside one church springs to mind), but I’ve learnt a lot from him about how to make the most of my time abroad. And also how much you can get away with by pretending you don’t speak English.