Halfway down the Danube

A Weekend Out

So we finally got out of town for the weekend.

We drove north from Yerevan to Vanadzor, then up almost to the Georgian border, where we stayed at this hotel. Stayed there Saturday night, then swung back down through Dilijan and past Lake Sevan.

We'll blog more about this anon. A few random observations are below the fold.

-- It's June, which is the end of the brief rainy season and the beginning of the long, dry, furnace-like summer. So everything is blooming. Claudia calculated that there are more than ten billion daisies in Armenia right now. I think that might be low.

-- Every dinky flyspeck of a country claims that it has "tremendous variety". But here in Armenia, it might be true. In one weekend, we saw steppe (no kidding... real Eurasian steppe; you could practically see the Mongol hordes thundering over it), prairie, oak forests, snow-covered mountains, lush meadows, deep gorges carved through volcanic rock by a white mountain river... I'm assured that there's also semidesert and, up north, something close to a temperate rain forest.

We also saw a depressing amount of environmental damage, mostly from deforestation. But that deserves a post of its own. (Probably on some day when I'm in a crappy mood anyway.)

-- We drove past the Molokan villages. And we saw some Molokans on the road. But we didn't stop.

If you know what Molokans are, then you know this is sort of like driving to Keystone, South Dakota, and then not bothering to look at Mount Rushmore. If you don't... oh, hell, we can't get through a couple of years in Armenia without doing a post on the Molokans. So, watch this space.

-- We can see why everyone heads to the mountains in the summer. By the shore of Lake Sevan today, it was 21 Celsius (68 F). One hour later, we were in Yerevan, and it was 32 Celsius (90 F). By August you'll want to add 6 or 8 degrees to those figures.

-- A minor but telling incident: the hotel sits by a loud mountain river, all brown water foaming white over rocks. After looking at it for a while, it occurred to us that we didn't know where the water went. That is, would it flow eventually into the Black Sea, or the Caspian? The watersheds in the Caucasus get really tangly, so the answer was not intuitively obvious.

So we asked one of the hotel staff. "It flows to Georgia," she said.

"Yes, but... after that... where does it go?"

She summoned a colleague. They discussed it for a moment in rapid fire Armenian, then turned to us.

"It goes to Georgia."

"Yes, that's right. To Georgia."

"Um... okay. Thank you."

And there you have it. The river goes to Georgia, just a few miles further north.

And then, I suppose, it just stops.

-- We try to avoid comparing our children online. (If only because they may come back, years later, and develop a complex from reading that Sibling X toilet-trained a month before Sibling Y.)

But one thing became very clear on this trip: Alan is only mildly interested in chasing chickens, but David can't get enough of it. Sadly, we didn't get pictures, but he was quite the cursorial predator.

What this may foreshadow, I entirely refuse to speculate.

Posted by douglas at June 4, 2006 07:09 PM