5-August-99 Dilijan and Haghardzin
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There was no electricity in the hotel when we woke up.
We asked for yoghurt for breakfast. I was hoping for some fresh local yoghurt, but we got a little prepackaged cup that you could have found in a supermarket. It was still welcome after all the omelets and fried eggs we had had, and there was lots of bread and herbs anyway.
Our driver, Mischa, was here a few minutes before we expected him, and we took off for Dilijan. We weren't really surprised when he stopped a hundred meters before the turnoff for the town we walked through yesterday, picked up a friend, and gave him a ride up to the second corner.
Yesterday we were happy to have got a taxi back to the hotel after waiting for a while on the highway. Today we took a closer look at the car. It was a zhigouli, considerably older than Tom's Volga. Zhigouli is a Russian make of car, but if you ask me, 'zhigouli' is Russian for 'old, broken down, obsolete the day it was made cheapo Fiat clone.' Neither of the rear windows had a handle any more, and only the right-hand door had an inside door handle. The shocks were in better shape than on the minibus we had ridden in Yerevan, at least. Anahit, who had answered the phone at the St. James Church in Watertown when I was looking for information before the trip, had advised me to save my money on hotels and look for a decent car to ride in, because it really made a difference on the terrible roads here. We hadn't properly appreciated Tom's Volga. This car was what Anahit had cautioned me about. Mischa, however, was a confidence-inspiring gray haired guy. It was obvious that he and that car had been through a lot together.
It turned out that the town we walked through yesterday was on the road to Dilijan, so the first couple of Km were review. The road continued to the right where we had turned left and bought ice cream, and went on up through green grassy wildflower-filled alpine hayfields, wheat or barley fields, and pastures. We went through a second village and started downhill off the plateau through wooded hills.
Out in western Massachusetts there's one well-known spot where the road makes a 180 degree turn along the side of a mountain. It's marked with signs far in advance, “Caution! Hairpin Turn.” Anyone in who's driven extensively in this state can tell you where THE hairpin turn is. I mention this only because anyone who has driven in the American West will snort in contempt at the concept of THE hairpin turn. You go up a mountainside, you're going to have switchbacks. Thus it was on the way to Dilijan. The road went down the mountainside, switching back twenty or thirty times before it got to the bottom of the valley. At each of the first five turns were local people with a stand selling cooked corn-on-the-cob. We stopped at another of the turns where there was a spring and public fountain. “Good water,” said Mischa, and took a two-liter plastic bottle from behind the gearshift, poured the remaining water from it on the road, and filled it up from the fountain.
If you've traveled in California, picture the foothills of the Sierra. The area we were in was somewhat more wooded, but basically that kind of semiarid scrubland.
Two thirds of the way down the mountain we passed several vehicles stopped at a turnout by one of the switchbacks. One of them had a 'press' sign in a window. Several switchbacks farther on water was cascading down the hillside. It could have been a picturesque waterfall, but it didn't end up in a stream, just in the gutter, then ran across the road and down the gutter on the other side. By this point we were on the outskirts of Dilijan and there were houses along the road. From the way the residents were looking at the water and moving things out of the way it was obvious that this was not a normal stream but a broken water main up in the hills. I figure the 'press' car was there for the story.
Anne had told Mischa that we wanted to go to the Haghartzin church, somewhat past Dilijan. He asked for directions as we got close to town, and continued past the town. The vegetation got denser and greener as we went, and we found the turnoff for Haghartzin. It was a narrow, winding mountain road, but there was a dense enough forest off the side that you figured that if the car went off the road it couldn't fall very far. If I had been driving on that road, and if there hadn't been forest there, I would have rated it a five on my one to five scale of mountain driving (I-80 across Nebraska is a one on that scale, the Lee Vining Grade on the east side of Yosemite is maybe 4.8.) Mischa took it slowly, and anyway, I'm always less worried about getting hurt than about being the one responsible.
It turned out to be a lot farther past Dilijan than we had expected, and we realized that we'd have to pay Mischa more than we had agreed on yesterday as the fare to Dilijan and back. Eventually came to a spot with a ruined chapel and some khatchkars and got out to look. Anne thought it felt haunted, so we thanked the ghosts for letting us visit and wished them well. We turned around and saw a few pigs in the field next to it, and then saw this view of the church we were looking for:
Haghartzin Church
If you didn't click on that link, go back and look! Most of my pictures are kind of -eh-, but this view was special. Thanks. The church, seen from around a bend in the gorge, is exactly what I imagined in the hills here. We walked around the church but didn't go in, and then headed back.
Just before we got back to Dilijan we stopped for some gasoline. I didn't say at “a gas station.” It was at a tank truck. The truck driver pumped gas from the truck into a measuring bucket and poured it from that through a funnel with a strainer into a big plastic jug that Mischa tucked under some stuff in the trunk.
We drove through downtown Dilijan, looked at the houses and other buildings, and bought some ice cream, but didn't get out to walk around the town. On the way back, the road was no longer flooded; they must have fixed the broken water main.
As we went back up the mountainside the car lost power and sputtered. Mischa got out, fiddled with something under the hood, and started up again. We realized that he had done the same thing a couple of times on the way to Dilijan and didn't think too much about it, but it happened again and again. About every second switchback up the mountain the car would start to labor and Mischa would come to a halt at the next reasonably wide place, open the hood, fiddle with something, and start up again. We finally asked. “Dirty gasoline,” he said. There must have been some crud that was clogging the fuel line. At one point he got a tire pump out of the trunk, connected it to the fuel line, and tried to pump it clean. After ten or fifteen stops we started to wonder how long the trip back was going to take, and whether or not the car would make it at all; but we remembered we had said that Mischa and the car had been through a lot together, and figured he knew how to deal with it. Eventually we reached the top of the pass. Mischa cut the engine and coasted, and we were all relieved that we didn't have to worry about the fuel line for a while. We ended up paying Mischa $20 for about three hours of driving instead of the 6000 dram (about $11.50) that we had negotiated, and hoped it was enough to cover the extra fuel, time, mountain driving, and fuel line troubles.
I read & Anne sunned for an hour; we got some refreshments, and Tom showed up to drive us back to Yerevan.
I took a last look at Lake Sevan. For years I've liked going to the Sevan Bakery in Watertown, and until six weeks ago I never thought I'd see Lake Sevan. Now I wondered if I'd ever be back this way.
Yerevan looked familiar when we got back. It's amazing that a place you've only known for five days can feel like home after you've been away for two days, but it happened. We hadn't ever stopped for lunch, and were pretty hungry. We found a recommendation for a Turkish restaurant in an article from AIM magazine I had got at the Armenian museum in Watertown a few weeks ago and decided to track it down.
We set off to the end of the metro line. We got off, realized we needed to cross a busy intersection, and went back down to the perikhod, the maze of pedestrian underpasses under the intersection leading to the metro. In Moscow there are pedestrian underpasses every couple of blocks along the major streets, and you really need them because the traffic is going about 50 Mph all over downtown. Traffic in Yerevan moves much slower and stops for pedestrians, and there aren't so many perikhods. This one was a biggie. We had finally found a major shopping area! There were tables and booths set up on both sides of the walkway, selling everything from meat to cassette tapes, cheese to stationery, vegetables to toothpaste. It seemed livelier and more interesting than the shouga near our hotel.
After asking a couple of people we found the restaurant we wanted. Its TV was, unnacountably, showing music videos in German. We had good main dishes and then asked about dessert. “Kataif,” said the waitress. “We'll split one,” we said. It turned out to be crispy and round, a little smaller around than a McDonald's quarter pounder patty but twice as thick. “Hmm,” said Anne, “Weird. Something like grilled cheese in sugar on shredded wheat. Not bad.”
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