Sevan, a city you cannot leave

Trip Start May 19, 2009

Trip End Dec 31, 2009

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Where I stayed

Harbour View Homestay Bed and Breakfast Wellington

(Wellington hotels)

Flag of Armenia Dilijan, Tavush, Armenia
Thursday, August 13, 2009

In Armenia, all major roads lead to the capital, Yerevan. So 4 of us who stayed in the same homestay in Goris hired a taxi (each of us paid a few dollars more than taking the minibus, but we saved a lot of time) to take us there so that we could go somewhere else. We first made a short trip to Garni, where a fort and a 1st Century Hellenic temple are located. The temple has been beautifully rebuilt and it looks like a petit Temple of Athena in Athens's Acropolis. After that we went north to Lake Sevan.

Sevan is the name of the largest lake of Armenia and also a name of a city on its northern shore. Besides its beaches and summer activities, it also has the Hayravank Monastery that is 1100 years old, situated on a promontory that has the finest view of the lake. We wanted to visit it but being in the height of the summer, lodging would be expensive and hard to come by, so we stayed in Dilijan, a small city in the mountains just 30 minutes away, and made day trip to Sevan

the temple in Garni

. It turned out to be not a very good idea: we had no problem going from Dilijan to Sevan; there were minibuses from Dilijan to Yeravan that went thru Sevan, but to go back to Dilijan was a huge problem, since all buses were originated in Yeravan when they were full so they wouldn’t stop in Sevan. We finally had to hire a taxi to go home.

Luckily Dilijan is a destination by its own rights. It is an alpine town surrounded by gentle mountains and lush forests, inside a natural reserve. So we just went to Sevan once and then spent the rest of our three days walking the town and did a 10 km hike that took us from Haghartsin Monastery, which is 900 years old, over a high mountain pass and ended in Dilijan. We went thru forests and meadows, walked by an army camp where we saw tanks maneuvered, and bothered greatly by bugs almost all the way.

I've met some interesting people in the homestay and had interesting conversation with them. There was a young French girl who studied law in the university and is doing her internship to become a judge (don’t you think a judge should have more life experience?); and a very conservative Israeli who admitted that if he was to live like the Palestinians in the West Bank he would be very angry to the occupying force too, but he had no problem with how his government treats the Palestinians because it’s all for the nation’s survival.

Next stop? Back to Georgia, and then go west for some real mountains.