Hitch Hiking through Georgia and Armenia

Since we were already in Eastern Turkey, we couldn't resist crossing over into her neighbors, Georgia and Armenia. We spent our first night in Akhaltsikhe Georgia, where we took a short trip to see the Sapara Monastery. It was located at the top of a fantastically green canyon on a serene, wooded slope. The monastery is still a functioning facility in the Georgian Catholic Church, so we were pleased to see a few of the monks in passing.

After one night's rest, we then hitched rides to see an amazing fortress at Khertvisi and another city built into the cliffs at Vardzia. People in Georgia were really generous about stopping to give us a lift, so we made it with no difficulty. The sites were both awesome, and we can't get over how many fortresses and under ground cities have been built in this particular region of the world. It is definitely a testament to the number of times this beautiful part of the world has been invaded and conquered.

One of the rides we hitched happened to be with a group of school children. They took a liking to us and even sang some traditional Georgian and Russian songs for us along the way!

After seeing these few places in Georgia, we hitched another ride to Armenia where we spent the night in Gyumri. Gyumri had a really nice central plaza complete with an amazing Armenian monument featuring violent cavalry and foot soldiers defending the mother land. Unfortunately, Gyumri was leveled by earthquakes which killed 25,000 inhabitants in the 1980s, so nearly everything has been rebuilt.

In Yerevan, Armenia's capital, we found it interesting that on a hilltop monument, they had lined up a number of weapons pointing toward Turkish owned Mount Arrarat. Mount Arrarat is the supposed landing sight of Noah's arc, and was part of the many lands taken from Armenia by Turkey during the early 2oth century conflict with Armenia.

Armenia has close ties with Russia economically, culturally, and militarily. Rusty felt that Armenia still has a very strong former soviet block feel to it. Many Armenians speak Russian very well, which allowed Rusty opportunity to use his Russian language. This Russian car selling apples out the back is a nice remnant image of former sovietism.

Our next Armenian destination was Sevan, which was a lake resort town for Armenia. It had a lovely peninsula with a couple of ancient churches and some really good food, but due to uncontrolled lakeside development, it certainly wasn't our top pick for prettiest place.

At Sevan, we rented a little cabin on the lake, checked out some ancient churches, and had some delicious fish before heading on to Vandazor and then crossing from Armenia back into Georgia.



We briefly saw Georgia's capital, Tbilisi before we moved on to spend the night in Sarp, which is on the black sea and close to the border with Turkey. Thus ended our short sojurn into this interesting area of the world, collectively known as "The Caucus."