September 30, 2009: After a good breakfast buffet in the Villa Mtiebi’s charming, light-filled atrium, I took a taxi over to Ortachala bus station. Every other time I’d done this in Georgia, the driver had delivered me to the correct marshrutka: here, perhaps because I had been staying at a more up-market hotel, the driver delivered me instead to a coterie of taxi drivers – yes, you could get a taxi all the way to Yerevan. After I cleared up this misunderstanding, I had to trek through the station to its lower reaches, and a rather worn marshrutka.
A (city) marshrutka in Yerevan
The good news? I didn’t have to wait long for it to leave. The bad news? I didn’t have to wait long because it was almost full when I boarded, and I had a cramped seat in the back. Since I couldn’t see much, the ride to the border was pretty boring. So was the wait at the border. I didn’t have any trouble getting a visa, but it took the Taiwanese guy up front almost 90 minutes. Apparently he ran into a Catch-22 where the border guards thought he was mainland Chinese, and should have gotten his visa in Tbilisi, while the authorities in Tbilisi had insisted he should get it at the border.
Another passenger, a small, black-clad nun, didn’t make it into Armenia at all. The Taiwanese man told me that she had too many Russian stamps in her passport, and the Armenians were currently leaning towards the west rather than Russia. She lost a shouting match with the driver before collecting her luggage and heading back across the border. Perhaps she was trying to get a reduction in the fare. Primed by Lonely Planet, even though I was only going to Vanadzor, not all the way to Yerevan, I hadn’t even tried to get a reduction – one fixed fare for all. The nun’s fate did help the rest of us – we were glad of the extra room.
The rest stop view
Shortly after we entered Armenia, we suddenly stopped, made a U-turn, and headed back towards the border. But no big problem – the driver had just forgotten to drop off a parcel. Not long after we stopped again, but this was a rest stop. I admired the view, but passed on the food from the roadside barbecue.
The driver didn’t seem very happy with dropping me off in Vanadzor, and in fact let me off on the main road, north of town, and not at the bus station. I pulled out Lonely Planet, and decided to walk to my hotel. It was further than it looked on the map, but I found my first look at Armenia interesting. Both Georgia and Armenia have their own alphabets, but in Armenia many signs are still multilingual, with Russian as well as Armenian – I had seen precious little Russian in Georgia!
My hotel (Argishti), which I had booked through an agency in Yerevan (no website or email address available), came as a pleasant surprise. The facade and public areas were much posher than I expected, and my semi-luxe room had elegant blue drapes, bright lighting and a huge (if somewhat empty) bathroom. I also appreciated the plentiful hot water. Having passed on the BBQ on the way south, I was glad to find food available in the hotel’s dining room, and tucked into (tough) chicken and potatoes before setting off to explore the town and arrange a taxi for the next day.
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