from Sewan via Dilijan to Haghpat - Caucasian summer 2024 - 18
from Yerevan to Goris including visits to Chor Virap and Noravank
from Haghpat in Armenia to Tbilisi in Georgia
Tbilisi and back home
02.08.2024 - from Sewan via Dilijan to Haghpat
Today is our last full day in Armenia. As breakfast is only served at 8am, we start at 9.
Our first stop is the Goshavank monastery [↗]. On the way there, still close to Sevan, we pass through a tunnel and get caught in thick fog. We drive down and through Dilijan and the fog turns into a thick layer of clouds.
The monastery consists of a series of individual churches. Some of the domes are rebuilt with glass. In some of the domes, greens started to grow. The churches are nice to see, but in the meantime, they all start to look very much alike.
We drive back to Diljian [↗] and will have almost 3 hours here, as a part of the group is going for lunch at a local family’s house. I checked Google yesterday. The town is supposed to be quite nice, but I didn't find anything I really wanted to see.
The bus driver wants to take us to the upper part of the village so we can walk down. But as in Gyumri the police stop us and we have to wait until the president's convoy has passed.
I walk down through "Old Dilijan" a street with nicely renovated houses, that are now home to hotels and souvenir stores. But it is only two or three hundred meters long. Down at the roundabout, I look for the way to the ruins of the Khanjian Villa. I already know that it's fenced off, but halfway there our guide meets me and tells me that he was stopped even earlier because they are setting up some pavilions.
Okay, so let's try one of the hikes through the forest. I walk back up the hill to the museum and then up another road. By chance I even find the entry to the "drunken forest", a place that was mentioned in my notes, but with no indication of where it is. I was hoping for some twisted trees, but they were just growing at an angle instead of straight up.
I continue along a now marked path until I come to a tree swing, which is even mentioned on Google Maps. A little further on, I turn around. It was a nice walk, but now I have to make sure I find something to eat for lunch.
We continue our journey at 2pm and should arrive at Haghpat two hours later. We gain a little altitude and drive first just below and later within the clouds. The landscape here is a bit like in the lower Alps, with hills all around but no real mountains. Later, the mountains come closer, and we drive along the Debed Gorge, but the clouds make it difficult to see how high the hills are.
As we get closer to Haghpat we reach the town of Alaverdi [↗]. This area seems to be much poorer than the others we've seen. We drive along a gigantic industrial ruin. Later in the hotel, I read that it is a copper smelter that has massively polluted the entire region. Nevertheless, discussions on setting up a new, smaller plant are ongoing. Population went down from 26,300 in 1989 to an estimated 11,000 now. No wonder that many of the Soviet-style houses are empty and fall apart.
We reach our hotel on a dirt road and it's astonishing that our bus is able to make it. But the hotel, a small family business, is quite new and nice. We also have our final evening here, as it is unlikely that there will be an opportunity for this in Tbilisi.
