The Southern Caucasus, Part One: From the Eventual Book

Over a few installments, here comes the tale of our trip across the southern Caucasus. Here's part one:

The Wein Flughafen stood disturbingly deserted at night, all the shops stocked like Christmas but you couldn’t play with the toys. They glittered and blinked coquettishly behind glass doors pulled shut.

Our old buddy Austrian Airlines, the official airline of strange destinations east of Europe, left Wein on a beeline toward Budapest, Timosoara, Bucharest, Costanta, over the Black Sea to Trabazon and on into Yerevan, all of it in blackness below, the flight tracking screen cheerfully showing our destination tucked right in between Grozny and Baghdad, once showing the stark, lonely, “Local time in Jerewan 4:31 a.m.”

It was the tiniest Airbus, a little 319, five rows of business class without a soul in ‘em except us. We called it Murray class. The corporate color scheme was brilliant red, the national color, and the cabin crew was dressed red hat to sensible (but red) shoes. Fetching, I thought.

We taxied out (“We are number one for takeoff”) and a wail arose behind us. A woman was screaming “Go back, go back and check!” Crimson crew rushed to her and the cockpit continued on “Blab la bla, we’ll be airborne in one minute….” While the cabin crew kneeled and huddled round our distraught Armenian.

They rushed back forward and PA’d their apologies, “Dis is not Azerbaijan, ve know dis.”

The recorded safety announcements were for the wrong destination and no wonder the lady wasn’t by God going to go to Baku – their border with Armenia had been shut tight for fifteen years.

All the Armenian men wore suits. Tomorrow was “Wheat Sunday,” something after Orthodox Easter, the lead flight attendant explained, “You know, about when Jesus goes up in the air….”

We thought the Airbus was small. This lady told us, oh, the plane that brings you back from Baku is even smaller – a Fokker.

She confirmed what I’d thought all these years. Mirja asked how was Yerevan and she said she’d never been. Always just turned around and came on back (Just what I thought they'd do when we came in to land at Sarajevo shortly after the war). She allowed, though, how she knew a lady in her company who worked in Baku who thought Baku was a surprisingly interesting city.

Back in Murray class I took the last hour before Yerevan down. Call it a palate cleanser. All air travel should be like this, where before your nap you can order coffee for “the last minute.”

It might still have been the Soviet era but for the smiling folks at the otherwise wholly Soviet Zvarnots airport. They still wore the huge Russian era Hats of Officialdom. As Levon, our man in Armenia, went to fetch the Volga sedan we shuddered at the concrete monstrosity of an airport the Soviet Union imposed on its Armenian Republic and they’d had to endure ever since.

Out on the road Levon swept his hands expansively, “Las Vegas of Armenia,” he said as we rolled through a garish land of neon casinos, empty but lit at 5:00 a.m. The very faintest hint of a brightening horizon gathered below Mars and we headed through deserted streets, over trolley tracks (never saw trolleys) and through traffic circles.

Wide boulevards stood utterly dark. There were streetlights but not a one of them was lit.

Benzene stations and shops with indeterminate wares, lit by multi-colored neon bulbs. Looked like maybe the Dari-Dip in 1960’s U.S.

A vague scent of fires, cheap coal and urine evoked memories of late Soviet Russia.

Used Ladas and Zighulis and Volgas. Not as much nouveau flash as contemporary Russia. Lots more like Russia than the U.S., though. The good people of Armenia are much closer to the earth. Farmers, just the shapes of them really, moved toward the fields, rakes, hoes and scythes over their shoulders.

After the sign marking the end of Yerevan (the word Yerevan with a line through it, the way they do), a chill settled over the fields and we cruised down a serviceable four lane split highway to Khor Virap Monastery, about 30 kilometers south of town, which was closed when we arrived.

We served ourselves up as breakfast for a mob of mosquitoes and walked around the grounds, where Levon made us understand that the fourth parallel road out that way was in Turkiye, as was Mt. Ararat, towering beyond. He showed us a really big statue on a hill. Georg somebody, Armenian partisan, who stands and taunts the Turks still. Levon explained that ahead on the road was Nagorny Karabagh. He used the Russian “Nagorny,” although we always hear it “Nagorno” back home.

The caretakers at Khor Virap, when they realized there were guests, agreeably mustered for an early opening and let us poke around the main building, which dates from the 1600s, like everything else between the Caspian and Black Seas. The guy with the key walked around in sort of Mediterranean shirt-tails-out fashion and the other fellow mainly sported a massive mustache.

Levon pointed at that smokestack over there and told us, “Cement factory.” My Armenian is none, and so I may be wrong, but he seemed to take pride in explaining, waving his finger and emphasizing, TWO cement factories! Could it be there are only two cement factories in Armenia, and that even so this is a source of pride?

Levon would later drive us to Tbilisi (Tiflis to him), so we’d be a guest in Levon’s Volga for some time. It was black inside, with a Blaupunkt cassette player, a picture of virgin and Son on the dash and a pair of miniature boxing gloves hanging from a visor. Levon himself was very fair in a world of dark Armenians, and well turned out, in a gray jacket, checked white shirt and black slacks. You felt you could trust him.

His ready smile revealed occasional teeth.

And the landscape, sun up by now, felt comfy too, spread out, with long sight lines, hills gently rising into the far distance, backed in one or two directions by snowy mountains. People worked the fields as the sun rose. Four car doors were strung together to make a gate across a lane through a field.

Straight ahead ten more miles down the A325 highway Armenia, Turkey and Azeri-held Nakhichevan meet, and perhaps another six miles down the road is the border with Iran, but it’s not a landscape you associate with Iran. Fields, not exactly lush, of just emerging low yellow crops, perhaps rape seed, stretched among tall cedars and slender poplars.

The common folk, like in poorer parts of Southeast Asia, sold petrol from soft drink bottles on tables by the road. One lady sold flowers, too. Flowers and petrol. Three heaping baskets of strawberries filled the back of an orange Lada ahead of us as we rolled into Yerevan.

*****

Next: Yerevan and the road to Tbilisi

Photos: Top, Khor Virap Monastery and Mt. Ararat at dawn. Middle, Levon. Bottom, Turkish truck as seen from Armenia. See photos of the South Caucasus in the Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

This is the latest in a series of excerpts from the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey. Previous entries: Madagascar, Greenland, Patagonia, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay, Climbing Mt. Kinabalu, Tibet and Cambodia and Malawi.