Hallelujah

We had THE Azerbaijani Touristic Experience. Or rather as non-touristic as it gets. Following the advice of the excellent Trailblazer guidebook (and my auntie Cecilia) we, still together with Adam and Will, headed up to Xinalik, again a mountain village high in the Caucasus. It was as beautiful as it was described and we settled in with a local family (six children, mother eight years older than me) in their kilim decorated guestroom.
Unfortunately the food was less sensational and after three meals of bread and home made sheep cheese (very sheepy) we longed even for the never ending kebabs. I was also tiring the boys by beating them in backgammon all the time.
Luckily we hiked up the mountain valley to see an "eternal flame", a leak of natural gas burning right out of the mountain. A man invited us for a picnic "-We'll make kebab". The following took place:
A riding man arrived with a live goat tied to the horse back. The goat was untied and within forty minutes it was freed of it's head, skinned, belly emptied (testicles, livers, heart, lungs, kidneys saved) and chopped into neat kebab pieces. These where fried on the stones heated by the eternal flame and offered to us. It was delicious. The flame is said to have been burning since the eighth century, 1300 years.




And yes, to Adams horror, I ate a testicle.

Mad Max 2

Travelling around Baku is uncommon and has an apocalyptic touch. One can freely climb an old rusty oil derrick (some of them are dating back to the Nobel brothers epoch), smell the precious crude that enables the Son's presidency and dip a hand in a cold mud volcano.

Azeri Curiosities

In what other country could you find sexy halva, ‘Happy Rabbit Babies’ butcher's shop, sheep’s leg tripod and in front of a Khan’s palace? A 19 year old stuffed wolf with light bulbs for eyes.

Central Azerbaijan isn’t Tuscany

Driving to Lahic we picked up two road weary English hitchhikers, Adam and Will. The moments later we got stopped by a police for failing to recognise a roundabout that wasn’t there. After receiving a fine the mixture of playing a bit of Turkish music and using the phrase: ‘Come on this is not Armenia’ we got away with only a loss of a pair of apples. Next stop a nice drink in a central Azerbaijani restaurant; or as it turned out to be a brothel. Three hours and seven Aliyev posters we ended up in Lahic. The village offers a charming orchard to camp in, unique mountain characters, sheep kebabs, old cobbled streets, wooden balconies and several copper workshops.

Father and Son

Driving through Azerbaijan is exotic, whereas on an African safari the objective is spotting the many varieties of wild animals, here it is the vast array of cult of personality posters of the father and son; former president Heydar Aliyev land his son, the current president of the ‘democratic republic of Azerbaijan’, Ilham Aliyev.
The posters come along with proverbs and collective wisdom such as:

• I respect people who live in villages.
  
• The man who charmed the entire world.


• I am always with you! Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan,…


• I will continue Heydar Aliyev politics!

Lenin Baba

Azeri border officials proved extremely efficient after I told them that Armenian customs were extremely corrupt and inefficient. None the less our luggage was ransacked and a map of Yerevan and Russian flyer on the Armenian genocide seized. First town you come across in Azerbaijan is Balakan. The excellent guidebook suggested seeing a sad WW2 memorial with a decapitated unknown soldier and an eternal fire that went out. We were disappointed finding a new cable car running to the site with a new statue, possibly of Heyder Aliyev, still veiled at the moment. Luckily enough we found a sewn in half pink-granite Lenin statue that has been dumped in ex-industrial waste land.

Aragats

Yerevan is hot. The only way to escape the heat is to drive up in the mountains. The closest is Aragats, the highest mountain in Armenia. The road from Yerevan winds 65km up and ends 3200m high at the cosmic ray institute and meteorological station. We found a perfect camping spot by the Kari Lich lake. Right away one of the meteorologists spotted us and invited us for a tea. We ended drinking pear brandy and sleeping at the station, only disturbed by the wolf who took a stroll in the neighbourhood. High altitude and hangover is not best hiking combination. No matter how, we reached the top of the 4000m high southern peak.

Armenian Apostolic Church

Armenia was the first country to declare Christianity the state religion, and the church has been a pillar of its identity ever since. For that reason the major part of sightseeing in Armenia includes visits to 800 years old monasteries hidden in forests. Their roofs and facades covered in greenness; khatchkars (carved crosses) scattered all around like crumbs on a table. Once St Gregory the Illuminator, first catolicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, has been imprisoned in a deep well (khor virap) for 12 years, where he was secretly fed by local women. The site is an important pilgrimage nowadays and it was a claustrophobic experience to climb 60m down the well on a metal ladder.

MiG

Driving through the ‘beautiful’ mining town of Alaverdi to Sanahin we caught a sight of a MiG. Artem Mikoyan, a native of Sanahin, was the designer of the first Soviet jet fighter, and so an early MiG deserves a shrine outside of local school.

About Vodka

I just want to say that we`ve been making alot of fun about the drinking habits of these countries, but in the bigger perspective it is of course mainly bad and tragic that people drink so much. It looks funny when a restaurant with nothing on the menu offer seven differnt vodkas or when someone pours you a drinking glas (as opposed to a shot glas) of booze at ten in the morning. But it is not funny really. We have seen so many people stumbling next to the highway or just sitting by the road all day long, apatic, drinking. It is a very horrible sign of the poverty in this area since it only creates more misery.

The intoxicated people are only men and at the houses we`ve been staying women are doing all kinds of heavy work, like carrying water and heating it up for the tourists as there is no running water in many places, while the husbands are out drinking. The effects are also (as you have seen) sometimes violent. I think this is a Soviet inheritance, even in Azerbaijan (muslim), which we just entered, it seems people drink. In some ways it will be nice to come to more muslim countries as poverty there does not take this expression.

Welcome to Armenia

Entering Armenia with the Shlakiyah was not as easy as we thought. First we have to get Armenian papers stating that the car is ours, that we paid a road tax and a substitute for polluting the country. The later is odd because the roads are filled with old Kamaz trucks that exhaust so much black burned gas that if you drive behind them you better wear a respirator. Anyhow, since we didn’t bribe anyone, everybody else was skipping the line. We got all papers done in 3 hours after considerable yelling and payment of 75 USD.

It proved to be a very welcoming destination. When after a few glasses of late afternoon wine tasting we asked a cellarman if there is somewhere to park for the night; he simply took us to his house. A day later, when we found a tranquil lunch spot in the middle of a field overlooking Mt. Ararat, a watermelon guy drove past with his Volga oldtimer (built in 1956) only to bring us to his house he built with his own hands, where his wife and extended family and neighbours awaited. By no means has an Armenian taken the duties of a host to such an extreme. A table full of barbecue and vodka is provided, followed by loads of toasts that gradually become more and more emotional. Morning after is hard to leave, because breakfast is never ending. Neighbours then open their doors, encourage us to visit. We are not longer on the road but living within family structures.

Healthy in Borjomi

Borjomi is an ex-elegant resort town down deep in Georgian woods. For the proper Borjomi experience we tried, as suggested, Joint-stock kompany sanatory Firuza.

In the sanatorium order fee of 7 EUR there are included following services:
Medical feeding. ?
Doctor’s consultation.
common analysis of blood. ?
Swilling of stomach, gau-bladder, intestine.
Paraphine application.
Medical massage.
I got myself only the latter, because I have a back problem from too much driving.

Across the road from the sanatorium is a Shemoikhede Genatsvale restaurant with a peculiar menu offering under different categories:

‘Cool breakfast’:
Boil sucking pig
Cows boiled tongue

‘Hot foods’:
Smoke rigs
Trout on a fire

‘Pastry’:
Mother’s bread

‘Tea, coffee’:
Sediment coffee
Coffee without sediment
Icw Cream