Adventures in Lori - Part II

On Saturday night Zina made a special dinner of summer dolma. Her (other) guests were someone who had stayed with her years ago – she had worked for Peace Corps Bulgaria – and her boss. We talked about Bulgaria, the long history of the peoples in this part of the world, and life in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. At the end of the dinner, the boss read my coffee grounds; this was a first for me in Armenia. After a couple of months of calm, I will have a big change. I will be working with people of many races, and live near water. I will be going to a mountain soon. Overall, he said, I have a bright future.

I might have gone to the mountain that he referred to the next day! The trip to the Debed Canyon was about eleven hours long – so why not go back to Lori marz right away, this time for a twelve-hour day? The hiking group was going to two places that sounded interesting, and I thought it would be nice to do some hiking, so I signed up. There were mountains in the distance, and Mt. Aragats was outside the window for most of the way up and back, so chalk one up for the coffee grounds.

There was quite a mix of people this time – from Argentina, Italy, Lebanon, Syria, Germany and of course Armenia; a cook, an architect, two civil engineering students, an NGO person, a teacher, two policewomen and more. Lori Berd was our first destination – well, after the Aparan bakery, that is. This fortress was built on the edge of a gorge at the point where two rivers meet, as Amberd was. There are the remains of a bathhouse and a church, and then we walked down into the gorge, where there was an arched bridge (wait – wasn’t the one last weekend the only one?). As we had lunch there, a group of PCVs and Fulbrights hiked through! As one of them said, it’s a small country. One could keep hiking along the gorge – and it would have been nice to, though it was quite hot – but we had another stop, at a Dendropark.

This arboretum was cool and shady but not large. Armenians come in the spring to breathe the pollen, thinking it has a health benefit. Maybe there’s something in that - near Lori Berd I could not stop sneezing, but in the Dendropark I could breathe and the air was fragrant. However, we walked on every path and still had about an hour to hang out before we went home. Jeanne had gone on last week’s hike and she said it was a long drive and not much hiking – I wonder if the leaders think that it’s too hot to do a lot of walking and that the group just wants to get out of Yerevan and go somewhere cooler. I’m glad I saw both of our destinations but I wish we had either hiked more or gotten back sooner. At least I got back in time to stop by Republic Square and watch the fountains for a while. I love those!

By the way, I asked where we had gone on that very first hike – since I wasn’t on the mailing list yet – and found out that it was a nature reserve in Ararat province. I knew we had gone to a fortress and a church called St. Karapet, and when I read Lonely Planet I thought that’s where we might have gone; I was glad to confirm it. So that means I have seen two sites in Ararat marz (and not just been to Khor Virap twice) – Lori was my last marz, and now I have been twice, so why not see every marz twice now? There was a big MCA pumping station opening in Tavush last week; this was originally going to be an outing for all of MCA-Armenia but it was scaled back, and I didn’t go. During the construction they found some pre-Christian tombs; that would have been interesting to see, but I think that even those who did go last week didn’t see them. I may go back to Lori a third time to visit a PCV who has invited me. I’ll go back to Shirak on my way to Georgia and I think I will come back from Georgia through Tavush, and that’ll do it.