The Dialogue Groups presents: Armenia & Azerbaijan, part 2!

Wednesday 24.10.12

Tired as hell after literally no sleep the last couple of days, we got up early and took a taxi to the bus station. It turned out that we were too late for the morning bus, and would have to wait for the afternoon departure. Luckily, there was a döner shop nearby. Our time in Baku being over, the consensus was that all of us wanted to return some time. We had a blast!

Waiting for the bus.

After two funny, but disturbingly weird Turkish movies, a lot of Balkan music and nice chats with the people on the bus, we arrived at the border to Georgia. They told us at the station that our bus didn’t go to Tblisi. Shit. Our new friends from the bus told us that we could hitchhike with a bus going to Istanbul through Tbilisi—perfect! We had been told that the people here are very friendly and they truly are. We got past the border without problems and got on the bus we had been told about. We wondered if we could get to Tbilisi without paying more money. On the bus we were greeted by the uncle and nephew who drove the bus telling us “problem no, money yes”. We chatted with them all the way to Tbilisi and when we jumped off the bus we handed over some of the chocolate we had brought from Norway. That did the trick.

Barbecue on the way to Tbilisi.

Thursday 25.10.12

We only had a few hours of sleep before we returned to the bus station in Tbilisi where we had been dropped off the night before. Our plan was to take a “Babushka” to Yerevan, a trip that would take no more than six hours. We ended up taking a taxi. The taxi took us through the beautiful surroundings and nature of Georgia and Armenia. Our driver, a huge man by all standards and by far the scariest person we had met on the trip so far, smoked a number of cigarettes during the trip to Yerevan—probably close to the amount of words in this blog. As you can hear in the video, this habit had definitely stained his voice.

The voice from Philip Solvang Wright on Vimeo.

We finally arrive in Yerevan, exhausted and hungry. Here we consume a proper English breakfast just in time for the arrival of Beate.

Beate is greeted.

After some practicalities, we went to the nearest and best car rental and got ourselves a car. Now, I am extremely happy that we did not go for the Lada, but more on this later. We also got a GPS (just in case) and got in our Toyota Matrix, this time heading for Stepanakert, Nagorno Karabakh.

As mentioned earlier, the nature was absolutely stunning, but the dark night was approaching quickly and we were still some hours away from our destination. The drive was really challenging, not only because of the pretty bad roads, but also due to the fact that most of the other cars had really bad drivers; some of them even drove without lights! To top it off, every time we passed a police car it put on its sirens and lights and pulled some random car off the road, and that happened a lot! After a short stop at the border sharing some pomegranates with some guards, and after a bit more than an hour in the car we were finally at Stepanakert. We checked in at a hotel and met up with Marut, a local friend that was in the Dialogue Groups back in 2011. As we were mighty hungry he took us to a restaurant where we got ourselves a proper meal.

Friday 26.10.12

Finally, a full night’s sleep! We met up with Marut again after a big breakfast and joined him at his office. He is working for an NGO called Stepanakert Press Club, an independent magazine publishing articles in cooperation with journalists from both Georgia and Azerbaijan. Later, we visited the museum of fallen soldiers of the Nagorno-Karabakh war. All the walls in all the rooms were filled with faces of the soldiers who perished on the Armenian side. We noted that some of the soldiers were under the age of 18 when they died. Upon leaving we were handed a notebook each, covered in pictures of military effects and soldiers. We wondered if these are the notebooks that are handed out in the schools as well.

           

The walls inside the museum.

Marut and Even in front of Stepanakert Press Club.

Even and Beate in front of the University of Stepanakert.

The clock was ticking and as the designated driver, I was not too eager to drive much in the dark. We rushed to our interviews, finished them, said goodbye to Marut and his very helpful French-speaking friend and drove off. A few kilometres from Stepanakert lies Shushi, an ancient and strategically placed city on the top of a ridge. We drove through the city and saw among other things a very impressive church. Although we still had some daylight, there was no time to stop for sightseeing. However, we managed to get some snapshots through the windows of the car.

At last, we arrived at the trip's final destination. First of all I would like to personally thank the people who invented the GPS—without it we would either be somewhere in Iran or still driving one of the many roundabouts in the city centre of Yerevan.

Part three, which is the final part of this story, will be published on Friday the 7th of December.