A day trip to Geghard Monastery

On my second day in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia I decided to get out of the city for a day and visit Geghard monastery. Little did I know when I got up how that day would turn out.

I knew I had to get to a bus station on Gai Avenue but had no idea how. There are a lot of buses and marshrutkas (minibuses) in Yerevan each with a line number, but not being able to read Armenian script I had no idea which number to take. I went to the bus stop planning to ask a bus driver in the first bus that would arrive.

I waited barely 5 minutes when the bus number 3 arrived. I asked the driver in my broken Russian how to get to Gai Avenue. He understood and just made me stay on the bus. So I did. I was surprised and happy at the same time when the bus dropped me off exactly where I needed. How lucky I was! The first bus took me where I wanted.

I found the bus station where the buses to Geghard departed from. It wasn’t really a station just an empty car park. A small yellow bus came in perhaps 20 minutes but it wasn’t until half past nine, 45 minutes later, that it departed. Not too bad. The bus didn’t go all the way, I had to get off in a village about 5 kilometres from the monastery. I didn’t want to take a taxi so I started walking.

After about two kilometres I reached a turnoff and decided to hitchhike. It wasn’t before long that I hitched a ride. A nice SUV stopped and I jumped in. Three men were sitting inside and it turned out they were from Russia and they were visiting someone in Armenia. On the way to the monastery they wanted to stop to have a cup of coffee and they invited me to join them. Upon hearing I was going to Garni temple later they offered me to drive me there too as they were going there as well. Great!

They were really nice. We had coffee together, visited the Geghard monastery and Garni temple, too. To my great surprise they also invited me to lunch. There was a fish farm and restaurant near Garni so we went to have lunch there. On the way there we went to see basalt columns – amazing rock formations in the valley below the temple. It looked liked a basalt waterfall something I had seen before in Slovakia. When they took out a bottle of brandy I wasn’t even surprised. Russians 🙂 They poured me a shot glass of either apricot or peach brandy. Quite nice. Then we went to the restaurant.

I think they ordered three different kinds of fish. There was so much food that I was stuffed halfway through the lunch. They poured me a couple of shots of the brandy. One of the men was a designated driver so he didn’t drink. After the lunch we visited another place, a cathedral,  and eventually they dropped me off just outside my host’s place. This is just incredible. I was again really lucky that day. I managed to see what I wanted, try delicious food and I also got to meet really nice people. What a day!