After a full day of resting, on the eighth day of our adventure in the Caucasus we were full of energy, and prepared to say goodbye to lovely Georgia.
The only ones who stayed behind were the guys from Rabbit Software, who decided to wait for their companions. The rest of us continued our journey to Lake Sevan, Armenia. And boy, it was quite an adventure! Soon after leaving Tbilisi, The Travel Scientists picked up a couple of young hitchhikers. They told us how they had set out on a long adventure, hitchhiking through Europe and Asia, from Germany all the way to China. That is a hell of a long journey! We really enjoyed their company and we got to live through the horrors of Georgian roads together.
Crossing the border from Georgia to Armenia is usually one of the most dreadful stages of our trip. Everything here is done manually and this makes the process take hours. In our past adventures we always designated someone to take care of the paperwork.
This unlucky person would get the task of running around from one office to another, queuing for ages and collecting approvals, signatures and stamps, trying to communicate with the Armenian customs representatives and paying God knows what kind of fees. Everything pretty much happens in sign language around here. They point to where you need to go, you nod and go.
They ask for money, you pay. Resistance is futile. The only problem is that it takes hours to get things done. The good part is that everyone else besides the person walking around with papers gets to sit around and enjoy a drink in the shade. This year it was different. We crossed the border in 45 minutes and it was shocking how fast it went, compared to other years! Once this challenge was over too, we stopped to have lunch in Ijevan, where we ate some delicious fresh-caught trout.
