After more than three months in the ski resort and organizing a lot of stuff in Tbilisi, we made it back into Rosinante and the nature life and went to Armenia!
It was awesome to run around in T-shirts again and discover new places.
We found super nice camp spots.
And the scenery in Armenia was very diverse.
Like always we had different temporary dog friends. Some were more funny than others.
Waterfalls!
And more waterfalls!
These stones looked very exotic. They are called Symphony of Stones and I’d say they are one of the biggest tourist attractions in Armenia.
Most of the time we searched for our own hiking tours and found very nice ones.
On that river crossing, Racki and I tried different approaches. Both of us got wet feet. Who would have guessed?
This monastery in Tatev looked very nice. Next to the monastery we took one of the longest (distance between two pillars) cable cars in the world.
And the birds in that region were huge and majestic!
Here are the hikes we did on Komoot: Angel Canyon Wings For Life Run Jermuk Waterfall Shaki Waterfall and Zorats Karer (ancient tomb memorial) unexpected hiking tour, Tatev monastery, Devil’s bridge, Hermitage, Wings of Tatev (cable car) Azat valley, Symphony of stones and Geghard monastery Parz Lake round Short hike down to the river (Lastiver)
And we went back into the climbing life! It was awesome! After a couple of days we were fit again and did weeks of climbing!
This was my favorite route. 38m long and 6b grade. It was awesome. But before it was awesome, it was a frustrating experience for me.
During that time my grandfather died in Germany and that was another special experience for me. He was quite old and had his illnesses and so it was no surprise but still it caught me. Mostly it remembered me at the time when my parents and other grandparents died and this kicked me really out of balance. I got kind of stressed, partly pissed and it was not the easiest time for Racki and me. I guess I could not really communicate my imbalance or did not understand what was going on with me which made me kind of pull back which maybe confused Racki who always loves to do something together. But in the end I mostly found my balance again and we got relaxed again.
In Armenia we met so many lovely people! It was unbelievable. Even compared with other regions of great hospitality this was so amazing. This guy (a natural reserve ranger) let us stay in the reserve area, explained a lot of interesting stuff to us and gifted us a lot of grilled lamb. Which I ate because I’m not as strictly vegetarian as Racki.
These guys took us with them to a hot spring bath and we had a good time together. And there were a lot more of these lovely Armenian people.
Our diesel heater showed some malfunction and to be able to maintain and repair it without putting the cabin off our pickup we realized one of my dream improvements for Rosinante: we installed the heater from the inside. In Yerevan these nice guys laser cut a custom stainless steel plate for us and in the end they wanted no payment at all.
This is the custom cut plate. In Germany we maybe could have ordered one online but in countries like Armenia this is not so easy or even impossible. The tasks of the car life.
The sexy pig-batman-ass hole in which we fit the heater.
We cleaned the heater and afterwards it worked flawlessly again. I’d say it’s normal that diesel heaters get dirty when one uses them a lot and so I thought about it since I started living in a car. In the end it was not difficult to dismantle, clean it and put it back together. The needed spare parts we had with us. And so we learned to handle one of the big car life topics.
Some classic site seeing in Yerevan.
We did none of the famous volcano off-road tours because the weather was too cloudy and there was still too much snow on the volcanos.
But still we did some off-roading to explore nice places.
And some more tricky off-roading.
And nice roads. And in the end when crossing the border back to Georgia we normally would have had to pay 90€ driving penalties but the officials decided to let us leave without paying.
