Walking Meghri to Sisian with Border2Border

This is the story of my participation in the Border2Border 2012 project, in which two groups of Peace Corps volunteers each walk halfway across Armenia to wrap it all up on Friday July 6 in the middle, in the little town of Yeghegnadzor. The point: teaching nutrition, exercise, alcohol, smoking and recycling to children in town and villages along the way.


On 17 June 2012, we taught our first day, in a school in Meghri, a town all the way down south near Armenia's border to Iran. I did the alcohol sessions – why do people drink, what are the short-term effects, what are the long-term consequences – with Hermine, who works at a mobile network provider's store in town. She immediately picked up what the lesson was about and filled in whenever I stumbled with my Armenian: she made my first day teaching this stuff easy.

Meghri kids with their certificates. The southern B2B crew are all in the back row, in white t-shirts: Tamara, Jack, Tom, Kelsey, Kelliann, Hannah and off to the right yours truly.

Under a hot sun, we then hiked up about 5km along the highway to Lehvaz and Tom's house.

Tom's house: feel the heat

Later that evening, Erin and Shayna treated us to a great carboload.

The next day our destination was Lichk, 24km north and about 1,200 meters higher than Lehavaz – but not much cooler. Heat, almost no shade, mountains, forests and meadows covered in wildflowers. Yellow, white, purple and blue: I wish I knew all of their names, but I saw countless different types of flowers over the next 10 days. We stayed on the highway until the last few miles and then took some dirt roads Tom knew. In the village we stopped at the store for supplies: lavash and sausage, which were to be our staples. One of the village men who had gathered to watch us weirdos was telling us we should go up the valley toward the west because it's just like Switzerland up there.


We took a cowpath out of Lichk to a valley below some mountains that really did look rugged and grand in an Alpine way. We set up our tents in a damp clearing next to a roaring little river, in a cloud of gnats. We had a fire; smores were eaten. Most of us were also eaten alive that night by some vicious bugs of various types.

Looking away from Switzerland

Early the next morning, when the clouds around the mountains – which by the way separate Armenia from the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhchivan – lifted for a few second, it did indeed look like some Alpine peaks in Switzerland.

Looking toward Switzerland, which is again hiding behind Armenian clouds, and Jack

All of us except Tom and Jack left our packs with the store owner, who drove them to Kadjaran for a nice sum of money. Then we jogged leisurely to the top of Meghri Pass. Yeah, right.

After running

The weather cooled down as we descended repeated switchbacks, and around 7pm we arrived in the little town of Kadjaran, scenically situated in a narrow valley below piles of tailings from the copper and molybdenum mine. But Switzerland was still visible in the west: that makes up for a whole lot of tailings. In some outdoor restaurant we had pork khorovats, lavash, and tomato and cucumber. Yum.

That night we slept on our sleeping pads in School #1's gym.

Day four. In the morning we taught 49 kids in the school. Each time we teach we split the kids into four or five groups and rotate those groups among our sessions. That means we end up teaching the same session four or five times in each location, so we get to know our lessons well. I teach alcohol: here's how it usually goes, in brief:


Why do people drink? "To forget, to party, for birthdays, from stress, because your wife was unfaithful."
Do you know people who drink too much? Silence.
Are there people in your community who drink too much? "Absolutely! Oh yes! Many!"
What happens in my body if I have a drink or two? "You feel dizzy. You stop thinking. You get a headache."
I try to tell them a little about how the first thing we lose is our good judgement, our ability to think right, and how some people will want to drink more as soon as they've had one drink. Then we – I always got help from a local Armenian – have the kids spin around and try to walk along a straight line to imitate the effect of alcohol. Almost all of them love this.

I told the kid not to drink so much

We also have them write their names first with their dominant hand and then with the other hand to illustrate how uncoordinated our brains can be even when we feel normal. Finally I show them pictures of various organs (heart, stomach, liver, brain) in healthy and alcoholic conditions. This usually makes an impression. Our 15 minutes are up; time for the next batch of kids.


Considering the attitudes I get among adults, especially men, the children's understanding of the problems often caused by alcohol was refreshing. They get it. Most sessions I taught were more about reinforcing what they already knew rather than trying to convince them of something new. Not one child tried to convince me that oghi, the ubiquitous home distillate made from fruit, is good for your health. All of them knew that drinking and driving is stupid and dangerous. Things will change in Armenia when this generation grows up.


By the time we'd had lunch and dropped off four of our seven packs for their taxi ride and hit the road, it was past 3pm. Fortunately it was downhill all 27km to Kapan along a rushing river through beautiful rugged mountains.

The road to Kapan

Unfortunately, around 7:30pm the sky suddenly darkened and opened up; the road turned into a river; my umbrella leaked; water slowly soaked through my pants into my socks and down into my boots; we all got more or less soaked. Oh well. By the time we reached the outskirts of Kapan it was getting dark; we stumbled along on what was supposed to be sidewalks through the stretched-out town, covering several kilometers along the river, and finally climbed a hill to PCV Lizzie's apartment on the sixth floor – no elevator. If we'd been Brits we would have said we were knackered. Lizzie's chili hit the spot. I took my pack and a taxi to a hotel and hit the sack.

Thank you Lizzie!

Day five, rest day. Sleep. Pancake breakfast at Lizzie's. Laundry. Lunch at outdoor café. Rest.


One word about the hotel in Kapan. In Jack's and my room the beds had no blanket, just sheets and bed spreads; it got a little too cool. And the beds were hard and uneven. The shower water had two settings: very hot or very cold. There was no seat or lid on the toilet, just porcelain. At one point the TP fell in. There were no bed lights, and the electrical outlet by my bed didn't work – I had to unplug the TV to charge my phone. There was a musty smell in room. The receptionists were surly. There was no shower curtain or shower stall, so the water flowed straight onto the bathroom floor, which remained wet for hours afterward. Thank you for reading my gripe.


I was actually quite comfortable.


Day six, supposedly a Friday. We taught at the American Corner in downtown Kapan. There was very little space but a veritable plethora of adult specimens – staff, friends of staff, parents, who knows. Of course, they were all there to watch us, but some of them couldn't help but to 'contribute' during the lessons. I don't know what's wrong with adults in this world. 

Partial Kapan plethora

But it all worked out. Overall those adults really behaved quite well. And three young women who had helped up in Kadjaran came here too: Bella, Satine and Emmah. Much appreciated. It's young people like them that make me feel Armenia has a great future.

Satine and Bella at the finest dining establishment I've seen outside Yerevan

Back in our hiking footgear, the remaining six of us – Kelsey had business to attend to elsewhere – headed out the downstream end of Kapan at 7:30am, turned left at Syunik village onto highway H-45, and followed it up a bucolic valley under a hot sun to a group of villages around the headwaters of a little river. Eventually we got to the last of the villages, Verin Khotanan. Here we sat outside the village store enjoying some cold Jermuks in the shade listened to the woman who owns it talk about last year's B2Bers, who had stayed in her house overnight because of rain.


As we set off up the mountain, we could hear and see a thunderstorm approaching from the West, and we got worried about hiking and setting up our tents in the rain and then continuing tomorrow wet and miserable. What we needed was a hotel. With or without shower curtains.

I wouldn't point my camera straight up at the storm now, would I?

Eventually Jack and Hannah saw a hay loft built of concrete and went and asked the people in the house below if we could sleep in it. So we had a home for the night: a large platform about 10 feet off the ground, with a few bales of hay up against the one wall that reached the roof and more than enough room to raise our tents. Camping in the great outdoors doesn't get any better than this.

Hotel Verin Khotanan

It rained for all of a minute, but the view was fantasic: the neighborhood houses and their gardens, green open pastures interspersed with big, lush trees, the winding valley with a glimpse of the road we had come up, and past that to the south, ridge after ridge fading into the distance. To the west, meanwhile, beyond a couple of hills covered in light green meadows and darker green woodlands, we had some taller, rugged mountains.

Taller, rugged mountains

We had been invited by the owners, a couple, Samo Givorkyan and Ina Grigorian, with a four-year-old, out-of-control son: Ina insisted on serving us plenty of coffee, cookies, home-made yogurt (matsun), home-made cheese (Armenian panir) and lavash, even though they clearly were subsistence farmers. After a while, a neighbor, Alvard, came over and told us about the American woman who lived with her for two years until two years ago: Sara, an A-16 Peace Corps volunteer who taught health and sports in the tiny village school of 20 or so students. Small world, or at least small country. We went to bed as soon as it got dark – before 9pm. The local frogs, however, had no concern for our need to get on the road early.


In the morning we went for tea with Ina and Samo in their two-room little stone house; cheese, lavash and delicious strawberry preserves (muraba) – made from berries from someone's grandmother's garden.

B&B operators Sam & Ina

The dirt road went in switchbacks up toward a ridge; as the day wore on and it got hotter, my shirt got stained white from sweat. At times, Jack would carry Hannah's backpack on top of his own. Later I had her transfer some of her things to my pack. After crossing the ridge, the road entered a valley that looked almost untouched by humans: a wide, wet wildflower garden at the bottom surrounded on both sides by dark forests and bright meadows that appeared to have seen no livestock in many a season.

Tom sur la route parmi les fleur

The first little village we came to had a store, although it was upstairs in someone's house and the woman running it had to be summoned from a nap. There wasn't much for sale, but I managed to get my daily ice cream and more water. The second village, Aghvani, which was even smaller, had no store.

Then we followed switchbacks up the side of a mostly treeless ridge until we crossed a saddle at about 2,000 meters. In the distance we saw a village but determined collectively that it was neither Tatev nor Halidzor.

We finally saw Tatev across a green ravine.

On our way down, we finally saw Tatev across a green ravine. Across that green ravine, Tatev looked close, maybe less than a kilometer as the crow flies, but of course the road couldn't go straight across the green ravine in between. A couple of hours later we were met by Michael Kim and Lisa Southerland, who waited just before the last little uphill to Tatev Monastery. We all ate khorovats at a restaurant, left Mike and then took the world's longest ropeway to the village of Halidzor. This arial tram is a new, sleek, fast cable car, surprisingly small – the capacity is maybe 15 people.


Lisa's house turned out to provide only the most basic comforts, but there was enough space for us all and Internet access to boot. Moreover, I got to soak my feet in salt water, and some kind soul hand-washed my socks and shirt. Lisa's bathroom left a little room for improvement – anything that went down the hole seemed to come back up the drain in the floor – and running water was available for only an hour in the evening and another hour in the morning, as in Noyemberyan. Nevertheless, Lisa was the perfect host: she fixed us dinner, then breakfast, and let us use her laptop for hours.


The next day we taught in Halidzor, in Lisa's school across the street from her house. It was one of the most run-down schools I've seen in Armenia, or for that matter anywhere. I got help from the amazing Armine, one of Lisa's 12th grade students.

Exercise class with Jack

"This is your brain on alcohol"

In the evening we walked a kilometer or two to 'the' café out on a ledge above the canyon and had khorovats again, partly because they have real flush toilets. Clean, with toilet paper, sinks with running water and soap dispensers. All these expensive meals were starting to make themselves felt in my wallet. Afterward, Jack, Tom, Tamara and I walked further along the road to Tatev, to a little stone gazebo on a promontory with views both up and down the canyon. Whether it was worth another 5-6 kilometers – I was wearing flip-flops – I'm not so sure.

There's a Tatev there somewhere

The next day, once we had ascended from the canyon shelf where Halidzor lies, we had a relatively easy walk of 16 km across a plateau of rolling fields to the town of Goris. We stopped in a relatively wealthy-looking village, Shinuhayr, to stock up on water and Snickers bars, and were treated to a show-off gallop three or four times by a disproportionately big round kid on a horse. The effect was comical: two legs and two arms flailing around, mostly pointing diagonally upward from a shapeless blue ball, all of it bouncing around on top of the poor horse. I totally forgot to turn on my camera.

My dream picture: maybe now they'll leave me alone when I'm photographing landscapes in Armenia.

Team

After a few kilometers I started to realize I wasn't doing so well today: everything seemed to hurt. Both knees and both hips felt painful on and off; blisters seemed to completely cover both feet, under my heels, under the balls of my feet, between my toes and around my toenails; various pressure points in my boots reminded me of their presence with astonishing persistence; the shoulder straps from my day pack were cutting into my shoulders; the small of my back hurt; my hands felt swollen, with the fingertips somewhere between numb and tingly; the inside of my lower left calf felt strangely sore; I had a mild headache in the back above my neck; and I was running low on energy. As we descended into Goris on a series of switchbacks, walking felt increasingly like torture.


When we got to Austin's house I was shaking with fatigue, took off my hated boots and laid down on a couch. I couldn't follow the shower water instructions I'd been given and just washed myself in freezing water. After that I shivered and ached on the couch until I got out my sleeping bag, took three Ibuprofen and fell asleep for a while. When I woke up, Tamara checked my temperature and said I was a little on the warm side.


The next day I felt better, but I let Hannah do the session on alcohol for me and stayed at Austin's surfing Facebook with my feet in a tub of warm salt water. It felt safer to rest in the hope I would manage better tomorrow. I did go downtown, however, to have lunch with Austin, Hedley and the B2B crew in a café overlooking a ravine and the cave-pocked rock formations on the other side.

Us B2Bers weren't roughing it on this trip, exactly, but Austin's phone had a rough day and jumped off the cliff here, never to send out a ringtone again

Day 12: up at 5:15am, said goodbye to B2B cofounder and host Austin and started up the road at 6:45. We walked 38 kilometers, from an elevation of 1,360 meters in Goris to almost 2,200 meters and then down again to 1,600 in Sisian. Almost the whole time we were on the main north-south highway, with all the big rigs to and from Iran spewing diesel fumes as they thundered past. In other words, we saw the most spectacular fields of wildflowers so far.

I know what the red flowers are called

I had bandaged and taped my two swollen toes, but they made themselves felt anyway, and I limped all day trying not to put pressure on it. Sometime around 24-28 km into the walk, a raincloud was catching up with us from the south. We didn't want to get soaked again, so when Tom suggested seeking shelter in an abandoned structure some distance uphill from the highway, we took off across the wildflowers and the nettles to a concrete shell – walls and roof – that had a magnificent view over the tree-less landscape.

Rain fell on the wall, but thirty or forty minutes later we resumed our walk dry.

Resumers

Endless, breathless: priceless

We made it to Sisian. We checked into Hotel Basen, also known as Hasmik's place. We had a great dinner at Restaurant Basen. We showered in water of an appropriate, custom-selected temperature. We slept.

The next day we had a great breakfast at Restaurant Basen. We taught in a school near the hotel. It was all good. We met for lunch with most of the A18 volunteers who remained in and around Sisian. It rained off and on. It was cold in Sisian.

That afternoon I looked again at my feet. They'd gotten worse since they had walked into town: my big toe was now not only inflamed, swollen and red, it also had a secondary infection next to the nail that was oozing pus. Not good for a day of rest. I called our Peace Corps Doctor Nune and told her what was going on. She told me to stop walking for five to six days, get oral antibiotics, up my dosage of Ibuprofen, continue with the antibiotic cream and soak my feet in warm water. Border2Border was over for me.

I'm happy to have walked from Meghri to Sisian, 178km, and I will always have unwalked roads ahead of me, but I'm totally unhappy about having had to leave the team and the project. I'm glad I didn't wimp out because of the multitude of blisters on my feet, nor from the mere pain caused by relentless pressure points in my boots or my ill-fitting pack which numbed my waist or the uphills or the sun and the heat or the leaks in my new umbrella with a broken spoke or the diarrhea or the constipation or the strange soreness and weakness in part of my left calf that I had for a few days or the lower back pain or the shoulder straps on my day pack that cut into my shoulders or the bug bites around my waist from camping outside Litchk or the bug bites from mosquitos along the way or, well, that was it for petty complaints. Infections on toes, however, are not to be messed with because of the risk of osteomylitis or sepsis. I have no wish to be another Bob Marley.

The remaining five – Kelliann, Hannah, Jack, Tamara and Tom – ready for any and all challenges as they continued on their way to Yeghegnadzor

Me – with moral and logistical support from Ashley O and Joel – not so ready for the challenges of vomiting kids as I traveled to Yerevan and continued on to Noyemberyan

It's five days later and my toes are doing well. I've spent my time on the Internet holed up in my armchair at home, trying to figure out what I need to do to get ready for our departure from Armenia, now less than a month away. Seeing the south, walking through villages and meadows, talking to the kids in school after school – nothing could have been a better finale to my time in Armenia – but now there are some goodbyes to say here in Noyemberyan. The tough part is coming up.