AWOL in Armenia

I was speeding through a blizzard in the Armenian highlands with a chain-smoking, one-handed taxi driver blasting Rabiz on his shitty speakers.

My plans had gone to the dogs.

Yet, an immeasurable feeling of peace - a deep release - engulfed me as I watched the driver's crippled left hand precariously caress the wheel while his right fingers lit the 10th cigarette in an hour and began to gently wave rhythmically to the music - a conductor to an invisible, snowflaked orchestra gathered in the headlights.

Too often, it's sheer discomfort, the unpredictability of foiled plans, that forces you to accept the ephemerality of control.

Faced with the absurdity of an increasingly unknown situation, we can only laugh at our delusion that we ever had the reigns, reflecting in gratitude as we consider all the times, amidst infinite possibilities, that things actually ran smoothly.

I'd reached the northern-most and most remote Armenian/Georgian border crossing after a 4-hour bus from Yerevan. We'd traversed the country, listening to the Duduk wailing melancholically through the speakers as we weaved through ancient mountain towns, the sun vanishing eerily behind the heavy snowfall.

Armenia had been tough.

When the Ayatollah refused my visa, I booked a last-minute flight from Istanbul to Tbilisi, Georgia.

After weeks of exploring the Caucus and finding my afternoons happily commandeered by elderly roadside alcoholics with tubs of bootleg wine, I'd taken a night train to Yerevan.

At 3 am, I was hastily shaken awake by Military police at the border and escorted to a freezing, rusted shipping container: Questioned for reasons that remain a mystery.

I realised, in that empty train carriage in the proceeding hours, that Armenia wasn't hostile to foreigners; it just wasn't used to them - especially not the kind with no fixed address and no determinate plans on finding one.

The people were lovely, and the wine was exquisitely strong, but it wasn't exactly on the Lonely Planet route.

English was non-existent, Wi-Fi was an Orwellian daydream, and the nationwide transport infrastructure was a Soviet relic completely opposed to change. It was a dark, brooding, and fascinating country. A changing nation, yet Stalin's shadow stalked every street.

One afternoon, in a military-style bus park en route to Mount Ararat, I boarded a bus that looked like it had been a dormitory for chimney sweeps. With only a feint directional notion and speaking a language that may as well have been Sanskrit to fellow passengers, I trusted that by dusk, I'd be watching the sunset over the rumoured resting place of Noah's Ark.

Magical. But my driver was holding the dice.

After some bumpy hours, he stopped the bus on a deserted stretch of highway, abruptly grunting and pointing out the window at what looked like the aftermath of an abandoned Iraqi warzone.

Flabbergasted, I jumped out into the dust, laughing hysterically, realising with every passing minute that he'd just dumped me in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere.

I had no phone connection, limited cash, and the vague cartographic notion that I was walking in the wasteland that was at the nexus of the Turkish, Armenian, Iranian and Syrian borders.

A dicey region of the world to be marooned, to put it mildly.

It's an area prickling with a collective static of pure potentiality. Anything can happen - and it often does. I pictured Mum walking through the park to procure her morning coffee as I faced Mt Ararat in the distance, figuring I'd best start walking towards Turkey.

It wasn't an ideal solution given the Armenian/Turkish relations aren't exactly Koscher following the still-denied (and largely unknown) genocide of over a million Armenians who were forced by the Ottomans into the Syrian desert and mercilessly slaughtered during World War I.

I walked for hours through the dilapidated, desertified, cinder-blocked rubble, listening to Israel Vibration and Van the Man's Tupelo Honey on repeat. With The Turkish border as my drishti, I figured I would walk through the night or eventually find some semi-inhabited tarpaulin-clad town where I could doorknock for a night's sleep.

Dusk had embraced the harsh landscape before I discovered a semblance of habitation. Approaching the town in the distance, I was doubtful a sentient creature had lived there in a decade, but my standards were uncomfortably low by now, and all roads seemed to be leading me into this beaten-up pueblo.

First impressions were dubious. It wasn't exactly El Dorado, and it looked like a post-apocalyptic ghost town, yet the sound of barking, thrashing, salivating dogs restrained by a flimsy iron mesh was somewhat relieving. Life.

I'd been unsuccessfully playing charades with a baffled elderly couple through the fence for far too long before I realised any hope of a conversation was fruitless. Turning to leave, it noticed two boys standing together on the opposite street corner.

In a town this deserted, they were a mirage.

They greeted me with curious excitement. It was their first interaction with a foreigner outside of YouTube and the movies, and they beamed proudly as I desperately asked if they spoke any English - a question that had garnered only shy head-shaking throughout most of my time in Armenia.

Turned out they were studying English in Yerevan, and their bus, approaching in the distance, was driving them there.

I laughed manically as the bus arrived, and we found our filthy, torn seats, smiling at the synchronicities of life as I watched the town and the Turkish border shrink from view.

Brothers, they were around the same age difference as Sam and I. We bumbled over the potholes as they slowly explained their dreams of leaving their village and moving to the big smoke. They raved about football, sporadically pressing me for nudes on my phone and asking me about weed in Europe.

That bus ride was something I'll never forget.

A pure, simple, touching moment in time where, for a brief few hours, we were just three boys hanging in the back row of a bus talking shit and clumsily making each other laugh through communication that transcended syntax.

Religion, race and our own personal histories were all suspended for a fractional blink as we shared our lives freely. Their optimism was energising. Their hopes and dreams rolled off them so casually between questions that predominantly involved women - a recent discovery that had appeared on their horizon as quickly as their new pubic hair.

We reached a cold, grim Yerevan at night. I was struck with awe and gratitude as I watched my guardian angel apparitions cross the street before I trudged through the dark, snowy streets en route to the same guesthouse I'd left earlier that morning.

The old crone of a caretaker laughed at me, muttering in Armenian and handing me the keys to the same room. I showered and lay awake under the heavy blankets for hours, listening to the snow and the traffic, high with the bizarreness of life and the little encounters, the potentialities that move us in certain directions.

The next morning, I decided that my Armenian affair had expired. I took a taxi to another grotty, underwhelming bus depot and sedated myself with a long-neck beer. There's something serene about sitting in a freezing early morning Soviet bus park half-cut, watching the men play street chess and smoke their souls away.

Armenia had been fascinating, but I was ready to return to Tbilisi.

Four predictably uncomfortable hours passed, packed in like sardines as our minivan sped through endlessly ancient villages, the saving grace being the alcohol and the mournful, haunting Armenian music lamenting the troubled history of a people whose rich culture has been raped.

We wound through mountain towns, altitude increasing as we reached a Nordic-noir-style checkpoint high in the mountains.

Finally, as the sun set, we reached the Georgian border, where I was questioned by Kalashnikov-wielding police for the second time in weeks.

It was COVID days, and land crossings required a PCR test. This could, however, be provided for a hefty fee the following morning.

The vision of waiting around for some 20-year-old intern wearing a lab coat to probe me for 150 euros was outta the question.

I was escorted back into Armenia as my bus indifferently vanished behind the dense Georgian forest.

So, there I was, standing in a snowstorm at a remote Armenian mountain checkpoint that looked like the set of Deliverance.

No phone reception, no guesthouse in sight, no bueno.

As one of the local men vultureously watched me weigh my pathetically dismal options, I surrendered.

Where to?

Yerevan.

Half an hour later, I was speeding through a blizzard in the Armenian highlands with a chain-smoking, one-handed taxi driver blasting Rabiz on his shitty speakers.