Goris, Armenia

It was another sunny morning, although somewhat on the chilly side, 0C at 8am. We got down for breakfast at 8:15am and then found out it only started at 8:30 :( so we used the time to pack up for our Tatev Monastery excursion.

Breakfast was quite the spread, given how few guests there are. The eggs to order were really tasty.

Our driver had already arrived and was chatting with the staff and having a coffee. I suppose he’s a frequent driver for the hotel guests.

Our main attraction for today, and the reason we came all the way to Goris, was Tatev Monastery. It’s reached by a 5.7km cable car from Halidzor.

The cable car holds one of those obscure Guinesss records, the longest non-stop double track cable car in a country starting with A. Or something like that.

First I had to update our timed tickets to include the return. Our outbound ride was at 10am, and the ticket people suggested returning at 11:30am. This would allow us just over an hour at the monastery, accounting for the 15 minute ride itself, and being in line 5 minutes before the return. We found it to be the right amount of time.

There was a group of five French-speakers with their guide also in the cable car. The max capacity is 25, which sells out in the summer (thus the timed ticket). 25 people in the car would be pretty packed. On the other hand the eight of us had plenty of room and could take turns at the front taking pics.

There’s beautiful views of the valley and of Old Halidzor below; the fifteen minute ride went by quickly. We disembarked and walked over to the monastery, about 100m away. The monastery is free to enter (all the monasteries have been free so far, although we thought they could charge tourists to help with upkeep).

We walked over to the church to get pics before more tourists arrived. Women require a shawl, of which there some hanging on the wall to borrow. A priest was doing some puttering about and made a nice subject in my pics.

We then exited the monastery grounds and walked 1km along the road to reach the classic viewpoint of Tatev Monastery. We could feel the altitude as we walked uphill. A pack of five friendly dogs joined us on our walk, just like our trek in Bhutan.

It was about 30 minutes round trip to the viewpoint. There’s a bright green tarp or something covering a part of the monastery, which I cropped out later. We were lucky once again with the weather, to get nice clear pics of the valley.

We explored around the rest of the monastery grounds. There’s rooms with some historical khachkars, and others with nice views over the valley.

We caught the cable car back down where our driver was waiting.

Our next couple stops on the excursion actually took us back towards Tatev Monastery, into the valley via the switchbacks we’d seen from the cable car.

First we went to the Devil’s bridge, which is actually just small-ish stalagmites and travertine pools in a cave. It’s an effort getting to them - it’s a rope ladder down about 20’ and then Spider-Man crawling about 10’. There’s a couple entrepreneurial guides who lead the way, for a fee. I went to see them cause we were already there; Heather waited up top. It’s cool enough to see but not worth the effort to get there.

On the drive into the valley we had seen the ruins of the Great Hermitage of Tatev, which was also on the itinerary I had planned. It didn’t look all that great, and definitely not worth getting muddy over. So we skipped it. Also our driver didn’t seem to know about the site as a tourist attraction, maybe i was fooled by travel blogs with carefully cropped pics.

The last site I had included in the Tatev excursion was Old Khndzoresk, where old homes and churches were carved out of the soft rock. The 4km access road to get there was really muddy due to the melting snow and ice. We got about 2km in before turning back, you would need a Jeep or something like that to get through. We’ll see similar stuff in Turkey, just with more tourists.

Also you can see from the transliteration of Խնձորեսկ / Khndzoresk why that monk invented a new alphabet for Armenian. It’s pronounced sort of like schnor-esk.

On the way back to Goris, our driver stopped at viewpoint overlooking the town for some pics. Goris is built into a valley with houses reaching up both sides, just like La Paz. It looks cool and would make a better pic in the spring when things turn green.

We got back to our hotel and had lunch, we both had the chicken soup and then split a large dish of dolmas. Mmm good. We’ve been suitably impressed with the hotel, which punches far above its price point.

We went for a walk after lunch to check out the town. A stray dog followed us, initially trying to jump up on us with its muddy paws, while I frantically tried to get google to translate down boy into Armenian (just kidding). We walked down to Grigor Tatevatsi Square in old Goris, had a hot chocolate from a stall in the square, and walked back.

Dinner was excellent, we had three dishes that were really tasty: stufffed eggplant, grilled/smoked vegetables, and a beef dish with dried fruit and a mushroom pilaf.