And so back to Yerevan after 7 days of driving around Armenia. What a beautiful country! Best times to come are May/June and September/October. If you come in June you'll see the wild flowers - no matter how hard your heart, however cynical you are - to see fields of red, yellow, pink, purple, blue and white flowers will refresh your spirit - plus all the butterflies and the birds.... Do you know, Yerevan only has about 6 pairs of pigeons - top marks, Yerevan...

Greetings from Goris - this is as far south as we come on this trip to Armenia. I have several days to catch up on so will now continue from where we left - i.e. Lake Sevan. We followed the shore line of Lake Serevan and went first to a church at Hayravank and then on to a fascinating cemetary in Gavar - the fascination being that some of the grave stones date from the 7th century and there are, of course, lots of khachkars to see. After that we drove through t...

Greetings from Lake Sevan - about 60km from Yerevan and regarded as the "pearl of Armenia". We left Yerevan and drove out to Amberd Fortress - where the ruins of the castle and a church can be seen and visited. The Amberd Fortress is built on a promentary at the confluence of the Amberd and Arkashen rivers - and the views are just magnificent. The grassy slopes are covered in a multitude of brightly coloured wild flowers - red, yellow, purple, white - ...

Barev dzez from Yerevan - capital of Armenia! Now - i discovered on arrival that Armenia has its own alphabet - devised in 405ad by Mesrop Mashtots - initially with 36 characters but three additional ones were created in the 12th century, so they now have 39. Makes our 26 seem a bit meagre, doesn't it? The original 36 characters were also used as a numbering system but, luckily for us, the Armenians seem to have adopted Arabic numerals somewhere down the line....