In today’s blog I visit an ancient Armenian vision of the world after humanity’s extinction, and I also explain how Catherine and I came to arrive in Tbilisi, Georgia at 4am, penniless, mapless and clueless, in an Iranian truck blaring “Gangnam Style”.

First thing in the morning I took a lift out from Kars to Ani, Armenia’s medieval capital and once a silk-road city of great importance with a population to rival Constantinople. The journey out there, through a desolate slab of bitterly cold central Asian style steppe, gave no suggestion that we were approaching an ancient capital. The houses of the few villages strung out along the roadside where built of stone and topped with earth and grass, a sensible way of insulating against the winter whilst not risking a crushing weight falling on the houses’ inhabitants when one of this region’s frequent earthquakes strikes.

The road ended in Ani. Dramatically located overlooking an earthquake-created gorge that marks the border between Turkey and Armenia, the ancient city of Ani is so deserted that it felt as if we’d come to the ends of, not just the country, but the earth. The only sound was the flowing water deep in the gorge below and occasional distant birdsong.

Ani was built in this dramatic location to prevent invaders from outside, but the real danger to its long-term survival was the enemy within, or rather beneath. Numerous invaders passed through including Seljuk Turks and Mongols, but the city’s final destruction was the result of it being located right on top of an enormous fault-line. The surviving buildings, churches, mosques, old silk road caravanserais and palaces, have all been dissected by earthquakes. The crumbled walls made me think of those children’s history books where the illustrations present a medieval castle or a roman baths with the exterior half removed so you can see the life inside.

But in Ani there is, of course, no life left. The city was once home to 100,000 people but today there were only four tourists and a few goats.  In addition a few saints with faded haloes still stood on church walls waiting for judgement day. Neither Christian nor Islamic buildings have been spared destruction by the forces underneath the earth. Neither the swastika on the city walls (an ancient sun symbol of the Turks and many other Asian cultures), nor the crosses or crescents on the church and mosque walls have prevented the city’s destruction.

Ani in its bleak beauty, and with signs of past-life everywhere contrasting with its utter emptiness today, is a vision of what the world will look like when humans no longer exist. It made me think back to a recent visit to Dubai, where huge edifices are now being erected in a city as successful in the modern world as Ani was in its day. One day some future tourist will visit Dubai and marvel at the grandeur that must have existed there before it was abandoned. And one day there won’t even be a tourist left to see the ruins at all.   

But my morbid musings in Ani were lightened somewhat by another member of our party, a middle aged Japanese woman who became obsessed with photographing me everywhere around the site. As she was alone I offered to take her photo with her camera, but she would always say “no, photo of you”. At every ruined building she would shout “Mr Hitch-hiker! Mr Hitch-hiker!” and she took so many snaps of me, including ones when I was just walking along not suspecting I was being snapped, that her film ran out.

On the way back from Ani to Kars the driver told us that Turkey did not build its first car factory until 1970, and that up until that date everyone rode around on horseback. Fortunately there are cars, and trucks, in and around Kars today so Catherine and I were able to complete our plan of hitch-hiking on to Georgia in the afternoon. As the trucks were slow on the windy mountain roads we only reached the Turkish town 15km from the border in the early arriving dark (4:30pm). We hitched to the border with an Iranian truck driver scrunched up on the front seat of a vehicle so old that it might have been the first one produced by that factory back in 1970.

Every turn of the wheel required an enormous wrenching on the part of the elderly driver, and produced a groan from the reluctant engine. Despite the difficulties of steering the beast the driver was not deterred from holding a cigarette in one hand and constantly changing the CD in the player above his head with the other. No song would be given more than 5 seconds before he decided to swap the CD, which meant he wasn’t looking at the dark mountain road ahead. Eventually some Iranian boy band dance pop came on and I decided to feign enthusiasm with big thumbs up and shouts of “good, good!” and even a bit of head-nodding, in the hope of getting him to leave the track on so he could focus on driving. Although less than a minute into the song I was regretting my decision and would have preferred to take my chances with crashing.

Gettng stamped out of Turkey was no problem but walking across the border into Georgia proved difficult. We were detained by the border police for nearly an hour and subject to a bizarre very occasional interrogation, where they would come over and ask us a random question such as “are you married?” then disappear for twenty minutes before returning to ask us our brothers and sisters names. Obviously our siblings aren’t on any lists of Georgia’s most wanted cos we were eventually allowed in. But as it was so late and dark finding a truck going on to Tbilisi was a struggle.

We stood in the freezing cold just across the border watching as every truck crossing parked up to sleep for the night. Eventually we were approached by another Iranian with a Georgian friend in tow to translate. He was driving to Tbilisi and offered to take us, while the Georgian offered a shot of vodka to warm us up.

We were so grateful for the lift but the truck was slow and stopped frequently and inexplicably. The journey to Tbilisi took over four hours, during which time I mostly slept, although I was periodically awakened by the song Gangnam Style which the driver had great enthusiasm for. Every time it came on his CD player he would turn it up to near maximum volume and wake me up, before turning the volume back to normal levels for the next tune.

The arrival in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, at 4am was marked by a final blast of “Gangnam Style” and the truck driver nearly ploughing straight through a heroic looking horseback statue of “King David the Builder”, the regal Georgian equivalent of our own Bob. We left the truck with great gratitude but also realising we had no idea where we were within Tbilisi, no idea of how to get to the home of our couchsurf host (whose phone number we had lost en route), no Georgian currency in our pockets, and no idea which one of us had wanted to come to Georgia in the first place.

Still we sorted it out, with a vague memory of the street name we needed to reach we found a taxi driver who would take the few US dollars we had to get us there. Then we found a hostel with wi-fi and were able to dig out our host’s number, and then we were delighted to discover that despite it being past 4am he wasn’t sleeping, in fact he’d just returned from his night out. We ended up sitting up chatting till past 6am and learned a lot of amazing stuff about Georgian culture – but that will have to wait for another blog cos this one, like the day it describes, has gone on for far too long and now it’s time for bed.