Alaverdi via the Tense Apricot Police Taxi Scam

I feel like we’re in a budget old people’s home where we can’t afford separate rooms.
— Jonny

July 25th, 2025 It’s 1am and Jonny has just arrived in Yerevan from London to walk with me for a week or so along the spine of some of the mountains that more or less allow Armenia to exist. Compared to my usual, sleeping on a pull out sofa feels luxurious (Jonny can have the bed), but I can appreciate how this dimly lit shoebox buried in the back of a slightly crumbling building in the village of Parakar (Փարաքար), sandwiched between Zvartnots International Airport and a gypsum mine, might seem a little spartan to a man who makes his home in Catford, London.

This first test of Jonny’s adaptability wasn’t intentional, there was nowhere else available near the airport, but it has confirmed my sense that he’ll be up for what lies ahead. I say “sense” because Jonny and I have only met once before (in Pëllumbas, Albania, that village of 200 people I called home for the first winter of the walk) so this week will be a walk into the unknown in more ways than one.

I have come off my line to collect Jonny so in the morning we grab some supplies and head to the bus station in order to get back to Alaverdi where my feet have so far carried me. No buses are running any time soon so we haggle with a taxi man to drive us the 4 hours north. Said taxi man is a former soldier but by the way he barges through traffic and makes a hundred blind overtakes on the winding highway, we imagine he spent his childhood dreaming of being a Formula 1 driver instead.

On the road to Alaverdi we are: castigated for daring to wear our seatbelts, as though it constituted a personal insult to our driver; duped into buying two kilos of perhaps the tastiest apricots I’ve ever eaten, and which cost barely a quid; nearly strong armed into buying lunch for said driver at a restaurant with 400 things on the menu, all of which we must ask for to determine the 3 things they’re actually serving; moderately alarmed as we find ourselves slipstreaming behind a police car as though under escort, only to overtake it at 110mph somehow without any problem; forced to remind our driver that we agreed a price all the way to Alaverdi, not 50km short in Vanadzor; and told that we talk too much (in fairness, we do talk for the entire journey) and this is why the music must be at deafening levels else, our driver says, he’ll fall asleep… it is without a doubt the best, most memorable Armenian taxi experience we could have had.

That first night — after returning to my line of footsteps, being quizzed by young Anissa in a market, leaving the birthplace of the father of the MiG-21, zig-zagging up the walls of the Debed Canyon, watching an Eastern Orthodox monk sing hymns alone in the hall of a monastery, and passing two teenagers on horseback carrying an AK-47 — we sleep in what was once home to seasonal shepherds in the mountains but now lies in near ruin.

We’re barely ten minutes back onto the trail in the morning when we meet the first of many sets of bear prints in the mud, fresh too. A week before flying out Jonny had caught wind of the bears in Armenia and sent me a concerned message, in the end we settled on arming him with bear spray. For my part, people have been strenuously warning me about bears in every country since Italy so I no longer register any concern about them. In Croatia I had my only close encounter when I was woken in the middle of the night by a bear who came to investigate the smelly human sleeping on a mat in the middle of the forest, ever since then I’ve felt more or less immune, but Jonny’s visit is reminding me what it’s like to be in bear country for the first time again.