Snake Highway

July 9th, 2025

06:44 The sun hasn’t yet cleared the mountains that enclose Dilijan and Jonny is still asleep. I’m stuffing cold soaked oats and an instant coffee down me and in ten minutes I’ll set off alone. Last night we agreed that we’d split for today, Jonny will take a rest day and catch a bus later, I’ll try and knock out the 37 kilometres to Sevan by mid-afternoon so we can still hang out this evening. Tomorrow we head for the volcano.

It’s strange. More than two years since I set off from Bristol, thousands of kilometres walked alone and only three days of walking with Jonny, yet setting off this morning without him feels… wrong.

But even this feeling I’m grateful for. Today I want to reflect on this walk-within-a-walk which has been a success beyond anything I could have hoped for. What has made it so?

08:36 Turning off the main road onto a dirt track through the wilderness, I pass four men repairing a water main and almost immediately the track deteriorates to an overgrown mess and I feel relieved not to be putting Jonny through this.

Within a half hour I have probably ten thousand nettle stings and find myself involuntarily cursing aloud in anguish and frustration. The vegetation towers above my head, concealing hollows in the ground that snatch at my ankles and every three steps forward I seem to lose my footing completely. I could keep pushing through it, but I want to spend today in reflection, not frustration, so I beat a thrashing retreat, descend a steep gully, wade across a stream, stumble across an animal trail and follow that until it vanishes into the undergrowth, before hauling myself up the wall of the valley for a half hour to reach what I will later christen The Snake Highway.

That level of overwhelming bush reminds me of planting trees amidst ten-foot-high fields of brambles and gorse in New Zealand, of spending days tangled in bushman’s lawyer. Above all, it expands my empathy for Jonny. That first full hiking day after Alaverdi began with an intense couple hours of bush bashing — not so dense as what just beat me, but close enough. That he stuck with me and barely complained is testament to his good nature.

The old road is completely deserted now that the new one and its 2.2 kilometre tunnel have been cut through the mountain. Deserted except for three elderly women from one of the hamlets up here, with whom I share a very joyful and satiating early lunch. They have a typical spread: bread, cucumber, tomatoes, meat, cheese, juice, coffee, vodka, biscuits, chocolates. They insist, with the particular insistence of Armenian grandmothers that cannot be refused, on sharing the lot of it with me. They come down to this spot because there’s a natural spring around which a memorial to a young soldier has been built. He was a relation but I can’t quite figure out to which, later I wonder if they are three sisters, and they all grieve him. They arrange some food on a cloth beside the memorial as if setting a place for him too.

Lunch over, I return to the snake highway. “Snake” both because like all old mountain roads it snakes back and forth through hairpin turns, but also because I’ve already seen plenty of snakes laid out sunbathing on the tarmac. As I pass they remain motionless except for their heads, which raise up ever so slightly and turn to follow my movements. There have been a couple of those fifteen to twenty centimetre long brilliant green lizards as well, the ones that seem partially transparent under the bright sun.

The credit for these rich days belongs to Jonny first of all: it was his idea to come and join me out here, he made the time, he made the trip. Beyond that prime movement though, what is it about us/him, that has made these days such a triumph? There are strong similarities between us, sure — that easy familiarity where so much is known without needing to be expressed — but without forestalling communication, but rather making space for us to dig into those things that matter much more. To lift a line from day four,

By his own experience, his abundance of empathy (and his ongoing psychology degree), and within the vivid crucible of this walk together, with Jonny those same conversation have risen to that hallowed plane of dialogue where there is no need to translate between two worlds, where nothing is diminished in the telling, and so to a place where things are said, heard, and understood in a way that is simultaneously effortful and effortless, such that our growing understanding of the other expands our understanding of self equally.
— The Booky Chronicles, Day 4: The Dilijan Plan

It is this trust above all that has made these days what they have been.

Armenia deserves credit too though, it has put on a very good show for Jonny and I, and I will be forever grateful for that. My foremost fear in his coming was that my spartan, precarious lifestyle wouldn’t yield such joys to him, that there would be too much discomfort. I made accommodations, tried to smooth some rough edges, but rough is rough and bears are bears and some discomforts are just inherent to this life.

This day off marks the midpoint of his visit and already there has been a fullness to it that borders the absurd: the bustle of a strange capital; the battle of a belligerent taxi journey; the devoted singing of a lone monk in a monastery; the delight of finding derelict shelter at the end of a day’s walk twice over; salvation delivered by an 8-year-old boy on a horse when the threat of the wild felt too great, the hospitality of a large shepherd family at their summer pasture up in the mountains; a trip to space in the ISS; and yesterday, the simple pleasure of a guilt-free afternoon of rest after such a window of maximally full days.

Later, in the small and somehow strange village of Semyonovka (the whole place felt both very alive and very dead), I photograph Yova, a young boy carrying a bucket, his expression serious with the weight of the task assigned to him, and Arpine, waiting for the village bus to take her and her dog to the vet. “I speak English book,” she says proudly, and proceeds to demonstrate with a welcome few words she’s learned from a simple English book she has at home. She can’t understand much when I reply, so I use my few words of Armenian and Russian while she tries to answer in English. We meet somewhere in the middle, in that improvised language of gesture and goodwill.

At the edge of the village a half dozen children wait for a bus going the opposite direction, toward Dilijan. Not far beyond them a woman fights with an unruly calf on a leash that’s pulling her across the open grazing of the hillside. Before I can get close enough to help, she manages to wrest control of it long enough to stake the tether into the ground. A little further on I meet two men raking hay. The younger takes an interest and I, newly equipped with the Armenian word for year (տարի/tari), tell him I’ve been walking for three years from England. That blows his mind a little. He’s sad when his phone rings, interrupting our chat, but I’m happy just to have met him and eager to maintain my pace toward Sevan.

In Tsovagyugh I’m called over by a man sitting on a bench wearing a military uniform. Beside him is another man, civilian clothes, looking increasingly uncomfortable as his friend proceeds to deeply embarrass him by begging me for some monetary contribution to a free Armenia. The civilian leaves quickly, repeatedly imploring his friend to stop.

Moments later I meet an old woman in a beautiful blue dress and headscarf. She operates a tiny shop, no larger than a Lada Niva stood on its end, its shelves crammed with a few of the odds and ends a village might need, but mostly with sweets. She introduces herself only as Babushka and won’t let me leave until she has stuffed my front shirt pocket with all the sweets and chocolates it can carry, her weathered hands pressing them in one after another, nodding firmly each time as if to say and this one, and this one too.

And one more kindness before I leave this town: Hamayek and Daniel, each knowing a few non-overlapping words of English, come to an understanding of the breadth of the walk through my couple words of Armenian and Russian. They receive it with such warmth as further fills my heart. Hamayek asks me to take his photograph, and I steal one of Daniel despite his protests because his face is so striking — first for his large-nosed, long-faced appearance, best described as Adrian Brody-esque, and second because it’s covered in grey plaster powder from the tiling work he’s just taking a break from.

I’m on the highway now, hugging the edge of Lake Sevan, when six police cars and trucks pass in convoy, a train of flashing lights. I watch them disappear around the bend and wonder what they’re up to. Turning back to the road, I come face to face with a sweet old man named Heraj who offers a very strong handshake and an intensity of eye contact that I’m becoming accustomed to in Armenia, and which I enjoy. It feels very earnest, very respectful, and after months of walking where communication is always improvised and incomplete, there’s something grounding in that directness.

I spend ten minutes chatting and laughing with three Chinese tourists: a woman my age and her parents. They’ve just come from Mestia in Georgia, tomorrow they’ll be in Iran. What strikes me, in contrast with perhaps my prejudice against Chinese tour groups, is that they’re all very genuinely having a lovely time, even walking beside this busy highway to get photos of themselves in front of the lake. The walk stuns them a bit. But I’m glad to have told them because they engage with it in a genuine way. The questions they ask are the usual ones but they meet each answer with sincere curiosity. They’re very affectionate. As we take photographs together, walk together a little, and say goodbye, we embrace each other with an ease and familiarity that surprises me.

In Sevan Jonny has found us a guest house, another night of luxury before we walk back into the wilderness tomorrow, including a gorgeous dinner and spirited conversation with our hosts. Through the evening we find we have both been reflecting along similar lines through the day.