Early Saturday afternoon I ventured down to Jermuk with Anush to relax and stay there overnight, something I had been meaning to do for several years now. I was already aware that it would have been rather cold there as it’s still winter, but I also knew that we would have the entire place to ourselves since it’s the off-season.

Jermuk is a resort town located high in the mountains of the southern Vayots Dzor region, which incidentally is perhaps the most beautiful area of the country, in close par with northern Lori. During Soviet times Jermuk was a popular location for people to be cured of various illnesses at the numerous sanatoriums there. They still exist, although many are privatized but there are some old-school state-run places as well to get away from it all.

As you may be aware the national mineral water of Armenia is bottled there. Two companies are located in the town employing hundreds of people locally. Jermuk Group is by far the largest and their product can be found in most grocery stores and restaurants countrywide. Indeed, usually when you order Jermuk mineral water in a restaurant you’ll be served the familiar dark green bottle with the blue label. The other bottling plant is “Mayr Gordzaran” or literally the “mother factory,” which has been operating for something like 50 years. I actually prefer their product, but it’s harder to find. Although the naturally carbonated water is popular it does indeed have high amounts of mineral content, notably sodium. There’s also higher than average levels of arsenic, which caused quite a stir a couple of years back (click here and here to find out more), although they are supposedly not toxic. In any case, Jermuk should not be consumed in mass quantities, despite that it is excellent for digestive problems. I cannot think of a better remedy for upset stomach, actually.

The entire landscape was already covered in snow as soon as we reached the towering plateau leading to the town. Along our 20-minute trip there from the main highway we were caught in a hailstorm, which was quite lovely. Hail as it turns out is excellent for getting the car clean. Strangely enough driving wasn’t as risky as I figured it would be-- the Niva didn’t slide or skid once during the drive.

After arriving the first thing we did was find a place to stay. We crossed the bridge leading to the town’s center, and I instinctively decided to take a right at the end of the road rather than making a left that leads to the main park and the tiny downtown area. After about 200 meters we stumbled upon a four-story hotel containing about 30 rooms called Ani, which as we found out had just opened for business at the beginning of the year. The place was extremely clean and the room was very comfortable. Our room was triangular in shape, a bit odd when you think about it but the layout worked. Seemed like they consulted a feng shui expert while they were designing the entire place. The closet, cabinets and bureau seemed logically placed. The tiny bathroom however was a bit cramped because of the corner-placed shower with its shallow tub and sliding glass doors; nevertheless the bath the next morning was invigorating. I’ll have to say that it is perhaps the best hotel I have stayed in anywhere in Armenia. And for only 5,000 dram per person, or around $17, you cannot go wrong at all. This price will undoubtedly double or even triple by the summer, but it’s an excellent alternative to the overpriced sanatoriums where you are required to pay $200 per night or even more. Just beside the hotel is the Gndevank restaurant, named after a monastery located in the adjacent valley. The service there was prompt and friendly, and we ate very well. They offer some excellent locally produced dairy products like strained yoghurt, salty cheese and a fantastic rich, thick buttermilk product, which actually looked like vanilla ice cream when they brought it out. People with high cholesterol problems should stay away from all of it, needless to say.

After dinner we ventured on foot into the park where there is a stone plaza with about six gigantic urns in a row alongside a wall. Into every urn flows a steady but light stream of mineral water, each at a different temperature. The first spout dripped out Jermuk at about 30 degrees Celsius, and the temperature increased in five degree increments with each subsequent spout. Into the last urn flowed mineral water at 53 degrees Celsius, and since I didn’t have a cup with me I simply let the stream trickle into my mouth, which I placed just under the spout. It was like drinking tea and warmed up my belly immediately in the chilly air. We went for a short walk through the park along a narrow path on top of the snow banks that must have been as much as four or five feet high in some spots. When we heard some dogs barking in the distance Anush became scared so we made our way back to the main road.

The next morning after a light breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, cheese and butter with lavash bread and wild mint tea we jumped into the car and were about to make our way into the gorge to see the waterfalls, which I have been meaning to find since the beginning of 2005 when I purchased my first Niva. When we saw that the narrow road leading into the gorge was partially covered in snow about six inches high Anush freaked again, so we turned back. While in search of the old road leading to the main highway we stumbled upon a newly constructed small church called St. Gayane and lit a few candles there. We inquired about how we could find the old road but the woman said it was best to ask a gas station attendant on the main road. There was someone waiting for a bus there who we asked, and he told us that he would show us how to get to it if we drove him to the main highway, as he was en route to Vayk, which is about five or so miles from the turnoff to Jermuk. His name was Virab, and he works as a driver for the electric company but also keeps bees. During the winter he places the hives in Vayk where it is much warmer, then transports them to Jermuk in the spring. Apparently the portion of the old road leading into Jermuk is blocked by fallen ledge, but it was possible to reach the monastery as that part of the road was not obstructed. We dropped him off in town, and I promised that I would try his honey the next time I was in the area.

We had to travel along the old road from the main highway for about 20 kilometers in order to reach the monastery. It was rough going at first because the asphalt had been worn away in many places and there were large pot holes scattered filled with dirty rainwater as a result. The left side of the road is almost completely lined with high ledge except for a few places, and along the right flows the Arpa River, the source of which is the lake in Jermuk. After 10 kilometers or so the road became littered with chunks of crumbling eroded ledge. We tossed aside as many rocks as necessary to move forward but we soon realized that at least 500 meters of the road had to be cleared up ahead, so we gave up after 20 minutes of futile work. That was when my lower back finally gave out. Turning the Niva around took another aggravating 20 minutes because of some huge blocks of stone that needed to be maneuvered around, which stressed both of us out. For the way back I decided that it was best to engage the four-wheel drive which helped immensely getting out of there. It perhaps would only have been possible to reach the monastery with a Villis, a Russian SUV that is raised much higher off the ground than the Niva and built like a tank. My friend Tigran Nazaryan has a diesel Villis that would certainly get us there despite the rocks, but he would have to be lured away from his apricot orchards, something that isn’t going to happen anytime soon with the beginning of spring.

On Saturday while driving through Areni I stopped at a roadside stand operated by a family of five, from whom I have purchased lots of wine before. The head of the family, Haigaz, makes the best wine I have had anywhere in Armenia and ages it, storing the wine in large containers in his cool stone garage. I bought about four liters of an exquisite three-year-old dry red wine and a two-liter bottle of wine distilled in 2004. He insisted that we eat a late lunch with him of baked chicken and sliced potatoes the following afternoon, and we did so eagerly, although we showed up an hour late having been unaware that the clocks had been set forward overnight. He asked me if it wouldn’t be much trouble to drop his daughter and her friend off in Yerevan where they attended university, and we immediately agreed to take them with us. Along the way through the craggy terrain we listened to some vintage folksy Roupen Hakhverdian songs and the girls sang along softly. It was a nice afternoon, and a lovely weekend.

Labels: Architecture, Armenian Churches, Nature, Personal Experiences, Travel

I might as well, judging from the absence of comments left after I posed some vital questions to the readership of this blog in my previous post,  address them in a subjective voice since, after all, this is a blog and not a newspaper.

Turkey should confess to committing genocide against the Armenian people by year’s end. It’s absurd to continue denying it, especially when major European and South American nation-states have already done so, thereby putting Turkey in an awkward, dare I say ridiculous position. Until Turkey admits to the terror and inflicted plague committed in its previous incarnation, I don’t see any point in having an opened Turkish-Armenian border. The economy in Armenia is shrinking because of various factors due to decreased exports as well as a decline in cash transfers into the country from Armenians living abroad. Thus there is a purchasing slowdown because of uncertainty and consumers are cutting corners in order to wisely prepare for the worst-case scenario, which is the situation arguably all around the globe. The economy is not worsening because of a closed border with Turkey.

Although hundreds of millions of dollars will be pumped into the country from Russian and European powers this year, there’s no telling where exactly that money will go, and how much will end up in the pockets of selfish, greedy government officials—let’s face it.  Some of it will supposedly go to infrastructure and road projects. But judging by the way they pave roads here, never mind the assemblage of water networks, I don’t expect quality being put into the work, and I doubt anyone does. There doesn’t seem to be accountability for the way funds are spent in Armenia. But I digress.

It’s nice that the Turks are no longer stipulating that a solution to the Karabagh problem be on the table for diplomatic talks or even an opened border, since it’s none of their business anyway and never was to begin with. Turkey has enough problems to deal with in terms of divvying up land to various minorities that resided at one point or another in its eastern regions. Armenians obviously lay claim to many of those lands and they must be returned to Armenian governance. Exactly which ones can be debated between the Armenian and Turkish authorities—that’s ultimately their decision, whether Armenians in the diaspora understand this or not. And considering that there is basically only one active politician in Armenian politics from the diaspora and a former foreign minister at that, namely Raffi K. Hovannisian, the diasporan voice will not be represented in such talks, nor should it be since they aren’t publically speaking about land transfers at all.   Naturally Armenia must have secure access to the Black Sea once and for all and that area of land leading to it must fall under the domain of the Armenian republic. Like I just pointed out, no Armenian organization political or otherwise is discussing what that will entail geographically speaking; however, there’s one think-tank in cyberspace trying to stir up thought called Regional Kinetics.

The Armenian authorities are being very hypocritical, even foolish, in making a deal to export electricity to Turkey so soon, long before any details about diplomatic ties are set in stone. By doing so Armenia is putting itself at risk of becoming overly dependent on the Turkish demand for survival. As I have mentioned, the Armenian marketplace is already flooded with Turkish goods purchased in one-sided trading. Making money off of Turkey by selling kilowatts should not come at the expense of having a continual closed border, no secure, dependable and direct access to the Black Sea, no recognition of horrors committed in the past, and no agreements to reinstate at least a sliver of the expansive Western Armenian territories as a gesture in good faith. Personally it means nothing that the Turkish president came to Armenia last year to watch a soccer game and say hi. Turkey has yet to prove that it can be trusted by the Armenian nation, regardless of how many times its politicians and scholars grin and shake hands. Read history to understand how the Armenians have been cheated and tormented by the Turks in the past. They need to fess up to their wrongdoings. Armenians are still being manipulated by the Turks, that’s obvious to me at least.

I just read an excellent article written by Hovannisian that was published on Hetq Online on March 24, in which he essentially challenges Turkey to face up to its past as well as its present. Here are some excerpts:

Turkey and Armenia:  These sovereign neighbors have never, in all of history, entered into a bilateral agreement with each other.  Whether diplomatic, economic, political, territorial, or security-specific, no facet of their relationship, or the actual absence thereof, is regulated by a contract freely and fairly entered into between the two republics.  It’s about time.  Hence, the process of official contacts and reciprocal visits that unraveled in the wake of a Turkey-Armenia soccer match in September 2008 should mind this gap and structure the discourse not to run away from the divides emanating from the past, but to bridge them through the immediate establishment of diplomatic relations without the positing or posturing of preconditions, the lifting of Turkey’s unlawful border blockade, and a comprehensive discussion and negotiated resolution of all outstanding matters based on an acceptance of history and the commitment to a future guaranteed against it recurrence.  Nor should the fact of dialogue, as facially laudable as it is, be pitched in an insincere justification to deter third-party parliaments, and particularly the US Congress, from adopting decisions or resolutions that simply seek to reaffirm the historical record.  Such comportment, far from the statesmanship many expect, would contradict the aim and spirit of any rapprochement.

The past as present:  The current Armenian state covers a mere fraction of the vast expanse of the great historical plateau upon which the Armenians lived from the depths of BC until the surgical disgorgement of homeland and humanity that was 1915.  Having managed for seventy years as the smallest of the republics of the USSR, Soviet Armenia was the sole remnant component of the patrimony in which the Armenians were permitted by the Soviet-Turkish accords of 1921– the Armenian equivalents of Molotov-Ribbentrop– to maintain a collective existence under the Kremlin’s jurisdiction. Even such obviously Armenian homesteads as Mountainous Karabagh and Nakhichevan were severed by Bolshevik-Kemalist complicity and placed, in exercise of Stalin’s divide-and-conquer facility, under the suzerainty of Soviet Azerbaijan. Accordingly, as improbable as it seems in view of its ethnic kinship with Azerbaijan, modern-day Turkey also carries the charge to discard outdated and pursue corrective policies in the Caucasus.  This high duty applies not only to a qualitatively improved and cleansed rapport with the Republic of Armenia, but also in respect of new realities in the region.

I don’t believe that anyone could have made these points any clearer and as concise. 

Labels: Armenian Genocide, Economy, Politics, Thoughts and Musings

I just read an interesting article on RFE/RL's Web site about a deal whereby Armenia will certainly be supplying electricity to Turkey after all by April. There was a news story about this plan last year, but I didn't expect it to come to fruition so soon. Here's some excerpts:

The Armenian government announced such an agreement between an Armenian state-run power transmission company and a Turkish utility following Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s September 2008 visit to Yerevan. Movsisian and other energy officials said that Armenia will start delivering 1.5 billion kilowatt/hours of electricity in March if technical preparations at power grids in eastern Turkey are completed by that time. 

The Turkish side has still not officially confirmed the information. Some officials in Ankara have actually denied that Turkey is set to buy electricity from a country with which it has no open border and diplomatic relations.

“The agreement [on electricity exports] was signed,” Movsisian insisted on Friday. “In accordance with that agreement, preparatory work is underway [in Turkey] to start electricity deliveries as soon as possible.” 

“It was envisaged that that work will be complete in April,” he told RFE/RL. “It is still possible that we will finish that and start [supplies] in April. 

***

Armenia produced approximately 6 billion kilowatt/hours of electricity last year and has the capacity to significantly boost that output. Two major Armenian thermal-power plants are currently undergoing multimillion-dollar reconstruction. They are due to be the main recipients of natural gas that will start flowing to Armenia from neighboring Iran through a recently built pipeline. It is expected that the bulk of electricity to be generated with Iranian gas will be sold to the Islamic Republic. 

Labels: Armenian Genocide, Economy, Politics

An article that I wrote about the exchange rate fiasco of two weeks ago was printed on the Armenian Weekly's web site, which incidentally has been, thankfully, redesigned and looks great. 

Labels: Economy

Labels: Social and Cultural

The dram seems to have found its place, at least for now, on the monetary exchange market. Yesterday the dollar bought around 365 dram on the street, while the dram to dollar rate was averaging at 375, give or take one or two dram. That discrepancy is not altogether understandable, as there was always a difference of five dram at the most. But the dollar is ever in demand, that's for sure.

The exchange rate will probably continue to fluctuate 10 dram up or down and I think that's perfectly normal. Commerce has not been affected from what I have seen, the Gomidas market for instance is still thriving as always and bread is plentiful. Construction is continuing, with old, historical buildings being demolished to make way for new structures, most likely elite apartment housing which has been the trend for years. There are rumors spreading around that by the year's end people will wait in long lines to buy a loaf of bread as was the case in the early 1990s. With the way things are going here I don't see that happening quite honestly.

Last week's crisis was brought on by a proposal by the International Monetary Fund to provide $540 million in repayable loans on the condition that the dram exchange rate be allowed to float. The rate had been fixed for a year at 305 dram, although the Central Bank has always denied that it had a hand in setting the rate. A few days ago the IMF approved the loan, so things will most likely keep going as they have been, despite the Word Bank's projection of zero economic growth for 2009.

Labels: Economy

According to some friends I have just been chatting with the dram exchange rate to the dollar is falling. For almost a year the dollar bought 300 dram, the lowest the rate had been in years. As of last night the Armenian currency's worth decreased 80 dram against the dollar, apparently during the course of one hour if A1+ can be believed.

My friend Loris tells me that dollars are no longer even being exchanged. This means that the dollar will continue to strengthen against the dram because the currency is finally losing its value and significance. It most likely has been artificially inflated as many people believe--at least everyone I know has mentioned this in conversation. People are apparently on a shopping spree and grocery stores now have shelves emptied of the bare essentials, like sugar, flour and cooking oil. So it was just a matter of time. I am surprised it didn't happen sooner, quite honestly.

The collapse of the Armenian economic paradox is occurring for a number of reasons. The World Bank's recent prediction that Armenia would see zero economic growth in 2009 wasn't an encouraging way to start the year. It means that government-connected businessmen only now have started to panic. Perhaps the Central Bank's dollar reserves are getting low or are running out. No one can say because their modus of operations has never been transparent to the public. Perhaps only the World Bank and the IMF really know what's going on, but then again, they have most likely been closely associated with the problem to begin with, having both been strong supporters of the Central Bank's decisions with the currency and the overall banking system. Now the banks are going to get into trouble, especially when their regular customers start withdrawing whatever they have in a panic and convert it to euros or whatever else they can think of. There may even be a resurgence in public unrest with rallies and riots.

One thing's for sure--no one has ever really had faith in the dram because if they did it would never have been backed by the dollar. If anything it should have been backed by gold just as the dollar once was. Now the frenzy will start. I am predicting that some of the fancy boutiques will start closing their doors overnight because they will no longer be reliable fronts for laundering money. Some mafias will start going into the automobile export business and all automobile imports will drastically decrease or stop. Imports of consumer goods like clothing and domestic stuff may taper off. Banks will start shutting their doors, despite previous claims by Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian that the banking sector was strong regardless of the global economic crisis. But the one thing I naturally don't want to see is a resurgence of petty crime when the mafia underlings and wannabe crew members start freaking out that business is bad and start robbing. That will be a terrible situation, and let's hope that desperation will not encourage that to come to fruition.

Labels: Economy