Saturday, May 24, 2025

Cheltham and Rochester, England

The Royal Dockyards back in the day.
View of the Ocelot from the stern.
In the sub.
The memorial to the ships and 11000 sailors lost during the war.
HMS Gannet.
Admiral Nelson's Victory.
Bruce and Pam.
The lovely streets of Rochester.
Rochester Cathedral.

The city wall of Rochester Castle.
The castle keep.
Very old England.
The cathedral seen from inside the castle wall.
Bruce straightening out a building.

Eating some horrible Pork Scratchings.
Pam and I enjoying a drink.

Saturday, May 24th.

After breakfast we drove to the town of Rochester where Bruce and Pam had booked a Holiday Inn for the night and where we left the car. We took a local bus to Chatham to visit the historic Royal Navy Dockyards. The site is massive. We boarded three ships to explore: the Ocelot submarine, the HMS Cavalier, a destroyer built during the second world war, and the HMS Gannet, a masted sailing ship. This is the dockyard where Admiral Nelson’s Victory was built. That’s the ship that he was on when he defeated the Spanish Armada, giving Britain command and dominance of the high seas for decades to come. He died during that battle. Three submarines were built here for Canada in the 1960’s including the Okanagan. We also watched a very funny young woman in pirate gear teach us about pirate life. It was aimed at kids but she was excellent and very entertaining. Then we took a bus to Rochester where we walked the quaint typical streets of the city. Charles Dickens lived in the area and referred to the city in his books. At the end of the street by the Medway River was the huge Rochester Castle and the Rochester Cathedral Castle. We were too late to enter either but they were impressive. Then we found a nice local pub and had a couple of pints before going to the Fish restaurant where I treated them to a great meal. We went to one more pub for a nightcap and then took an Uber to the hotel.

Friday, May 23, 2025

Travel Day and Reunion

Flying over the Greek Islands...
and Athens.
Reunited at Heathrow.

Friday, May 23rd.

We woke up by alarm at 1;45 and were down to the lobby to catch our ride to the airport. We checked in with Aegean Airlines and just like our flight to Uzbekistan had to pay for our luggage as somehow Adventures Abroad did not prepay it (not sure if that was their fault or somehow ours). The flight was uneventful, John slept and I typed trying to catch up. We arrived in Athens where we waited for three hours before boarding our flight to Heathrow. We arrived there at 11:30 am and were met by Bruce, who had flown in from Poland a couple of hours earlier where he’s been to an airshow.. We had a coffee together and a chat before John had to leave to catch his coach for Exeter. Bruce and I took the trains to his place where Pam was waiting. We spent the rest of the day catching up before an early bed as we were both very tired.

Thursday, May 22, 2025

A Tour of Holy Sites in Armenia

A beautitul sunny morning for seeing Ararat.
The Gerhard Monastery.
The interior...
and the incredible rock carvings on the cave walls.


Singing with amazing acoustics.
the Hellenistic Mithras Temple of Garni.
The stunning view from the temple.
The entrance to the temple.
Marianna explains the bread making process as we watch.
The mountain Noah's ark rested on after the flood, Ararat.
Our local guide Marianna.
Khor Virap Monastery
and the interior.
Khor Virap Monastery from the hill behind.
The last dinner with Pauline and Sherril, sushi!
Ready for the journey home.
 

Wed 22, May 2025 Dad’s 93rd birthday.

Today we headed for Yerevan, stopping at three places where local people express their beliefs: the Hellenistic Mithras Temple of Garni, dating back to the first century; the Geghard Monastery in the gorge of the River Asat and Khor Virap Monastery. Garni Temple was destroyed by an earthquake in 1679 and reconstructed in the 1970s. The temple was erected on a basalt base in the Greek or Hellenistic style and was a pagan temple built before Christ. Somehow it escaped destruction by Gregory the Illuminator who crushed all pagan temples when Christianity was adopted as the state religion in 301 AD. It sits on top of the gorge of the river Asat, surrounded by the ruins of the Garni Citadel, which also served as the summer residence of the Armenian kings in the third and fourth century. The monastery at Geghard is a unique architectural construction, partially carved out of the adjacent mountain, surrounded by cliffs. While the main chapel was built in 1215, the complex was founded in the 4th century. Then we had lunch at a local family restaurant where we watched two women make the local bread and had Armenian trout as the meat portion of our lunch. Then we continued to our final location of the trip when we visited Khor Virap Monastery (AD 4-17 c). Khor Virap has a very long and rich history, both secular and religious. It is situated in the Ararat Valley against the Biblical Mt Ararat (where Noah's Ark cast anchor) on the left bank of the River Araks on one of the high hills. From ancient times Khor Virap was highly esteemed for its geographical and territorial advantages. From the site we could look across the valley towards Mt Ararat which today sits inside Turkey but used to belong to Armenia before the border was relocated by the Russians. It tears at the hearts of the Armenian people that their enemy now owns or controls their mountain. The weather was spectacular today with blue cloudless skies that permitted us to see both peaks of Mt Ararat clearly. Then it was back to Yerevan. The Yerevan of today is a city of Christian cathedrals, theatres and museums, universities and academies, parks, squares and industrial sites and, finally, an art-loving and sophisticated people. When the coach arrived back at our Best Western Hotel we all said our goodbyes to Jordan, our local guide Marianna and each other as we will all fly home early in the morning. John, Jordan and I again made use of the pool to relax and cool off. Then John, Sherril, Pauline and I walked through the vibrant city streets to Republic Square where we found a little restaurant where we had a final drink and a light sushi dinner. John and I were back at the hotel and in bed by 10 hoping to get a few hours sleep before our 2am airport pickup.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Yerevan Museum Day

The Vernissage, the local artisans market.
The National History Museum
A 5000 year old shoe!
A very well laid out museum.
A wooden chariot that survived the ravages of time.
An excellent guide and a beautiful ancient door.
Books in the Matenadaran's Manuscript Collection.
Definitely one of a kind.
An early map of the world as they knew it.
Armenian Genocide Memoria
Our guide in the Genocide Museum at Tsitsernakaberd.

The Memorial and eternal flame.
Jordan and the group.
Traditional musicians and dancers.
Jordan with his new t-shirt and bag.

Wednesday, May 21. Jordan’s birthday

Today we toured three museums in one day. Museums are not really my thing and we’ve seen a few this trip that were pretty basic, but, today’s were all excellent and very interesting and or depressing. But first we visited Vernissage, the local arts and crafts market. There were lots of interesting souvenir type things to buy but I don’t need stuff or have a place to put it, so I just. Then we started our museum tour. First up was The National History Museum where we had an excellent female guide who gave us a succinct one hour tour of the history of Armenia from the bronze age up to the Middle Ages. The museum was beautiful, well laid out and had an abundance of important relics, which was impressive because previous empires had plundered them, and the Russians had stolen many artifacts to put in their own museums. The museum was built on Republic Square which was built in the 1940s in a traditional Armenian architectural style. In Yerevan, most buildings comprise a pink shade of "tuff" stone quarried locally. This is the most prominent feature of Yerevan's otherwise utilitarian Soviet architecture and is unique to Armenia. Next up was the Matenadaran's Manuscript Collection, which is a museum and institute dedicated to the collection, protection, restoration and study of written and printed documents, ancient maps, texts and books from Armenia, as well as Transcaucasia, Asia Minor and many Middle Eastern and European countries. The archives preserve over 100,000 documents of the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries: various deeds, decrees, treaties and letters, which contain vast material on the political and socio-economic history of Armenia and neighbouring countries. The museum made me think of two things: the music industry and car industry talk about limited editions and when looking at these ancient documents it was obvious that many of them were one offs or very limited in number because they were handwritten before the invention of paper or the printing press. And although some were written on animal skins, others were composed on early examples of paper, which was invented in China and was traded along the Silk Roads to other parts of the world. Most were written by monks when the general public was largely illiterate. Then we had lunch at an city square where John and I ate our snacks and basked in the warm sunshine while people watched. The Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum at Tsitsernakaberd ("Swallow Castle"), was next up. The memorial sits on the site of an Iron Age fortress, all above-ground traces of which seem to have disappeared. The museum's testimony to the 1915 destruction of the Armenian communities of Eastern Anatolia is moving, and the monument itself is austere but powerful. The spire symbolizes the Eastern and Western branches of the Armenian people. There we had another excellent museum guide who related to us the unbelievable, horrific and depressing history of the genocide committed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire (the Turks) against the Christian Armenians. This was a well documented effort by them to eradicate the Armenians. The Muslim Ottomans, the dominant group deemed Armenians and other Christians and Jews to be ‘infidels’ thus relegating them to an inferior status. In total millions of Armenians were massacred, displaced or relocated. All of this happened from the 1890’s through the First World War and which helped to hide the events from the world. There were death marches into the Syrian desert and forced conversion to Islam for many women and children. It is yet another horrible example of man’s inhumanity to man based on religious intolerance. Many countried including Turkey refuse to acknowledge the genocide to this day. Canada has and also accepted several hundred orphans who were housed on a farm near Georgetown. Joe Biden was the first American president to acknowlege the genocide. Many countries will not because of political or economic ties to Turkey. In scope and brutality it was not dissimilar to the Nazis treatment of the Jews. There was an illuminating quote by Adolf Hitler who said when justifying the Holocaust: who remembers the Armenians? We were all saddened by the presentation and were reflective as we walked around the Memorial and its eternal flame that overlooks Yerevan. After that we were taken back to the hotel for a rest (which John, Jordan and I used to make use of the pool) before reconvening for dinner at a local restaurant to celebrate both our last dinner together and Jordan’s 34th birthday. The restaurant gave Jordan a bottle of wine. Sherril and Pauline had bought an Armenian t-shirt and a really nice bag (to replace his blue Walmart bag that the group thought was tacky) on behalf of the group. Jordan was tickled and we had a good dinner with cake while we were entertained by a small band of local musicians, dancers and singers. Most of us got up and danced for one number before we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.