August 11th: We left at 11:45 – 45 minutes late for our drive to Armenia. Peace Corps Armenia has made arrangements for our reception into Armenia. We are told that we will be staying in a resort where the Armenian Olympics team does its training and is supposed to be quite lavish!

Our two buses drove down from Bakuriani to Borjomi where we stopped briefly so that our host-family could give us my computer which I should have taken in the first place. Not content with that, they gave us a big bag of food. Things were so rushed and emotional that we didn’t really think. We should not have taken the food. We were told later that all the Borjomi shops had been cleared out by panic buying, so the family definitely had a greater need than we.

We then drove through Akhalsikhe and closely followed the route we had taken just a few weeks earlier when we went to Vardzia. This time, however, we stayed on the “main” road, went through Nimotsminda and across the border. The crossing took ages. Five volunteers, for various reasons, did not have their passports with them and this may have been the cause of the delay. Or perhaps processing 90 foreigners simply takes that amount of time at this border crossing.

A brief rest stop.

Approaching the border.

The Armenian side of the border.

We then drove for another three hours to the resort. The whole trip took about 13 hours. We arrived at about 1:00 in the morning.

An eye-catching statue at the entrance to the resort where we are staying.

Yet another alphabet.

Members of a mime group adorn statuary in the nearby village, Tzakhkadzor.