Due visa-problems for Iran and India, we had to make a stop in Armenia. We took the minibus from the bus station near Metrostop Dedubi to get to Yerevan. It was a ride of 6 hours because of the border check and again dangerous curvy road through the lower Caucasian mountains. I must say I found this route terrifying, since the driver was actually crazier than our Kazbegi trip-driver. You must be crazy to drive with such high-speed with sudden turns to avoid holes on the road while there is this ravine on one side. We also saw there had been an accident on the road and a car had fallen into the ravine, surrounded with bystanders and police. That we were driving in the dark at a certain point was the cherry on top. We finally arrived in Yerevan and I remember being happy we’d survived the sick drive.
The next day we went to the Indian Embassy to fix our visa. We printed out all the documents needed in our hostel but since the printer didn’t really coöperate, everything was printed in small letters with too much text on one A4. We wanted to try it anyways so we hurried to the embassy since it would close at noon. For some reason they were quite amazed to see us wanting to get a visa for India. They got all suspicious for no reason and asking us several questions like who were we, which places we had visited before Armenia, why we wanted to go to India and why we didn’t apply for a visa in Holland, etc. After answering all these questions, the lady we were talking to decided we needed to print the documents once again because we had printed it incorrectly. We hurried to a travel agency and asked if they could help us with printing and rushed back to the embassy. We had to answer some more questions about our history and parents until we could finally hand over our documents, passports and fingerprints for starting the application process. The lady told us that it would take 5 working days and we should call back in couple of days before picking it up. We also went to the Iranian Embassy to inform about their visa possibilities, but unfortunately it was already closed. We called the next day and they said there are several possibilities like with or without an authorisation-code ( which would take couple of weeks) or the visa-on-arrival. Since the first two options took too much time, we decided to go for the visa-on-arrival in Teheran. Therefore we had to skip Tabriz, because visa-on-arrival was not possible on the borders which we previously thought. We couldn’t book tickets for Tehran at the travel agency because The Indian Embassy had our passports, so we had to wait with that as well. Sigh.
We took some days to discover Yerevan since we would only have good weather in the first few days (for me personally it was still too cold but okay). I must say there was not much to see around the city. The ambiance was nice, but there was just not much going on. There were some tours which our hostel provided to do some sightseeing outside of Yerevan but that was not really interesting for us. So most of the time we hanged out in our hostel, having nice conversations with our crazy Japanese rapper-friend Yoshi, watching serials, cooking and most of the time only go out to get groceries or dinner. After four working days we called to the embassy and they told us our visa was ready! Yeay! Right after getting our visa and passports we booked our flights to Teheran for two days later through Tatev. We had to manage several things before our departure to Iran. I had to make passport photos with a headscarf for my visa-on-arrival, buy appropriate clothing, print several documents like our health insurance policy, hotel booking in Teheran, return ticket from Iran to Sharjah and last but not least withdrawal money for at least 3 weeks since we wouldn’t be able to use Persian banks. And at last, we were ready for Iran!
Recommendation? Nope. We only went to Yerevan to fix things for our visa. We knew there wouldn’t be many exciting things to do there after reading about it in lonely planet and on the internet. Or wait, the drive to Yerevan was exciting as hell so if you’re in for an adventureous ride, hop on one of those from Tbilisi towards Yerevan 🙂
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