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January 02, 2011

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Seriously now...

Does this belong in a museum?!

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Chep Lap Kok Airport

This is a continuation of my diary from my RTW trip from November 2003. On arrival in Hong Kong I really felt for the very first time that I’d arrived in the 21st century! Maybe after 5 weeks in South Asia, I would have felt like that landing anywhere. Arrival at Chep Lap Kok is something special though. You step off the plane and are whisked along on 200m long travel-ators, up 150m long escalators and glide with speed aboard smooth, efficient monorails. It is like the vision of the future I was sold as a kid… all I was waiting for was a hover car or two to go past. Everywhere are state of the art diamond plasma screens, brushed steel and thermal monitors letting you know whether you or your fellow travellers have SARS or not. God help you if the thermal imager shows you any colour other than green! The masked nurses who were lurking around doing a visual check as to how sweaty we all were looked pretty brutal! The scale of the place is just huge too. It all makes the arrival feel calm...

Mount Ararat And The Armenian Genocide

Khor Virap is the Armenian Church closest to Mount Ararat. This means it has a particularly special place in the hearts of Armenians as Mount Ararat is revered as the sacred mountain of Armenia. Biblically famous as the site where Noah’s Ark came to rest, Mt Ararat looms over the Armenian capital. Yet the great tragedy for Armenia is that Mt Ararat is not in Armenia at all any more. Instead it is part of Turkey, who took over these lands in the early twentieth Century and who emptied it of Armenians in a programme of genocide during World War One. A great deal of what is now Eastern Turkey was once populated by Armenians. What the Ottoman Empire was going to do with this mutinous population as World War One broke out was known as ‘The Armenian Question’. Remember? The UK used to have an Irish one of those. As one Turkish general put it at the time. “No Armenians, no Armenian question.” A campaign of forced marches for women and children and concentration camps for the men redu...

EPEBAH means Yerevan

St Cyril has a lot to answer for. E when it is not preceded by a consonant is Ye P is R E when preceded by a consonant is E B is V A is A H is N EPEBAH is Yerevan... And this is the Martrushka that would take us to country 82: Armenia. Martrushkas are an interesting way of organising transport. They do not run to a timetable but go when they are full. LP said that five a day run from Tbilisi to Yerevan and that they went roughly on the hour from 8am til midday. Thankfully we ignored their advice and arrived at quarter to 8am to find the first Martrushka was full and the second (and last) one would leave at 8:30. As the trains were all sold out with Armenians returning from their holidays on the Georgian coast, this would have been a truly nasty surprise.

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