Spiritual Highland

Five days, four nights, and difficulty 1 out of 5 — the lowest figure any route in this programme carries; the only other place it turns up is the one-day wine trip at Areni. That is a description rather than modesty. Whoever takes the wheel here spends three of the five days entirely on sealed surfaces, and the highest recorded point of the week, at 1,800 metres, sits below what other tours reach before lunch on their first day. The ten hours of actual driving are spread so evenly that no single day reaches three. If you want to know how a 4x4 behaves on Armenian trunk roads before the tracks begin, this is where to find out.

Two of the five days stay in the Ararat plain, the flattest ground Armenia has. Yerevan sits at around 990 metres; the M5 runs west from the city and gives up height slowly until, after a good twenty kilometres, Vagharshapat follows at 853 metres, where Etchmiadzin Cathedral stands. Day three goes the other way: the M2 south, a good forty kilometres to the hill that carries Khor Virap — 827 metres, and nothing on these five days sits lower. After that the route turns east, out beyond Vedi to the Goravan Sands State Reserve, where the only sand of the week lies at about 950 metres. Straight roads, irrigation ditches, lorries up from the south: what is asked for here is attention, not technique.

Day two turns east and upwards into the valley of the Azat. Twenty-eight kilometres on the H-3, and then the driving pauses on the rock spur occupied by Garni Temple & Fortress — about 1,400 metres up, with the Azat gorge directly below. From there a short spur drops into the gorge: asphalt gives way to gravel, and after rain water stands in the ruts. It ends at roughly 1,300 metres at the foot of the basalt wall of the Symphony of Stones. Together with the sand track at Goravan, that is every unsealed metre this route owns. Back on the main road the valley climbs another ten kilometres until the gorge closes into a bowl and Geghard Monastery appears at 1,800 metres — the highest recorded point of the five days, reached on a sealed surface throughout.

Only on day four does the route leave the orbit of the capital. The M2 runs a good 110 kilometres to the south-east until, at Areni and 990 metres, the Areni-1 Cave breaks out of the slope above the Arpa; then twelve sealed kilometres through the Amaghu gorge up to 1,591 metres, where Noravank Monastery stands at the head of the valley, and 1,194 metres in Yeghegnadzor by evening. Day five is the same road back. Three of the four nights therefore belong to a single room in Yerevan, with the luggage left where it is. Which room depends on the comfort class: in the Signature class it is a hotel with a spa. The group numbers eight guests at the most and stays together on the road; if you drive, you take every stage in one of the vehicles, from the first to the last. The season runs from April to October.