"You must begin by knowing that you have already arrived ..."

When I was a child, my father would raise me on his shoulders as we would walk, and fill my head with stories of adventure and friendship. The stories revolved around two characters, a seagull and a doll I owned called First Love. While the house was empty, the seagull would come to call on First Love, she would climb on his back and off they would go on their great adventures to far flung corners of the world. Of course, when I would return home, I would go to check on First Love to see if I could catch sight of a sign of life or movement in her, but, ultimately, she was unyielding, laying in the same spot where she had been abandoned when we last played. Nonetheless, the magic of these stories would fill my head and the dreaming began.

As I grew older, Dad continued to build on his 'reach further, fly higher lessons' with simple lectures while we drove around the countryside in our old car. "Why be a nurse when you can be a doctor? Why be an air stewardess when you can be the pilot?" During one of these conversations my younger brother, not much more than 9 at the time, piped up with "Yeah! Why be the jockey when you can be the horse?" I remember us laughing till we cried, but you know, regardless of how funny the analogy sounded, the message remained the same. If you can think it, you can do it!

Until my mid-twenties, I believed that my father had created the character of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Imagine my surprise when he said my idea to put the stories to paper might be a copyright infringement. Shortly thereafter, and by pure coincidence (if you believe in coincidence that is), a fleeting acquaintance handed me that understated little book by Richard Bach. It's message was simple yet powerful, and one that had been informing my philosophy on life long before I ever turned the pages in the book itself.

Over the years the paths I've taken and the choices I've made have ultimately led me to becoming a kind of outcast in my own right, the black sheep. I am no-one special, I'm just a dreamer. In the process of following one dream, I discover another and follow it. I think people just don't get that sometimes. Why don't you settle? What about a family? What about your career? Why do you keep taking yourself further and further away from home? How can you build a life like that?

When the mountaineer, George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he answered simply "Because it’s there!" Jonathan gave a similar response to his mother, when in the book, she asks him why he cannot be like the rest of the flock, why he was so obsessive about testing his flight abilities.

"I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know
what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just
want to know."

I may never be a doctor or a pilot but then, those are not my dreams. My dreams are much simpler than that. I want to see, I just want to experience and see. This summer, after some 10 years of dreaming, I finally found myself in Outer Mongolia. I rode a horse, I fired a bow, I lived in a Ger, I met many wonderful people and, while my pockets may be empty, I feel full. Another level has been reached in my understanding of how things work and of what I can do, and a new dream uncovered in the process.

My brother hit the nail on the head when he was 9. Why be the jockey when you can be the horse, riderless, unfettered and free. It's not the easiest of choices to make. Nothing about climbing mountains is easy. Your legs can let you down, you can stumble and fall along the way, altitude sickness can ruffle the feathers a little, but if you follow Chiang's advice to Jonathan and begin like you have already arrived, it can be conquered. There are no limits. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing more beautiful in this world than silently brushing off your bloody knees and enjoying that view from the top when you finally reach it.

The Armenian Adventure

So our plan to ski in the mountains in central Armenia kind of fell flat. Every guide book and internet reference seemed to say it was an excellent idea. We were assured from every angle that skiing was good into mid-april and I was desperate to finally put all my skiing lessons from Ski Dubai to good use on a real mountain.

As we flew in over Armenia my first views of the snow covered mountains made my belly hop. In hindsight, the mocking laughs of customs officials when explaining the reason for our visit should have deflated me. But no, I wasn’t ready to accept the inevitable that quickly.

We arranged a driver at the airport to take us directly to Tzaghkadzor ski resort, famous for having been used by the USSR olympic team for training. As we drove out of Yerevan towards the mountains, the barren brown slopes began to dampen my enthusiasm. Even still I kept trying to persuade myself that the snow was ‘just over the next hill’.

When we got there we found a ghost town. Its funny now of course, but at the time I was very disappointed. Yup, ski season had long since ended, everything was shut, and the mountains, were snowless. We managed to find ourselves a place to stay for the night, and someplace to eat and grab a beer. The ghost town was our first insight to poverty stricken, post-communist Armenia. The only real sound was the whistle of wind in the trees. The occasional plastic bag tumbleweed broke that sound as it flipped over itself all the way down the street, which was flanked on either side by deserted and often ramshackle concrete buildings. Snuggled up in 70’s style blankets with two fizzing ancient bar heaters keeping us warm, we managed to make it through the night.

One of the other complications we came across was the fact that no-body, not a single soul, spoke English. Armenian and Russian are the languages here and there’s no in between. So we had a great deal of frustration and fun honing our sign language skills in an effort to communicate with the locals. It must have been hilarious for them to watch us waving our arms and contorting our faces in the most ludicrous of ways, in an effort to get our point across.

The next morning, after a breakfast of ‘Spaz’ (a salty porridge like soup that I ended up with by default because no-one else would eat it), we decided to leave the ghost town and head further north to Lake Sevan and into the mountain villages. A little bit of exploration was what was needed to rejuvenate our trip. It was fun and, for the most part, we met some generous and helpful people.

Apart from some cowboys who wanted us to pay 100 dollars for a two-room cabin with no running water that is. The cabin guy, also the owner of the local shop/restaurant/petrol station/souvenir shop, got very upset with us when we said we would have to pass. He kept pointing at the light and flicking the switch on and off as if the perk of having electricity was the cause for the cost.

“Turn it off then! We’ll sit in the dark and pay you 10 dollars for the night,” was Ian’s response. Oh, the cabin guy was not pleased then!
We left that venue fairly quickly when the dogs started barking and we saw his pudgy bald head start to turn peuce, fearing that he was about to call his band of brothers and come after us with a shotgun and the hounds! A sometime taxi driver with a back seat full of freshly caught fish helped us out in our endeavour by getting us to

the next town. We were able to gather that he was from Russia. For some random reason, I decided to try out a little Czech on him. He looked at me like I had two heads. So the rest of the journey involved him slowing everything he said down or shouting it thinking we would understand better. We obliged by pretending we did, nodding and smiling all the way to a place called Dilidjan, a mountain town just north of Lake Sevan.

We found a really nice guesthouse run by an Artist and his wife. The artist was also the Director of the local art academy and dabbled in restoration. His living room was filled with a combination of his own work and older paintings by Russian masters which he was slowly restoring for the local museum. He spoke French and his wife had a smattering of English so, between the two, we got on very well. They filled us with sweet Armenian tea and a sweet flaky pastry bread that I couldn’t get enough of, while the artist showed off this new digital clock that had been brought to him from Germany.

It showed the outside temp, the inside temp, humidity level, time of course and on the left hand side stood a man underneath the clouds and sun who, to the great amusement of our host, produced a “parapluie” when it rained.

He very kindly drove us around the mountain valleys taking us to some of the medieval monastic sites that seem to pepper the landscape. I quite enjoyed that. Apart from the shape of the buildings, the general architecture was very similar to some of our own examples at home. The sites and random hilltops were full of flat slabs with crosses carved on them in Celtic-like knot work and animal motifs. Little shrines were being kept up by the locals in some of the church nooks and crannies. At one site the oak trees and tall grasses were being strangled by hundreds of cloth strips, handkerchiefs, and in some cases children's underwear. A kind of modern pagan offering identical to those at the holy wells and rag trees in Ireland. Doubtless prayers for an end to some kind of hardship in the lives of the people who put them there.

Armenia is famous for 3 things. Cognac, being the first country to accept Christianity as the state religion, and stony resilience. That stony resilience is everywhere and chiseled into the faces of the people in the streets. They are not a handsome people. They are hard and battered looking. Men and women both have mouths full of gold teeth. Their features seem to vary between two forms, long and angular, or wide and bulbous. Our first impressions were to be a little wary of them. They all had that Ukranian mafia look about them, not that I actually know what that looks like, but I can guess. Ian seemed to recognize every second guy that passed as a resident of Southhill, in Limerick City or some other northside ghetto back home. Poverty and unemployment was rife there.

Everywhere we went outside the capital, through the villages and in the mountains, groups of men with ‘hard life’ written all over their serious faces seemed to be gathered in random corners, standing for hours on end. Our guide told us this was because there simply wasn’t any work for them. Many of the younger men went to Russia to work, those who were lucky enough to find work in Armenia usually had to leave their families and move to the capital. Along the roadsides the rest stand waving their arms at passing traffic to try to persuade it to stop so that they can sell the few fish they had caught, or the bundles of scallions they had hand grown and picked that day. Subsistence living in the extreme. Meanwhile their homes and villages remain either half built or falling down around their ears.
One would assume that the money for public works simply isn’t there. I suppose it makes some sense. Public works requires money, usually taken from taxes. You can’t very well collect tax from an unemployed nation.

So, we eventually returned to Yerevan, the capital. We had about four days there. We walked around the city hoping to enjoy some of the sites that the book I bought was gushing about. Thing is though, the city does not have a focus towards tourism and all of these sites were a let down in one way or another. They were either undergoing reconstruction or restoration, or were simply completely run down and overgrown, or, as in the case of Mt. Ararat, not there being, completely obscured by smog. Bad Mother Nature! How could you be so inconsiderate? Visiting Armenia was definitely a worth while experience, working on both our ingenuity and our survival skills as underprepared travelers.Lessons were learned, and in fairness it was generally safe and enjoyable. I only managed to loose my shampoo, moisturizer, toothpaste and travel toothbrush to thieves. From now on the side pockets of my back pack shall be packed with dirty underwear. Let them take those instead!

The rest of our time in Armenia was spent propping up a bar, sampling Armenian beers and playing cards. I ended up losing my Lonely Planet Armenia book to Handsome Bob in a game of cards. Best use for it in the end. I did consider using it as toilet paper, but decided it wasn’t even up to that job!

I spent my last day in bed because I drank altogether too many of those Armenian beers. I have a vague final memory of being thrown around an empty dance floor by an Armenian ex-boxer with a somewhat squashed nose and no English, who wouldn’t let me leave without presenting me with his cigarette-smoke scented handkerchief as a gesture of his affection. I had to give him 10 AMD for the pleasure though. Tradition apparently!