(remains of) RRI Aragats Scientific Centre
The problem with travel, is choice. There’s a big world out there, and with COVID restrictions fading into unpleasant memory in 2022, I was keen to see a lot more of it. But where exactly to visit during my year of revenge travel – and when best to do so – was hard to decide.
In the past, the choices were often made for me:
my first big trip report was anchored upon a mathematics conference, and these determined my travel schedule for many years. Although I’ve long since moved on from academia – somehow, that report is a decade old – the habit remains. Thus, after 2022’s
transcontinental opener, all my trips were to attend events: climbing world cups in
Meiringen,
Salt Lake City, and Edinburgh; Norse Atlantic’s first flight from London to
Oslo; and the subject of this report, the Extraordinary Travel Festival.
This was a conference for people whose answer to the question of where to go is “everywhere”. Born out of the Counting Countries podcast, it aimed to bring together members of the extreme and systematic travel communities. Having become steadily more interested in the latter, this seemed like a great opportunity to check out somewhere entirely new: Armenia.
As usual, once I had the hook, I wasted no time in hanging an improbable journey off of it. My excuse was that there were no direct flights from the UK, and connections through Europe all arrived in Yerevan (the host city, and capital) between 1 and 5am. If I overshot massively to Dubai, however, there were more sensibly timed options. The UAE would add a second unfamiliar country to the trip, and I hoped to get there cheaply and comfortably via non-rev travel. Whilst that turned out to be possible, I wasn’t convinced I could get
back, so instead I dipped into a pot of miles to lock in a flight home with Air France.
One of my most memorable travel experiences was visiting the near-abandoned Russian settlement
Pyramiden on Svalbard. So I was hoping that I could somehow lean on this collection of highly-capable travellers to find my way to one of Armenia’s Soviet relics – an enormous radio telescope slowly decaying on the slopes of Mount Aragats. To my delight, someone else did the work for me: a post-conference tour, the “cosmic day trip”, was announced soon after I booked my ticket, so I quickly claimed a spot on that as well.
Here, then, is what’s coming up:
As usual, this is a belated flyertalk treatment of a trip I previously covered on my blog – here I’ve gone for a largely chronological approach, whereas there I work thematically. That's also where you can find far more photos, as it's a lot easier to self-host than paste them into the forum.