The Temple of Garni in Armenia was reconstructed in 1975, almost three centuries after the original structure was destroyed by an earthquake.CAROL HUANG
Dispatch is a series of first-person stories from the road.
"Are you happy? I'm soooo happy!" gushed a voice in the hotel room next door.
It was three in the morning in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, and I'd had too much Armenian cognac, too much champagne and too many cocktails. I needed sleep, but the couple on the other side of my headboard entered a new phase of happiness as stray dogs outside my window began barking.
Four days earlier, I'd arrived with my husband for a wedding that coincided with efforts to make travel to Armenia easier by eliminating visas for some Western visitors staying less than 180 days.
The bride, a California native whose Armenian parents emigrated decades earlier, planned to shepherd almost 200 guests through four days of events that included a full-day hike through Dilijan National Park and a tour of a first-century pagan temple. On the last day, we would gather at a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a ceremony beneath the snowy peak of Mount Ararat.
Unfortunately, my husband caught a cold on our first night as we attended the welcome party at the Yerevan Botanical Garden, where folk dancers twirled beside a buffet of basturma (a cured meat), matzoon (much like yogurt) and lavash (an unleavened flatbread).
To stay close to him the next morning as he rested at the hotel, I skipped the hike through Dilijan and joined a walking tour of Yerevan that the bride had arranged for the less adventurous.
First stop, the History Museum of Armenia, which included a stirring photo exhibit of families and villages obliterated in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed out of an estimated population of two million. I passed artifacts going back more than 2,000 years, and after getting my fill of carpets and water vessels, I asked a docent if I'd missed anything. "There is the world's oldest shoe," she said, pointing ahead.
I approached a transparent case, the shoe's new home after spending 5,000 years in a cave in Southern Armenia. Inside, there appeared to be a sandy-coloured chunk of dung. I peered more closely and saw that, yes indeed, it was an old leather moccasin – about a size six.
I went outside and found our tour guide beside Yerevan's singing and dancing fountains, a spectacle of water and lights accompanied by classical music playing from loudspeakers. The guide said the music gets even louder when the piece is Gayane, a ballet created by Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian.
He told me Armenia is popular among tourists from adjacent Iran. "This is like Ibiza to them. They can drink, play cards," he said.
The breeze shifted and doused us with fountain spray. I wiped my face and moved to a drier spot, where I got an impressive view of Republic Square. Designed in 1924 by architect Alexander Tamanian, the square is a massive, oval traffic ring surrounded by imposing government buildings made of a pinkish volcanic stone known as tuff.
A friend came out of the museum and suggested we ditch the guide, so we set off with his guidebook. Though Yerevan is one of the world's oldest cities, founded on the site of a fortress built in 782 BC, much of what we passed was built during the Soviet era, from 1920 to 1991. The streets were quiet, with sparsely stocked stores and weedy parks that looked hardly changed in the years since Armenia's independence.
We reached the Cascades, a grand set of 572 stairs rising to a hilltop above the city, surrounded by flowing water and sculptures from artists such as Fernando Botero and Lynn Chadwick.
Originally conceived as a park by the same architect behind Republic Square, today it is the site of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, a vertical museum whose escalators rise past works from Marc Chagall, Arshile Gorky and others.
On our way back to the hotel we passed Katoghike Church, a medieval chapel not much bigger than a walk-in closet, and the Cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, completed in 2001 to celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of Armenia's adoption of Christianity.
We returned to the hotel as the wedding retinue returned from their hike. As they dispersed for an evening of jazz, I went to my room, where my husband and I spent the night reading in bed, as glamorous as a pair of old shoes – and thankfully just as comfortable.
The next day, we boarded buses bound for the Geghard monastery and the Temple of Garni, two ancient sites set among cliffs over the Azat River, less than an hour from Yerevan.
Armine, the bride, dashed between buses counting heads, while Adnan, the groom, walked around with his hands in his pockets, looking bewildered. Someone asked him a question, and he repeated what grooms have been saying for millennia: "I don't know. I'm not organizing this."
We drove into the surrounding hills, crossing streams and passing groves of fruit trees. The Geghard was founded in the fourth century on the site of a sacred cave that burbles with a natural spring. We explored its dark corners, tracing our fingers along Armenian khachkar crosses carved centuries ago, before heading to Garni.
It was reconstructed in 1975, almost 300 years after an earthquake destroyed the original pagan temple, which is believed to have been built by King Tiridates I around the time Nero crowned him king of Armenia in 66 AD.
The following morning, buses returned to take us to Zvartnots, the ruins of a seventh-century cathedral on the outskirts of Yerevan that was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.
The bride, wearing a towering pair of Jimmy Choo pumps, climbed the steep stone steps to the top of the ruins, where she and the groom exchanged their vows.
We spent the evening in a banquet hall with strobe lights, gypsy performers and speeches. Perhaps it was the champagne, but the singing and dancing fountains of Republic Square seemed even more spectacular as we walked back to the hotel hours later. We stopped to watch as the jets of water pirouetted in the sky and the music filled the streets.
Later, as the happiness of the couple next to my hotel room grew louder, I hoped that the love between Armine and Adnan would crescendo, too – though maybe more quietly – through each year of their marriage. Then I pulled a pillow over my head.
Send in your story from the road to travel@globeandmail.com.