The Advertiser (Australia)
Sunday
A IS FOR ARMENIA
by KENDALL HILL
In a new weekly column, open the atlas to see where the alphabet leads
The Jacaranda Atlas was my go-to reference book growing up. I was raised in tiny country towns where nothing ever happened and the Jacaranda Atlas was a constant reassurance there was a whole world out there beyond my dreary horizons. The maps were marvellous works of art but my favourite bit was the index at the back, the gazetteer.
The concept of it always struck me as bizarre. Who in their right mind would ever think they could catalogue an entire planet?
Whoever it was, thank you. Gazetteers have been my lifelong inspiration. I love scouting intriguing place names – from the Great Rann of Kutch to Tooting Broadway – tracing their coordinates to the atlas page and then letting my imagination run wild.
That's the idea behind the A-Z of Travel. To pluck a letter from the alphabet each week and see where it leads using that letter to kickstart some thoughts on a place, a person, a trend, a hotel or anything related to the realm of travel.
It could be an insider city guide, tales of mishaps on the road (I've had many), profiles with awesome people, amazing experiences … anything to fuel the wanderlust.
A, then, is for Armenia. I haven't actually been there but I did glimpse it recently from the border of far-eastern Anatolia in Turkey.
We were wandering among the ruins of Ani, a 10th century city crumbling elegantly on golden plains, when I pointed to a snow-streaked mountain on the horizon and asked guide Suleyman what it was.
"Oh, that's Armenia," he said casually, as if it wasn't any great concern to me. Until that moment it hadn't been. I'd never contemplated going there before but suddenly I was bursting to dash across the plains, scale the modest border fence and lose myself in the South Caucasus.
A is also for Afghanistan. I haven't been there either. But at the Pakistani border town of Torkham, at the end of the Khyber Pass, I stood on a ridgetop and gazed wistfully through barbed wire at Afghanistan's barren, chiselled mountains.
If not for my armed guard of six Afridi tribesmen, I would have happily stowed away on a cargo truck and trundled into the unknown. Both situations reminded me, not for the first time, that travel is never finite.
We treat it like it is – we go from A to B to do C – but the reality, for me anyway, is the more I see of the world the more I want to keep exploring. It's perpetual temptation.
Another time, flying home from Tunisia, I hadn't studied my itinerary closely so was shocked and a little put out when we touched down in the Libyan capital Tripoli – a surprisingly lush and ordered land of vineyards and olive groves. If I'd only known I might have arranged a stopover.
It was even more distressing when, a few hours later, we touched down in Cairo. Cairo! I'd dreamt of visiting that crazy, kaleidoscope city ever since I first laid hands on a Jacaranda.
And now here I was, trapped in its lifeless airport on a two-hour transit stop and so desperate to get among it I was almost climbing the walls.
I shared my frustration with the airport cafe owner, who was sympathetic but kept giving me a strange look. The kind of look that says, what kind of fool doesn't know where he's flying to?
Me. I'm that kind of fool. I rarely read itineraries properly. I prefer to put my trust in fate, which is perhaps fine in theory but does create the occasional drama.
In Mexico, after visiting the jungle temples of Yaxchilan in southern Chiapas state – where deafening howler monkeys hooted in the forest and I met a tarantula bigger than my head – I hopped in our boat to head home down the Usumacinta River. I asked the guide what was on the far bank. "Guatemala," he said. My eyes popped and I begged him to make a pit stop so I could touch the soil.
He did, reluctantly. He couldn't understand my obsession with setting foot in Guatemala but then he hadn't spent his childhood cooped up in a remote Australian town dreaming of such opportunities. Besides, I wanted to explain travel is not like an itch I can scratch and make go away; the more I scratch, the itchier I get.
I still think about Cairo a lot. I remember finally boarding the flight in a funk and then falling asleep as soon as the cabin pressurised, like I always do. I woke minutes after take-off and glanced out the window and below me, on a desert plain, stood two perfect pyramids, gold-plated in the afternoon light. I have no idea which ones they were but it doesn't matter. It was pure magic. Proof that, at least sometimes, the most memorable moments are the unplanned ones.