October 6, 2012
Ladies and gentlemen, we shall be landing soon
IT WAS in that cultural wasteland between dawn and the first cup of coffee that I wondered if there might really be a Mount Ararat. And, if so, where it might be. A man with too little on his mind needs no greater incentive to start planning a bike tour.
And, yes, there is a Mount Ararat. I realise you knew that all along but, truthfully, I had gone through life without giving it much thought. If there was one, it could stay in that department that contains Australia and Patagonia and much of northern Asia: places I know are there but see no reason to visit. Except that now I felt an urge to go.
It is, if you too are between dawn and the first emptied coffee mug, in eastern Turkey. It is right up against the border with Armenia. That adds to its attraction but it also adds excitement. The most convenient airport to fly home is at Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. It is just across the border. But the border has been closed for who knows how long because the Turks and Armenians can't agree on whether one side massacred the other back around the time of the first world war. Or, if you're American, world war one.
We could ride back across Turkey to Ankara, say, but where would be the fun in that? To cross into Armenia would be an experience in itself. But how?
Well, the answer is to go south through Iran and then north, or north through Georgia and then south. Countless people have told us that Iran was the high point of their tour, that the country wasn't to be judged by the coverage it receives. But things have changed since then and for the moment it may not be the best way to go. So we shall go marching through Georgia. Doing that will offer another week to ten days of looping round Armenia before ending up in the hopelessly unattractive town of Ararat itself, where we can gaze across the border at the mountain of my pre-caffeine dreams before bowling on to Yerevan and its airport.
Now, I am vacuous but I am not hopelessly naïve. I will take Mount Ararat on trust. Because, you see, the more I think about it, the more I start to doubt that the Noah story is true. I mean, who wrote it? It's in the third person, so it wasn't Noah. And Mrs Noah would have kept peppering the account with 'And what d'you think that idiot husband of mine did next?' Because she was his wife.
But if it wasn't them, then who? Everyone else was drowned, after all.
Then, of course, there were all the risks. Forget the lions eating the lambs or all those epidemic-carrying mosquitoes having their way. What about the termites, the woodworm and the deathwatch beetles? Are they the sort of passengers you want for an indefinite journey in a wooden boat 300 cubits long? With no land in sight.
I looked it up. There was nothing about woodworm but there was other worrying news. The story turns out to be nothing new. It was also in a Babylonian myth in the Gilgamesh Epic. And since Babylonians didn't trouble with vowels, whch mst hv md thngs trck t rd n ths dys, the story says only that the boat pitched up at 'rrt'. So it could just as well be Urartu. Which Google Maps can't find.
So blow that.
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