We headed out from our hotel at 6:30 the next morning to start our tour to Southern Armenia!
When we first got outside of Yerevan, we ended up in a patch of thick fog straight out of a Stephen King novel. I’ll admit, it isn’t so comforting when your driver is taking pictures and videos because he’s never seen anything like it before. But eventually, it cleared up, and we ended up on a beautiful drive.
We saw Mount Ararat, which is an important symbol of Armenia even though it’s located outside of Armenia’s present day borders. It’s now a part of modern day Türkiye. In pre-Christian Armenian mythology, Mount Ararat was considered the home of the gods, similar to Greece’s Mount Olympus. After going through all that fog, it was nice to have good enough visibility to see it!
One of the most interesting parts of the drive was watching where we were on the map. The borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan are complicated. A lot of this comes down to the post-Soviet conflicts in the 1990s, and localized conflicts between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the border zones where the minorities were marginalized, displaced, and sometimes murdered. Various enclaves and exclaves still exist as holdovers from this conflict, including the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan that we passed right next to on our drive. There are also tiny ones that are technically a part of Azerbaijan that had no indication that anything had changed, and you would never know that the borders were shifting around you unless you were closely watching the map.
There are still tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, although they did recently sign a peace agreement in 2025 that has theoretically calmed things down. There are no open land border crossings between the two countries and no direct flights between them as of this writing.
We had a few stops on the way to get a coffee and stretch our legs, but we had a long way to go to get to Tatev Monastery.
Our first bigger stop was Khndzoresk cave village, which reminded me a lot of the underground cave villages in Cappadocia. We started by walking down a ton of stairs (which was really fun on the way back up to the car) and across a bridge.
It was a nice visit, and I was enjoying the chance to see a side of the country outside of Yerevan. Yerevan is pretty modern and developed, but it went from urban to rural quickly as we left the city.
From there, we headed even further south! The next stop was Tatev. Specifically, we were starting at the Wings of Tatev, which is the longest reversible aerial tramway in the world. It takes 12 minutes to go across the gorge from the starting station to Tatev Monastery. The views were incredible.
Armenia had a very clear vision when they built all their churches and monasteries. Most of them look extremely similar, which meant that when I was recently in NYC, I had no trouble recognizing an Armenian monastery from a brief view out of a bus window.
We also went to another outlook nearby to admire even more views of the mountains!
Once we were done visiting Tatev, it was time for the long drive back to Yerevan. But first, we had one more stop to make….
It was time to do a proper Armenian wine tasting! This region has a unique winemaking culture, and they often age the wine in beautifully decorated clay pots instead of oak barrels. A couple that they had available to try were the same grapes aged two different ways so that we could taste the impact of the clay. We got to try three types of wine and one shot of their hard liquors, which were flavored by all kinds of different fruits.
It was a long day with a lot of driving. Still, I think it’s worth it to get out of Yerevan, and the landscapes and cultural sites in the south are the most impressive sites for visitors. I would recommend this same tour for anyone who wants to get out and see some of Armenia beyond just the capital city.