Kars And The Old Armenian Ruins of Ani

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The main reason we visited Kars is because it is the best starting off point to visit Ani, the ruined city on the border with Armenia. Ani, is a windswept grassy site that contains a lot of Armenian architecture.

The train trip from Erzurum to Kars was pleasant enough, we decided to order something from the restaurant car, I thought I had ordered a pasta dish each, but that got lost somewhere in translation and we ended up with one plate of french fries and a coffee, oh well it filled a hole and we were off to sleep soon. The guard came through and gave us a pillow and blanket and we rattled our way towards Kars for the next 5 hours.

Celil a local taxi driver come tour operator was there to meet us at the Kars Railway Station, we had notified him of our arrival and he had waited the 2 hours at the station for us.

We were booked into the Gungoren Hotel, mentioned in the Lonely Planet as budget, first impressions in the dark at 2am as Celil dropped us off were that this was less than budget. Celil woke the porter up and we were soon booked in and had our trip to Ani booked for later that morning.

In daylight the next day the Hotel didnt look that bad, it was under rennovation and the whole front was covered in scaffolding.

Up early and we were picked up for our trip to Ani about 45 km's away. The entry fee of 3 Turkish Lira is cheap and our driver was to pick us up again 3 hours later.

Ani is a huge site on the Turkish Armenia border and it does take the three hours to cover it. From all over the site you look across the Arpa Cayi River to Armenia about 1 km away. Lookout towers were visible as we wandered around.

The Church of the Redeemer, the Church of Gregory and the Ani Cathedral are some of the major buildings.
It was hard to imagine that this was once the Armenian Capital and at one time there was 100,000 people living there.

We snapped dozens of photographs and have included just a few
Two german girls Steffie and Beata tagged along with us most of the way around, they spoke some Turkish so at times they were able to help out with translations.
Back to our hotel, booking our onward travel alomg the way. The next leg is to Dogubeyzit an area we had been advised not to visit by some people as it is quite close to the border and occasionally there have been problems there.
Everyone we spoke to in Turkey said there was no problem and we shouldn't miss it.
On the way to Dogubeyzit you pass Mount Ararat (Agri Dagi) and there was no way that we were missing that.

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