The Warzone Series - Part 1: Armenian Borderlands 🇦🇲

Anyone who knows my travel style knows that I'm fond of travelling to places "off the beaten path" - and not in some sort of faux-influencer way where going to Kotor in Montenegro is considered 'off the beaten path' (it's really not). In 2023 I visited two of the most synonymous places with war that you could have in the world - Iraq and Syria. But where did my pre-occupation to visit these sort of places first begin? How did I build the confident to visit those sort of places?

My first brush with a warzone came during the part of my life I like to describe as the 'Eastern European Travels of 2019' where I backpacked across seven countries, from Vienna to Istanbul. At the time Ukraine wasn't in full scale war - just in the far-east, hundreds of kilometres from the main population centres that I visited. 

Following a stint travelling across Ukraine on this trip, I caught a flight from Kiev to Tbilisi, Georgia for the second half of this trip where I'd make my way overland towards Istanbul before flying home. After a few days in Tbilisi I decided to hitchhike down into Armenia with Holger, a mad Dutchman I met in my hostel (shoutout to Holger, we still keep in touch). We got picked up by people from all walks of life - from members of the Armenian Army to a Caterpillar machinery operator.

Trying to hitch a ride in northern Armenia. My board says 'Yerevan' in three different alphabets, to not much avail. 

In Armenia I went to the Ancient Temple of Garni, the Armenian Genocide Memorial, and spent a lot of my time trying to avoid heatstroke in the country's capital, Yerevan. After three days, it was time to return to Georgia to continue onwards to Turkey due to Armenia and Turkey's non-existent bilateral relations. Turkey and Armenia have a long, complex history that involves genocide, a century-old border treaty, ethnic cleansing, and so much more. 

We eventually gave up our hitchhike attempt in the town of Vanadzor, where we caught a marshrutka. The rolling green hills of central Armenia reminded me of the Windows home screen.

Garni Temple - a must visit for anyone who makes the journey to Yerevan. I think it was about an hour away on a minibus, if that. 

There are a few direct options back up to Tbilisi from Yerevan, the quickest way takes you up the countrys eastern border with Azerbaijan. For those who don't have an interest in global geopolitics, this is perhaps one of the most "hot" borders in the world and has been for some time (behind obvious places such as North Korea-South Korea, Israel-Gaza, Ukraine-Russia). This is in large part thanks to, once again, a border dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a place with a long history but in modern times is a remnant of the former Soviet Union that has created huge problems in the region ever since its collapse. 

In short, Nagorno-Karabakh is a region, internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but when I was there in 2019 was under the control of the Armenian military. This has since changed with Azerbaijan reclaiming the region in 2023 leading to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Armenians into Armenia and even more recently, a draft peace deal being agreed in March 2025 between the two countries, potentially ending this decades long conflict. 

This map shows the de-facto border in 2019, when I was there. This has all now completely changed following the 2020 war between the two countries and Azerbaijan's offensive in 2023 that reclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh.

Going back to my time there in 2019, however, highlights just how fragile the entire situation was. While my marshrutka bus back to Tbilisi did not pass through Nagorno-Karabakh, it did come very close to Armenia's north-eastern border with Azerbaijan. As you can see there are a couple of exclaves in yellow at the top, which once again are internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan following the fall of the Soviet Union but are now under the control of Armenia. The region there is also extremely mountainous and as such the road would cut in and out of Azerbaijan. I followed it along my iPhone which tracked my location. The borderlands up there were fragile contested places and the FCO even advises against travel there. 

As you can see, the borderland between Armenia and Azerbaijan marked in red.

The route our marshrutka took followed this mountainous border region. As you can see, it cut across the internationally recognised borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan many times. Like the Turkey border, it is closed.

I might make it seem as if this journey was more treacherous than it really was. If you were one of the other tourists, or even locals for that matter, on the same marshrutka I was on, you may never have known that we were inadvertently crossing in and out of two countries with such a deep-rooted history of conflict. The bus ride passed without incident, but it was my first experience travelling to a 'red-zone' and perhaps where my interest in visiting places like these began.