First Guest – Առաջին Հյուրը

The first guest to my house arrived on a bicycle, and had just finished cascading down the 2483 m high mountain pass from Kapan to Meghri. His large, brown beard was frozen.

I was startled at about 8pm the day he got here by a knock on my door from some of the men in the village. They explained to me, in pretty excited voices, that a man had arrived in the village, that he didn’t know a single word of Armenian, and that I needed to come out and translate. I walked out my front gate to find a very thin, bearded, spectacled man on a bicycle surrounded by 10 to 12 Armenian men from the village, all trying to help/understand him at the same time.

“Hello,” he said to me in clear English when he spotted me. “My name is Sven, are you a Peace Corps Volunteer?”

I told him I was. He said he’d been travelling by bicycle through Armenia and needed a place to stay. He also dropped the names of Austin and Katie, two volunteers he had stayed with in a town about three hours north (by car), and so between his unimposing demeanor and acquaintance with other people I know, I felt just fine taking him in.

I explained to the other men watching us talk that I’d be putting him up for the night, helped Sven put his bike in my storage room, and started heating the water tank so that he could get a hot shower. The first thing he asked for was not food or coffee or tea, but just straight up hot water. I heated some up on the stove and handed it to him. He guzzled it down, sighed, and said something like “you have no idea how nice that is after biking over that mountain.” His beard wasn’t frozen anymore.

I started whipping up a stew with veggies, lentils and potatoes as well as hot coffee for both of us. This was the official first guest at my new place, and I was really feeling the hosting mood. Could be the Armenian culture rubbing off on me…

We got to talking. Sven, it turned out, had been biking non-stop all the way from his home in Germany. He had crossed through the Czech Republic, the Balkans, Turkey, Georgia, and was now entering Iran through Armenia. His ultimate goal was to reach India, and he claimed with confidence that he would even be biking through Pakistan to do it. He had stayed with at least three other volunteers on the journey in Armenia and Georgia, and likely some other ones in the Balkans too.

Sven was 31 years old, was taller than me, leaner than me, was extremely talkative, had a huge smile and the air of someone who had been alone with only his thoughts for perhaps a bit too long (although this probably had been one of his goals anyway). He said he had worked for an IT firm, crunching data for several years, until he one day had the revelation that what he did was pointless and decided that traveling the world on a bicycle would be much more fulfilling. The people in my village told me later that they thought he was insane. I kind of admired him in a way, if only because I would never have the nerve to do what he was doing.

His first night at my place, after we feasted on stew and black bread and Armenian matsun, he slept on the extra bed in my living room, which, unlike my bedroom, has no wood burning stove and is only heated by a small PC issued radiator that hardly does anything. I felt sort of bad about this, but he said he didn’t mind at all, and that in his sleeping bag had slept in far more frigid conditions.

In the morning, after breakfast, Sven asked if he could stay a second night. I had kind of figured he would want to, and was happy to have him an extra night. He carried his weight just by being good company, and to top it off when I got home from teaching English that day, it was to the smell of a huge pot of borscht that he was cooking up. Turns out he was also an awesome cook. That night was spent eating more borscht, playing speed (a card game I hadn’t played in forever), and playing harmonicas (I have one I brought to country and hardly ever use and Sven travels with one as well).

When he left the next morning, it was kind of a funny feeling. I can’t say I’ll miss him. I only knew him for about 48 hours, but it was nice to have the company. Also, it’s a pretty certain bet that I’ll never see the guy again. We shook hands and he cycled away again, leaving early so that he could make it over the mountain pass just over the Iranian border before nightfall.

While my current occupation is sort of that of a wanderer, I still live and work in this country. I have other Americans living and working near me and I live in a community where I see the same people every day and am recognized. It takes a lot of willpower for sure, but to do what Sven is doing is another level of wanderlust altogether. To go it alone, without planned places to stay or knowing any of the language or people to meet, to be very often dependent on the kindness of strangers and also very often alone with just you and nature, that takes willpower and then something else too.