Pedalling up a vast, tilted pasture under scurrying cloud, I wonder where else Armenia reminds me of. It’s a sustained incline and, without the miracle of electrical assistance, such idle speculation would typically prove beyond me. But I’m scrabbling for comparative reference points, having arrived in its capital, Yerevan, the previous day with almost no idea what to expect. This is a country most of us might struggle to pinpoint on a globe, fingers hovering vaguely over the Caucasus in search of a landlocked enigma with fewer than 3mn inhabitants.
In any event, Armenia proves pleasingly resistant to my pigeonholing. I decide that this windswept panorama, bookended by hulking treeless hills, recalls the steppes of Mongolia. But the day before, prior to the three-hour minibus ride that delivered us from the capital to the northern province of Lori, Yerevan’s yawning boulevards and Soviet-era concrete cultural centres had put me in mind of Sofia, and in the days ahead I will find myself traversing landscapes suggestive of everywhere from Lebanon to Switzerland. Armenia is geographically Asian, geopolitically European and religiously unique — in 301AD, it became the world’s first Christian state. There is a pervasive otherness about this country, best encapsulated by its extraordinary alphabet: 38 curly shapes that wouldn’t look out of place on a Thai keyboard.
Armenia’s appearance in Lonely Planet’s list of “top 10 countries to visit” in 2025 (“countries like Albania and Georgia got all the attention a few years ago, now it’s Armenia’s turn”) might redress its obscurity as a destination, but nobody who signs up for the trip I’m on risks finding themselves lost in a horde of rival visitors.
The Slow Cyclist has a well-earned reputation for taking guests deep into uncharted traveller territory, magicking up delightful alfresco meals and locally run accommodation in even the most remote and rustic locations. This trip is a dry run for its new Armenian Highlands tour: it’s just me, plus a solitary “pioneer guest” and a hybrid Anglo-Armenian crew of seven that includes our omniscient guide Avetis Keshishyan.
The Debed Canyon in the Armenian highlands © Chris Joubert
A picnic lunch en route © Chris Joubert
When you’re far from the beaten track, an off-road e-bike is your friend. They’re now standard on all Slow Cyclist tours. Fat tyres and dual suspension are especially appreciated here, where paved surfaces often date from the Soviet era.
Halfway over the steppe on just such a surface, our support team’s trailer has a wheel rattled off, and a passing shepherd bouncing his rusting Lada through the tussocks alongside shouts out to Keshishyan that the grass is always smoother than the road. But nobody’s taking his word for it, and after an invigorating, pothole-slalom plunge down to the plain far below, we’re directed towards a coil of aromatic smoke rising from a little orchard. Laid out on linen beneath the trees a feast awaits, prepared by a local family who greet us with shy smiles and glasses of cherry cordial.
Armenians like to grill meat and ferment vegetables. Every gastronomic waypoint on milk’s journey to hard cheese is plotted and served up. The wine is always dependable and the fruit is a delight, with pomegranates and apricots especially venerated, working their way into every other dish and the names of half the nation’s commercial establishments. The standout culinary star for me is lavash, a paper-thin flatbread that is bought by the yard, baked in sheets the size of a tablecloth to be folded, torn and rolled up with whatever takes your fancy stuffed inside.
The afternoon ride takes us through ancient villages with earthen streets, laden fruit trees and front yards ablaze with roses and marigolds. It’s late September but everything is in full bloom, nourished by cloudbursts and bouts of fierce sun. I am routinely grateful for the attendant minibus that carries our kit, serving as mobile changing room and drying facility.
Passing a shepherd . . . © Chris Joubert
. . . and his flock © Chris Joubert
Stepanavan, the overnight stop after this debut day in the saddle, is an unassuming little town named in classic Soviet fashion after a pioneering Armenian Bolshevik. Standing proud from its ramshackle neighbours towers a lavishly renovated townhouse, with a swish bar restaurant in the basement and freestanding baths in the immaculate guest rooms above. As I will discover is routinely the case, this trailblazing venture has been funded by an expat Armenian, in this instance one who spent his childhood summers in Stepanavan before emigrating to Spain.
The Armenian diaspora now comfortably outnumbers the native population, concentrated largely in Russia, the US and France (my hotel in Yerevan overlooked Charles Aznavour Square, named in honour of the late singer who was born in Paris to Armenian parents and still rates as the nation’s best-known global celebrity). Armenians abroad are tightly bonded to their motherland; Keshishyan tells us that the new apartment blocks springing up around Yerevan are largely built by expats, for expats. This is devotion born of tragedy and suffering, and a 1,000-year struggle for national identity. “The red stripe in our flag represents bloodshed and misery,” Keshishyan tells us, in an almost weary tone.
A summary of Armenian history leaves you wondering how this perpetually embattled and brutalised little nation still exists. Repeated invasions have seen it laid waste by Mongols and put under every imperial yoke from the Ottoman to the Russian, with 70 years of oppressive Soviet rule tacked on for good measure. Its borders have been redrawn more times than anyone can remember, invariably to Armenia’s disadvantage. In September 2023, neighbouring Azerbaijan seized the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing the Armenian population — more than 100,000 people — to flee within a few days. As things stand, its only friendly neighbours are Georgia to the north and Iran to the south. It’s intriguing to hear our crew casually talk of going there on holiday or to trade used cars.
A field in full bloom © Chris Joubert
Passing a barn — and chickens — in the highlands . . . 
. . . and stopping for an alfresco feast © Chris Joubert
Before being introduced to our bikes, we had stayed in Gyumri, Armenia’s second city. During the first world war, between 660,000 and 1.2mn Armenian Christians living in Ottoman Anatolia lost their lives in massacres and death marches, with more than 22,000 bereaved children rehomed here in what became known as the “city of orphans”. (Turkey’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge this genocide means that diplomatic relations between the two countries are categorised as “officially non-existent”.)
In 1988, Gyumri — then known as Leninakan — bore the brunt of a cataclysmic earthquake that devastated northern Armenia, levelling poorly constructed Soviet apartment blocks and taking an estimated 38,000 lives. The northern half of Stepanavan was flattened and abandoned, its ruins now lost in the trees.
Today, Gyumri’s tsarist-era villas and townhouses have been largely rescued, reassembled into compelling parades of black tuff and red brick. But in the matching Holy Saviour’s Church, a hugely bearded cleric had mumbled the liturgy to a single-digit congregation, below a cloud of incense shot through with shafts of sun. Weeds fracture the gracious but deserted back streets; Keshishyan noted that Gyumri’s population is barely half what it was before the earthquake. “In other countries, people sing folk songs about terrible things that happened 500 years ago,” he tells us later. “In Armenia, we are still writing them. We still live in folk-song times.”
The Concept Hotel, near the town of Debet © Chris Joubert
A rusty Gaz truck . . . 
. . . and a Lada © Chris Joubert
The Slow Cyclist formula generally adds a morning hike to the daily mix, and after breakfast we stride uphill out of Stepanavan through sunny alpine pastures bejewelled with dandelions. The rest of our trip takes us through the Lori province, a region of steep slopes and deep gorges. With the elevation often nudging above 1,500 metres and into thinning air, it’s always a relief to be reunited with our labour-saving bikes. We ford the odd stream and bump past the tumbledown Soviet mega barns that still loom over every village. Ageing Volga saloons struggle by, roof racks piled high with sacks of potatoes and apples. Groups of beetle-browed men in grey cardigans play cards in bus shelters; women stoop out of cellars stacked with kaleidoscopic racks of jarred pickles and conserves.
Halfway down the side of our next gorge, the dusty, slaloming trail opens up and presents us with a dumbfounding scene. The sun-washed canyon yawns away in every direction, its distant opposite flank topped with corky cliffs. In the foreground, hunkered up in the shade of a decorously ruined monastery, sits a white-clothed table beckoningly filled with wildflowers, winking glasses and a cornucopia of local fare. Just to the left is a beige-stone church of obvious antiquity, with a few missing walls and the witch-hat steeple that remains a core feature of Armenian ecclesiastical architecture. A quavery drone, mournful and beguiling, leaks through its many holes — the call of the duduk, a woodwind instrument inevitably hewn from apricot, played as I presently discover by a local virtuoso with perfectly hemispherical cheeks.
View of the Hnevank monastery in the northern province of Lori © Chris Joubert
The ruins of Bardzrakash St Grigor . . . © Alamy
. . . a monastery near Dsegh © Shutterstock/Abraham Abrahamian
The Hnevank monastery, we learn while rolling up lamb and pickled beetroot stalks in ragged squares of lavash, dates from the 7th century — almost unimaginably old in Christian terms. The privilege of finding myself in these scenes is enhanced by their remote obscurity. You just couldn’t access a place like this without a specialist, heavy-duty bike — or, to be fair, a rusting Lada and the native spirit of adventure. The Slow Cyclist loves to spring a lunchtime surprise, and this must rank as the apotheosis. Yet incredibly, as a monastic wonder-site, Hnevank is upstaged within 24 hours.
We overnight at the Concept Hotel near Debet, a low-slung, curving concrete-and-glass hotel, restaurant and conference centre surrounded by fields and forests, a project funded by an American-Armenian biotech entrepreneur for the charitable benefit of the nation’s children. A morning hike through misty hills is followed by a ride to the village of Dsegh, where we take lunch in a vine-girdled farmhouse and sleep some of it off on blankets laid out beneath walnut and plum trees. Then we cross a field and walk down into another forested chasm, past a sign alerting us to the potential presence of lynx, bears and wolves.
It is a lifetime-grade travel discovery that leaves me awed to the point of bewilderment
The steep mossy trail passes a slab of intricately carved masonry half lost in the bracken and brambles, its latticed design a mystical mash-up that carries hints of Byzantium and India, even a dash of the Celtic. Deeper in the trees, we find a wall split asunder by the combined forces of time, gravity and seismic disturbance. There are no fences or barriers, and certainly no staff. In most places, they wouldn’t let visitors anywhere near such teetering antiquity.
We pass through the cleft and find ourselves dwarfed beneath fractured arches and bisected domes, the ferny floor strewn with column tops, broken crosses and hunks of decorous stonework. The immaculately hewn block walls, overhung with giant oak trees, are densely inscribed with row after geometric row of that runic native script, still sharp and clear. I feel like Indiana Jones, or Mowgli on a walk through…
