Vanadzor is an archtypical Armenian city of vast industrial ruins, with rugged mountains to the north, and flatter terrain to the south. As the Traveler wanders through the town, past its austere apartment blocks, interrupted by an occasional church or pleasant lake park, that thought of endless walking from town to town come back to him. Mountains seems to inspire him to walk much more than plains... and there's a lot up mountain terrain up ahead, leading to the border with Georgia... Turkey... and all of Europe beyond...


Walk ... across Georgia... Turkey... Bulgaria... Bosnia... Slovenia... Italy... France... Spain... across the Straits of Gibraltar to continue the Hike in Africa... across the ocean to continue the Hike in America...


OK--let's not get ahead of ourselves. He looks down at his shoes. One of them is losing its sole. Let's just take this one step at a time. I'm definitely not going to hike across the world with shoes falling apart. The Traveler comes across a roadside cobbler who says he can fix his shoe. So he drops off the shoe and heads off to explore downtown Vanadzor. He continues on down a main boulevard which has a couple of nice, trendy restaurants, including his favorite Armenian style pizza franchise... the on to the main plaza with is lined with solemn Soviet era government buildings... one of which looks like is still a functioning hotel. He heads into the empty giant hallway, to an elevator that doesn't work (actually it does, but the responsible upstairs has to turn the switch for it to come down--and there's no way to communicate with that person!) So he heads up the equally giant stairway, up a couple of floors to what really feels like a time warp . It feels like a communist office from the 1950s... with the receptionist wearing what almost looks like a uniform, they begin the lengthy paperwork process to check him into a room. Despite the fact that this clearly looks like a dying hotel, she seems very determined to do her job the right way, according to procedure.


The Traveler is shown to a rather austere looking room, feeling quite lucky to have this "Soviet hotel experience"


After picking up his shoes, he decides to walk south a little ways. All around is the feel of a has-been city. The train station... the huge park overgrown with weeds... But the industrial zone will be the sight that will stick with him forever. He walks for miles and miles and see nothing but ruins. Smokestacks, metal structures and towers, factories--all just abandoned rusted ruins.


Two things strike him: one is the huge scale of industrialization under communist Soviet Union (and it looks like a sizeable chunk of that industrialization what put right here in Armenia SSR .) Second is how competely all of this has been abandoned and forgotten once Armenia became a "free, capitalist" country.


I don't get it. How did capitalism go so wrong here in Armenia? he wonders. OK, I imagine that, under communism, these factories were probably run pretty inefficiently and wouldn't be able to compete well on a free market... but whatever was going on back then had to have been better than what there is now: endless ruins. I mean, you've got the land, the resources, the workforce... you'd think you'd be able to make SOMETHING here!


He walks all the way to the end of this industrial zone, then on back the other side--finally finding a road where i could walk right through the middle of it.


Suddenly he remembers the wasteland of the oilfields of Baku. Once again he wonders if this is he is getting a glimpse into the future of this planet. Just like the Soviet Union broke up, disrupting the vast network of transportation of good and raw materials throughout the empire, so one day the movement of goods and raw materials around the planet might be disrupted, bringout about the collapse of mass industry as we know it.


Is this really the direction that the industrialized world is heading?