Birthday Hike

So it was my birthday on the 11th.  A while back I decided with another good friend whose birthday is on the 10th to plan a joint hike.  So me and a bunch of my friends walked from one city to another in one of the most scenic places in Armenia.

The original walk was supposed to be from Tatev to Kapan (The middle line, to the bottom line, in the picture below)

We spent the night in the village of Halidzor (the top and to the right underline) and we woke up early and got the idea, hey, why should we wait to take the tramway at 10 am, let's just hike from Halidzor to Tatev.  These villages are across from one another in a gorge and so we had to climb all the way to the bottom, then walk all the way back up to get there.  This was a beautiful hike and we saw pictures of the gorge like this:

So then we got to Tatev, and we checked out a famous monastery there:

The only problem was we were now only starting our hike, when I was already a bit tired from this first bit.  In hindsight, this was a bad idea and made the rest of the hike excruciatingly beautiful as we've decided to call our experience.  While my feet hurt like crazy I was able to see views like this one in between Tatev and Kapan

And also this giant snail.

And I got to do it with great people, shown here:

And this final map will show you a larger picture of where the hike actually took place in Armenia.  The purple region is Syunik Marz, the southernmost region in Armenia, the green east of that is Nagorno Karabakh and the cream colored region in the west is Nakhichevan, geographically separated by Armenia, but part of Azerbaijan.