Tbilisi and Yerevan and existential threats

I wonder how people blog. They use laptops, of course, which I find heavy to carry around, but I wonder how they find the time and manage not to waste it on the net. But how do they find time to get appointed to the cabinet or marry lovely women? Here I have 9 minutes as I sip a Campari in the Mercure hotel Tbilisi.

That's it, really. They have a Mercure and a Sheraton. They had just built the Marriot when I was here before but I lucked out and got to Tbilisi in 2005 or 2006 before tourism did. Now it's the jolliest and most enchanting city you'll ever visit but thronged with hotels and restaurants and wine shops. And a cable car that swoops down every few minutes, save the mark. Yerevan does not have this for a good and sufficient reason. Yerevan is a grey Soviet city, charmingly squalid.

I hate organised tours of course but they have many elegancies. I recommend Envoy Tours in Yerevan and Tbilisi (and oddly Phnom Penh). I have become bourgeois, which I said would never happen, and stay in hotels, but have decided to go back to private rooms in youth hostels. Apart from being cheap you meet interesting and intelligent people and find good tours. And they have desktops on which you can blog.

In 2006 I stayed somewhere expensive in Tbilisi filled with very boring people working for UNDP whose hotel bills were paid for by the poor. In developing countries avoid places where UNOcrats throng, on expenses. They are dull. No fun. They read reports at breakfast.

If you have not been to Tbilisi do come here. If you have, you probably should not come back but explore the rest of the country or the monasteries of Western Armenia - the western part of modern day Armenia, that is, and the Armenia that is now in Turkey.

The Armenian monasteries are not without some tourists but they are protected by their inaccessibility. They are eerily beautiful and very strange. Pure Romanticism. Gothick. Mrs. Radcliffe on cocaine. Do go.

The news is about Christians slaughtered in Sri Lanka and Nigeria and some time ago Muslims were killed allegedly by a white Anglo-Saxon wanting to avenge the Muslim conquest of the Balkans. 

I knew 1990 was not the end of history but now is a return to a history that was never finished. A return to history especially in Armenia, the oldest Christian country, and Muslim Azerbaijan. A sort of hot or cold war waged for centuries in the Caucasus, which was partly ethnic and partly religious, until Russia succeeded in stopping it for a time. The two countries are still in theory at war.

The Whigs of the 18th century put something they called religion into a box and pushed the lid down, to prevent the religious wars that had disfigured the 17th century but you cannot stop people killing for religion. You can't because religion means anything a group of people consider sacred. It includes Marxism, patriotism, human rights and even climate change. And anything sacred tends to move people to shed blood for it, though there have not been climate change martyrs yet.

Talking about wars and climate change, that annoying Swedish schoolgirl, who has Asperger's syndrome and who is campaigning about climate change in England, looks to me like the little girl who led the children's crusade. 

Now a reverse crusade is taking place and she should be concerned at the existential threat to Sweden from migrants from the Mahgreb, not the highly questionable climate change scare. But did she try to warn people of that threat she would face disciplinary problems at school. She would not be teacher's pet.