A few weekends ago I had one of the most fun day trips of my journey so far, and not only do I have a few interesting things to share, I actually have photos too. Hooray!

But first, here is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle that I read. Editor's note: this is foreshadowing for the events of this post. "Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God."

One of the program coordinators here suggested that there were two good sites within reasonably taxi ride distance from where we are staying: the Masroor rock cut temple and a nameless wildlife preservation that was supposedly hosting a large flock of rare Russian birds for the Winter. Naturally, we couldn’t pass up that opportunity, so we called a taxi and departed on our journey.

After a nice drive through the mountains we arrived at our first destination: a temple carved straight into the sandstone rock at the top of a mountain. The site had experienced an earthquake that partially destroyed it and was being renovated, but it was still fascinating to see the intricate carving:

It wasn’t a terribly large temple, but there were still some pretty fascinating structures to look at. Like many sites here, there are some basic shapes that are replicated at all the levels of the design. So for example, if you look at the carvings you will see the same steep dome shape that makes up these big pillars, which you can also see in the structure of the whole temple itself:

Because it was relatively small, we didn’t end up spending as much time here as we expected, so we returned to our taxi and headed for our next destination. We had a hard time communicating with the driver about where we wanted to go, but eventually we thought that we had basically gotten the point across. We got a little uneasy when the drive lasted longer than we had expected, but we didn’t feel strongly enough to suspect that we might be going the wrong way.

Then, something rather unexpected and utterly confusing happened. In all the photos you’ve seen up to this point, the terrain is mountainous and covered in all kinds of trees. But somehow we ended up driving endlessly across a perfectly flat plain. Check out this photo I took out of the car:

This was some of the most open terrain that we have seen on the trip, and despite our uncertainty about exactly what was happening or where the driver was taking us, we felt immensely relaxed and just enjoyed the view for a while. But then, something even more unexpected happened: we drove over a little hill and all of a sudden we were at the edge of this:

Somehow we just stumbled across a completely amazing lake, complete with still water, rocky shorelines, and rowboats gliding around all over the place. What did we do to take advantage of this beautiful location? We asked one of the boats to take us out for a ride, of course!

So that happened. We had a picnic lunch on a rowboat with a gentlemen whose name we could never find out on a lake we didn’t know existed at a place that may or may not have been the reservation we were looking for in a country where clearly there are much things you can do than get lost and confused. All in all, it was awesome.