Yesterday we reached Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Unprepared, no map in head, no hotel address written out, it was already getting dark. Carelessly, you might think. That sounds like hours of wandering, like unsuccessful attempts to overcome language barriers, like endless stress and at the end a night on a deserted park bench, because you couldn't find a suitable accommodation. Everything thing of the past, such worries accompany us only rarely. We didn't lose anything, the driveway is a brainer. We go to the city center, take the laptop out of the bag, connect with one of the unsecured wireless networks, surf for half an hour on the internet, download a screenshot of google.maps on the e-reader, cycle to the next cheap hostel. Done.

The Internet has changed the world. Sure, nothing new, a sentence heard a hundred times. And yet it astonishes us again and again how quickly this development has gone. South America in 2006, the iPhone wasn't invented yet, hardly a hostel has had its own Wi-Fi. To post a blog on the website, we had to spend hours in smoky internet cafes. Power failures, system crashes, the banging of video games around us - it was awful. Today, every cheapest hostel has connected to the net. We are sitting in our room, skype with parents, write emails to friends, search on google in a few minutes the recipe for a cake mixture, the latest Travel Advice for Iran, the weather for the coming days, when the Scots will vote for their independence (oh, how it have been boring on the bike four days ago, allowing this vote has come to mind), the height of the next passes, when we can look the next Hobbit film, the address of a bicycle shop here in Yerevan. Essential and entertaining. A good or a bad development? Sure, the Internet sometimes makes us feel that all the adventures are already lived, all places on Earth have already been visited. All available information and the media coverage of incidents involving travelers unconsciously affect our travel plans.

Somewhere along the road between Georgia and Armenia we hide away to camp beside the road in the undergrowth. Invisible, guaranteed. No more flashlight use after dark. When we are asleep, suddenly the headlights of a car wake us up. Directly in front of our tent. It must be ramped up the creek bed, we heard nothing. In such a moment every ever read negative headline flashes through mind. Stupid, really. After all the positive experiences of our years of travel. Headless we search for the pepper spray instead to put on a pair of pants. It's the police. No idea how they have discovered us. If everything is OK and a good evening they wish us. That's it. The night is gone. We lie awake for hours, with some horror stories from Internet blogs in the head.

We know more and more stories of travelers, we have never met. Their experience can be intimidating, but often we benefit from it. Today we cycle routes on which a cyclist of the eighties would never have ridden. The information gathering would have been too tiring, too uncertain the supply, the route, the risks. We learn about the power backgrounds of a country which had been concealed to us from the government and people, and it encourages us to critical looking. The first e-mail, we read after our arrival in Yerevan, comes from Amnesty International. "A no-go, Mr. Putin!" is the subject. It's about the upcoming Olympic Games in Russia and the incompatibility with violated human rights.

We are interested in the mail. Although we are not traveling in Russia, we're getting close to the Russian culture. Ex-Soviet townscapes accompany us since we left Turkey. Especially in the countryside, but also in small towns is the Russian past still well seen and felt. Monstrous precast concrete slabs, which decompose slowly, the huge infrastructure of a superpower which is rusting from Albania to China. The pretty map, we carry in our handlebar bag is based on the military maps of the USSR. On the border between Georgia and Armenia are rattling caterpillar plows from the Soviet era across the fields, the cows are staying in the stables of the collective farms, tangerines, pumpkins and potatoes will be driven to market in the indestructible UAZ buses.

The Government of Georgia is working with eagerness to delete this image. At least in the big cities. In Batumi, Georgia's flagship resort, skyscrapers spring up like mushrooms from the moribund Soviet dinosaurs. When we leave the town to the north, we look at a skyline that could be flown in directly from Dubai. All this urge for change seems far away from the remote region of Svaneti in Caucasus. Before the winter falls, we cycle for a week in glorious autumn weather through this region. The villages and people here seem to be fallen in a deep sleep in the shadows of the Caucasien five thousand summits.

The townscapes are still dominated by stone defensive towers from the Middle Ages, the pigs run freely through the streets, only to be hung up and smoked later Granny-style. During our Svaneti tour we prefer to keep us therefore to Chatschapuri (bread with melted cheese) and "Röschti” for breakfast, but we can't avoid that sometimes a pair of hard-boiled, neatly peeled eggs in a plastic bag are presented as a gift to us. Well, the Swans like it just hearty. They stand as proud and legendary warriors.

By crossing the border with Armenia, the landscape gets flat: wide plateaus, barren hills and headwinds accompany us to Yerevan. When entering the city, we seem to cross time zones again: At the edge the gray legacy of the Russians, in the center ostentatious buildings of volcanic rock and synchronously controlled water light shows on the Republic Square. It's not just the Internet that has changed the world. The world is changing everywhere. Every day. Since ever.