The sightseeing begins

23/7

As some of you may know I like to sleep in in the morning so I did this day and plan on doing every day of this trip.

Breakfast view of my car from inside my friends travel mobile.

The outside of above-mentioned car

Me, Horst and Felix (who are my new German friends from the night before) had decided to go to the bazar today, so we took a taxi from the campground to the bazar just before noon.

The bazar is on one hand a really cool (in lack of a better word) place to visit with a lot of history and a lot of genuine goods in a beautiful building with some shops so small the owner has to be outside of the store because he (always a male) does not fit inside.

Although the stores are so small everyone has surveillance cameras, usually 3 or more, and I wonder who manages to steel from these stores and then only to be caught by the cameras that nobody is watching? On the other hand the bazar is filled to the brim with Chinese shit (like so many other similar places thees days) that no one need.

When I was on the Turkish – Irani border and about to go in to the Irani side I realized that I needed to change from shorts to pants, I also realized that I hade messed it up when I packed for this trip. The only thing I have with me that isn’t shorts is a pair of jeans and a pair of black trecking pants, neither of them is a good choice for 40+ degree heat. So how do I solve this you ask. Well I buy a pair of cheep pants at the bazar. They were made in China and the quality is shit! But at least they are a lot cooler than my previous options.

Me trying the size in the “changing room”

We then took another taxi to the Coy mosque. It is the second mosque of the day and beautiful on the outside but unfortunately very rundown inside, but it is impressively cool in there although it is 38C outside, so it gave us a well deserved break from the heat.

We were back at the cars at 5ish in the afternoon and I planed to drive to Resht by the Caspian sea but changed my mind when Horst asked me if I wanted to go with them to Alvars ski resort to meet the nomadic people there. It is not so much that I want to see the nomadic people and there lifestyle but that this trip for me is a lot about saving yes and take the opportunities that are in front of me. So vi drove 5h to a ski resort in the middle of the summer. It was way past sun set when we arrived and we should have had dinner a long time ago but in Irani spirit we had a very late dinner, that only made the frozen pizza they had with them so much better.

The day after we went for a walk on the mountain in search for snow.

We took the skilift up

Me an Felix saw some snow a fair bit away from where we Stod and we went there so that Felix could do snow angels. After a 45 min walk we where only a few meters from the snow when some shepherds dogs thought that we where a threat to the heard and came charging for us, Altho they had some distens to us I got scared and forced Felix to turn around and leav his sought after goal on this hike when we where so close.

This is the snow patch that Felix had to leave untouched

On our way down we met up with Horst and more dogs charging at us, but Horst handled them with ease, except one dog that I actually thought was going to attack him.

We where invited to two different family’s for chitea and bread on our way past their tents. In the first family they didn’t speek mutch English but they did smoke a lot of opium.

The second family tho was easyer to communicate with and we stayed there a little bit longer.

It was time to move on and go to the Caspian sea. We headed for a campsite in Lavendevil.

On our way we needed to find some diesel that I at this point had learnt that is restrikted in Iran and truckers have a card that they use when they fill up to prevent them from filling up more than 300l/day. So you’ll have to find a truck driver to see if he can give you some of his daily rasion or if you are lucky they will let you fill up at the petrol station (not everyone sells diesel) without the card.

We found some diesel, navigated the traffic and the bad roads and eventually reached the campground after 300km and 6h.

We both had to big vehicles to park on the campground so we parked right outside and went to bed almost immediately (that means I was up till about 4am so that it would be cool enough for me to sleep).

Waking up at the Caspian sea was not the ocean like experience that I hoped for. But how often do you wake up next to the Caspian sea? So me and Felix went for a swim. I did feel quit nice going in to the 30 degree wather when it’s 40 degrees in the air.

I did have some problems with my solar panels not charging my battery’s enough and my fridge would drain my hous batteries at night. I had prepared for charging the batteries from the car when driving but not hooked it up because of lack of time and parts, but luckily Horst had both. After our time in the water he helped me hook up the batteries to the car too.

We took of in search of a big supermarket and a new place to stay for the night.

We drove to Rasht to find a supermarket but that took a lot longer than expected (it always seems to take a lot longer than expected driving anywhere in Iran) and it was already dark when we arrived and we where only halfway to where we planed to sleep tonight.

It took us an hour to do the shoping but we didn’t find the big supermarket that we were looking for so we settled for a “regular” one instead. When we were done it was to late to go where we plan so we found a place 2h away that was a campsite. When we arrived at 2am we were told that the fee was 1,000,000 rial for one car one night, and that is really expensive here. As comparison the previous night was 100,000 rial. We did not have much of a choice tho so we payed and stayed there, the last night together.

In the morning we hade breakfast together and we were supposed to split up, but since we were traveling in the same direction for another couple of hours I suggest that we drove together til our paths split. It turned out to be only 5min from the location I was stopping at for the night when they were about to turn of so we decided to have a late lunch together at that campsite befor they moved on to Teheran.

Till next time, drive safe!

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