Day 19: We woke up in Tehran and after breakfast and quick chat with the Lotus Childrens charity team, who were staying in the same hotel, we decided our rough route for the day. We were going to head for a town near the Caspian sea that Bill could go paragliding and that was on the way to our next country, Turkmenistan. We left the 14 million+ people of Tehran and headed for the largest inland sea in the world, the Caspian. This was a 4 hour drive through a beautiful winding mountain pass. Despite all the cars and their crazy Iranian drivers this was one of the nicest roads we had been on so far. We rose up into the clouds, passing a huge damn, many tunnels, sections of forests and people selling fruits and honey. We only had to stop twice, once for fuel and once to wait for a bus to pass through a section of road that was conveniently only wide enough for the bus (and not the idiot in the porsche at the same time). After descending from the mountains we could see the Caspian sea in the distance flanked for kilometres by a highway. We headed east along the highway trying to find somewhere to eat (a challenge during ramadan) and somewhere to access the beach. Eventually we found some food and got directions to the beach where we met some friendly Iranian boys. After a nice swim we enjoyed the company of these rebellious boys playing music from their car and performing horrendously amazing dance-moves. Fear not, Will and Luke have taken notes and will be dissecting the video footage before our next dance-off. A couple hours down the road we passed 2 rally teams, 1 from Australia and 1 from Norway. After donning our top hats we stopped by the road side for a quick chat. There is nothing like running into and rally team on a random road to lift the excitement levels. They were both trying to get to Turkmenistan tomorrow so we introduced them to the the Wheel of Fortune dispute resolution system and they got on their way. We found a hotel nearby and conveniently near another paragliding site. Hopefully the weather will be good in the morning.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 04:16:29 +0000
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