I guess I was really eager to get ahead. I drove over 1200 km in two days. From Trabzon Turkey to Zanjan Iran. During this time you can imagine
I didn’t meet that much people except for the cars passing by. It’s kinda weird. I get really enough attention on the road. Often cars which are driving in the other direction are giving me light signals. Some of them are looking happy, others do not. On reason might be, that they don’t understand why I ride with light switched on during the day. Others are greetings for sure. But most of the time,
I must admit, I have no fuckin idea what the people want of me. One or two were looking angry and screaming something out of their windows I must have been disturbing them somehow. Like when somebody’s chewing a gum while he’s talking to you. And you really have to hold back not to strangle the gum out of him. But most of them are really nice, I got
a peach offered
from a few guys out of car which drove beside me, on the highway. At just the right time because I needed something in the stomach to move on. Everything was a bit sticky afterwards, but hey, the peach tasted great! But Kids, remember, never eat something or get a jacket on while riding a motor-bike, these can ’cause serious accidents ;). Yeah,
I was in a hurry, I needed the kilometers flying by. I have some kind of concentration loss.
I guess, most of the people have it, maybe you know it as well. Somehow your mind is loosing interest and you are not paying attention anymore on the current thing you’re working on. Mostly unimportant things because if something’s important you know it and keep your mind on. Like filling out a form for a “Carnet de Passage” — this is a passport document for a vehicle which allows you to bring it to countries like Iran. I would say filling out such a form is something important because it gets you in trouble if you don’t. Yeah, you got the point!
I messed that up. I filled in the wrong chassis frame number. But the Iran customs office let me through after long discussions. I hope I will have the same luck
on the Pakistan and India border, but what would they do otherwise, send me back? Iran is just big. I have seen amazing forms of rock and hills but had not the mind of making pictures of it. But on the way to Esfahan and later I will start again.
I am in Tehran and have applied for the Pakistan visa. Those guys are really helpful and friendly but of what I heard they charge freaking much for
a visa — about 120 Dollar. But at least you don’t have to wait on the counter for over 5 min because not that many people go to Pakistan. Statistics
tell that Tehran is the city with highest rate of accidents. I have seen a lot, but I was able to go with the flow up to now. I heard from other
tourists which were not so lucky. One big Problem for traveling in Iran is the money embargo. There are no ATM’s in
this country which work with usual credit cards. That means that you have to bring the money into the country. When you change it you get a huge pile of money. Compared to other countries swimming in money is really cheap here. But the
pile is shrinking quite fast as well. Gasoline is really cheap but spending the night indoors in comfort is not. And uncalculated costs like the freaking expensive Pakistan visa are quite heavy set backs.