Steve's Cycling Blog

I’ve decided that Mary is very like Canberra – it’s huge, massively spread out (and consequently difficult to get round), full of government buildings, and really there’s not a lot of point going there! Perhaps unlike Canberra it also gets insanely hot and though the humidity is very low (13% in the middle of the afternoon) it’s not really very pleasant to be out in the sun.

We get up so early on a regular basis that a sleep in is now somewhere around 0630 and by 0715 this morning I was starving so had to get up for breakfast. Sadly, like many other things, this hotel doesn’t do breakfast well – we get enough boiled eggs, dry bread, fatty salami-like sausage, cucumbers, tomatoes and watermelons from TDA, it would be nice if the hotel could provide something different, but it seems not on this occasion.

On the plus side the internet connection at the hotel was actually working relatively well this morning so I spent a few hours getting photos and blog posts from the last seven days uploaded and posted. A definite bonus as yesterday it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

By the time I’d done that and gone for a bit of a wander it was time for lunch before heading off to the museum – unfortunately the museum staff were having the same idea and the museum was closed till 1400 for lunch. It’s too far away, and too hot outside for me to be bothered going back later so I guess the delights of the Mary museum will remain a mystery to me!

In the end napping and arsing about on the (incredibly slow by now) internet in the air-conditioned hotel seemed to be the best course of action – particularly having discovered that the store in the bazar does in fact sell beer, it’s just that it’s not on display but is hidden behind other drinks in the bottom of the fridge!

I also tried to purchase the Iranian Lonely Planet – well I did manage to purchase it, but I couldn’t download it! It’s a 12MB download and that seems to be beyond the capacity of the internet connection here – the most I ever managed to get was 9.5MB. Sadly the mechanism which counts how many times you’ve downloaded your purchase counts when you start downloading, not when you finish, so I’ve now exhausted the five times I was allowed to download but still have nothing useful to show for it – an email to customer support has been sent, I await with interest their reply (when I get to Ashgabat and have hopefully better connectivity).

The people who went to Merv reported that it was ‘interesting’, and that was about all, so I don’t feel like I wasted an unmissable opportunity by not going. They did have a very nice lunch on the way back though the restaurant is too far to walk in the current heat for dinner, so it looks like it’s going to be pizza again for lack of any alternative – all the small places round the market have shut up shop by now.

We’ve got a three day week to get us to a double rest day in Ashgabat, though one of those days is going to be at least partially consumed in getting our Iranian visas issued.

The week ahead – three reasonably long days in the hot, hot sun

It’s also worth an update on statistics since yesterday was stage 80. At this point I’ve cycled 8,713km (for 65% of the estimated journey) climbing 61,089m in the process. Though we’ve only got two countries left, we’ve still got a long way to go!

Now it’s time to get bags sorted, have a shower, and get myself off to bed ready for tomorrow.