Steve's Cycling Blog

Something of a sleep in this morning with breakfast at 0700 at which point it was a rather crisp 3ºC, so while I’m happy that the afternoons have become somewhat cooler I’m not impressed with the mornings being so chilly – the leg warmers, long gloves and scarf are going to have to go back into my daily bag on the rest day.

Because we’re being shuttled the last 30ish kilometres it’s a pretty short day ending at the lunch stop.

Stage 97 (no matter what the board might say) route notes

As usual I set off on my own, but unlike the last couple of days was more intent on getting into lunch in the first five people to avoid too much waiting round at the side of the road (sure we’ll still have to wait for check-in at the hotel but at least we’ll have somewhere comfortable to be with the convenience of the internet etc). I passed Paul, Erwin and Jackie as we came off the gravel road onto the pavement, and Roger at the top of the hill.

It took a little longer to catch Ivan, but then he and I also caught up with Grant and took turns rotating through the front until the bottom of the main climb at which point Ivan on his mountain bike was too slow for Grant and I so we left him and carried on with me leading us up the climb.

From the top of the climb down was great fun – it was a pretty steep descent, the wind was over our shoulder, there was relatively little traffic and the surface was in good condition. Even at the point that we were going back up smaller rises we were doing at least 40 km/h and despite the climbing we’d done I had an average of 32.6 km/h when we got to the lunch stop.

We’d only just finished lunch when Andreas returned from dropping most of the crew and the bags at the hotel, so the first five of us were loaded into the van and driven into town. Thanks to the holiday today it wasn’t really necessary, the roads were pretty empty!

I mentioned yesterday that today was Eid Al-Adha and it seems to be taken pretty seriously here with pretty much all of the businesses closed.

In the end we didn’t have to wait too long for rooms to be available, and in fact by the time I got my room the lunch truck still wasn’t at the hotel so I didn’t have toiletries or clean clothes anyway. I used the time to upload the last couple of days worth of blog posts as though we’d been pretty near towns for most camps mobile data was impossibly slow.

After showers Michael and I took a wander round the block to drop off laundry to be done and see what we could find. Lots of the same as we’ve seen other places, including bread-making, though a different technique which is somewhat more mechanised. The chap who was doing most of the work really seems to enjoy his work 🙂

You can probably work it out form the video, but we timed it as 15 sec for each bread to be in the oven, which means a new piece of dough goes in every 3.5 seconds!

I spent the remainder of the afternoon doing a few chores and arsing about on the internet before Ron, Bruno, Michael, Ruth and I headed out for dinner. Michael and I had seen a pizza place in our wanderings and that got the ‘people’s choice’ award for tonights dinner – it proved to be a good choice!

We took the long way home, including stopping to admire some of the somewhat over-the-top furniture which seems to be the norm in Iran (I’d love to see inside someones house to see what this stuff looks like in there)

Ron, myself and Michael posing on the thrones

Back to the hotel and one last blog post completed before it was time for bed.

In other interesting news Jacob was also approached by Outside Magazine about them sharing the Pamir Highway video he’d made so my voice is now famous (yeah right) on both their homepage and a page about the trip.

If you happen to read Spanish then you might also be interested in Bruno’s blog of our little adventure.

Riding data

View from my tent

The roofs of Tabriz from our hotel room