Steve's Cycling Blog

Not a very restful night, as Andreas put it

Came for the mosquitos, stayed for the barking dogs.

so everyone was up and about earlier than strictly necessary, myself included, and ready to get out and riding. The good news was that Mark was also awake early so today was an eggs day!

Stage 99 route notes

Out on the road and I steadily caught with and passed most of the other riders who had left before me – as I went past Roger he said “hurrah – I must be getting faster, it’s taken you longer to catch me today”.

Once we turned off the highway at 27km the traffic got much quieter, but unfortunately the road surface got a lot worse (for the next 10km) and it also put us more into the wind which was already beginning to build.

Around 50km I took a break to eat my peanut butter sandwich and take a pee while my bike took a rest against a sign.

Rest break for everyone!

Continuing on up and as I came into the town where the climb was supposed to get steeper I decided some liquid energy was needed so pulled into a store just as Grant was pulling out. A couple of (very small) bottles of coke later and I was ready to continue. The added fuel was definitely a bonus as the hill did indeed get steeper, and the headwind got stronger to really make things hard!

I caught up with Grant just before the 77km turn and we rode the rest of the way to lunch together. As we got there we were surprised to see a rider just pulling away and realised it was Doug – this seemed pretty odd to me because I distinctly remembered passing him at around 16km. Turns out he’d had enough of the climb shortly after it began and hitched a ride on a passing ute which dropped him at the corner (and consequently the top of the climbing).

From lunch there was the opportunity to make a 10km round-trip detour to view St. Thaddeus Monastery – given that I doubt I’ll ever be back in this part of the world it seemed rude not to go. And I wasn’t disappointed – it’s pretty impressive – I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Back to the lunch stop an hour or so later and it was time to continue – the route notes said there was a long descent to look forward to, and they weren’t wrong! With a few minor exceptions it was downhill for the next 34km all the way back to the highway. At times it was fairly steep, and on quite a winding road which thankfully was pretty quite which meant a decent pace was possible. Fun times for me:-)

For a while we had a SANZA  contingent riding together after I caught Ivan (South Africa) and Roger (Australia) just as we turned back onto the highway. We rode together from there through to the outskirts of town where we started climbing more steeply and Roger and I on our road bikes got away from Ivan.

Into the hotel where we’re supposed to be camping and it turns out there’s really nowhere for us to camp so we’ve been ‘upgraded’ and have rooms for the night. Result!

I’ve showered, washed out my cycling kit, been to the shop for ice-cream and water and have spent the last hour or so sitting on the wall of our balcony (which makes this hotel sound way flasher than it is – the blanket on Grant’s bed has cigarette burn holes in to put things in perspective) sorting and uploading photos and getting blog posts done.

In news just in, it seems the descent this afternoon has taken its toll on our group. Rob, one of the riders, ended up in the bank, while Jordan, our tour mechanic, ended up in the ditch! Thankfully neither of them are badly injured – just scrapes and bruises, but Rob’s front wheel has been destroyed and even worse for Jordan his frame is broken in three places! There’s a glimmer of good news for Rob because Jordan’s front wheel seems to be in serviceable condition, so may enable him to keep riding!

The title of my post is also slightly miss-leading as we don’t actually leave Iran until tomorrow but it’s only 20km to the border and that’s up the main highway so it will be a relatively short journey in the morning before we make our last border crossing of the trip into country number ten – Turkey!

Now it’s time for dinner in the hotel restaurant!

Later: Dinner was great, we had a chicken dish done with walnuts and pomegranate juice which is very similar to something I’ve made myself using duck – delicious!

From there it was next door for rose-water flavoured soft-serve ice-cream to use up the small change IRR notes. I think the guys was somewhat surprised when eight westerners walked in and proceeded to have two ice-creams each.

It’s a pretty late start tomorrow with breakfast not till 0730. We’ve then got 21.5km to the border and a little further to go once we’re in Turkey.

The unfortunate thing is that it sounds like we’re crossing into a fairly unfriendly area. Ozgur – our Turkish support person – has said that he doesn’t think it’s safe for us to go into the town so once we get there we’re going to be under ‘hotel arrest’ in the hotel compound about 6km from the town (he won’t even let staff go into the town to do food shopping).

Riding data

View from my tent

Clouds in the valley Maku’s in