A bit of a stuffy night despite having the aircon on, and in spite of wanting to sleep in I was awake and hungry by 0730. The hotel breakfast was as good as everything else about the place – other…
Tehran here we come (stage 92)
It got pretty cool in the night beside the river – so much so that I actually had to get in my sleeping bag for the first time since the Pamir Highway! Having not put my tent up the morning routine…
And back again (stage 91)
We’ve spent the last four days criss-crossing back and forth over the range of hills which separates the inland valleys from the Caspian Sea and today was no exception, though by the end of the day we’ve come far enough…
Up, up and up some more (stage 90)
The rain and thunder continued off and on through the night, but so did the wind which meant that at packing up time things were actually pretty dry which makes the whole process much easier. From camp we had to backtrack…
Windy as **** (stage 89)
Today we’ve had every sort of wind imaginable; head, tail, howling, gusty, side, gusty-side, and far too much gusty-howling-head! It blew pretty much all through the night and although there was lots of thunder and lightening only a sprinkle of…
Not really feeling the cycling love (stage 88)
Sadly last night’s sleep was somewhat interrupted by power issues in the hotel which meant that the air-conditioning kept turning on and off as the power came and went, and for a while it also got pretty hot in our…
Sweltering in Gonbad-e-Kavus (rest day)
With the air-conditioning cranking all night keeping the temperature and humidity in our room under control I had one of the bests night’s sleep I’ve had in a long time which was welcome after the last few nights where I’ve not…
We’ve (gone to) Gonbad (stage 87)
A cool and surprisingly damp night as clouds rolled in overnight – it’s the first cloudy day I can recall since Almaty which is many days and several hundred kilometres away. We decided to do a ‘term photo’ for the…
Off to the national park (stage 86)
…Goleston National Park includes partly cultivated steppe and contrastingly thick mountain forests of 500-year-old trees… Lonely Planet, Iran All of which sounds really interesting but so far all we’ve seen are brown hills that look like Central Otago though we’ve…
Bojnord bound (stage 85)
Another chilly night full of disruptions – it seems the park is the place to go after dark so we had a constant stream of people walking and driving past our tents along with a visit from the police at…