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I had been looking forward to visiting Samarkand since the beginning of the rally. I had read a lot about it as a teenager, my anticipation had built for weeks and I had convinced Nick and Bob and Olov that it was something not to be missed. It didn’t take us long to drive there – [...] We arrived in Bukhara late and found the hotel that I had called along the way from the border just before all the restaurants in the old centre shut. ‘Liaby House’ was a great little hotel, just off the main square and man-made pond of the same name. It was a fusion of a new [...] The next morning we came down to breakfast and found another 6 teams catching up. One of them told us that there had been a casualty on the Mongol rally and that one of their friends had tried to reach them during the night to confirm whether they were OK. They said that although they didn’t [...] Driving down the mountain into the valley and towards Ashgabat, we could immediately tell that we were in a different country. The hills were lush and covered in green and gold shimmering grasses and the road was new, wide, clean and perfect to drive. At the border we had been given some of the ground rules [...] We got to the Iranian-Turkmenistan border far too late. It was supposed to close for the day at 3.30pm and we got there at 2.30pm. I was correspondingly nervous and pushed Nick through all the Iranian control points as quickly as possible. And there were lots! First, we had to walk over to a building and get [...] The next morning we got up at around 9am and walked downstairs. The family were already up, with the son at school and the husband at the hospital where he worked as an accountant. We were served a delicious breakfast of freshly baked bread, panir cheese, tomatoes and home-made jams and the two women asked us [...] When we got to the seaside on the day that we left Tabriz, we were exhausted. Although the roads were much better than in Turkey, there were frequent speed bumps that were unmarked and should have been measured on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of deadliness to a car. A couple of [...] Iran is a country of many contradictions. The nature is beautiful but hostile. Temperatures at this time of year are in the very high 30s and low to mid 40s. While it’s policy and politics are very unfriendly towards the West and that of the West towards Iran, the people couldn’t be further from it. Although [...] The Turkish-Iranian border crossing promissed to be quite intense from the outset. Although we had discussed months ago to leave Nick’s US passport at home, with the excitement of the new job, the last minute preparations for the start of the rally and my moving out of my flat, this had somehow slipped by the [...] On our last day in Turkey, we decided to get as close to the Iranian border as possible in order to avoid the crowds the of next day and cross it as early and smoothly as possible. I got up with the sun at about 5, washed at the little well at the top of our field, [...] |
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