Ecobiketrip

I was really happy when I finally got to meet my good old friends, Aggelos and Dean. Dean will stay with us till Dubai and Aggelos really got very good connections and fancy equipment. We start making a documentary for Sky, details are on his site: http://www.filmografik.gr/
We will also get more organized soon, besides a real Internet site, we will write for Geo, Der Standard, NOEN, Velosophie and MBike.

When we left Karaj I already got used to my very friendly host family. They are really good people and I hope to see them again. Maybe even in Australia when we pass there this winter.

The way to Esfahan is straight through the dessert. It was very hard to find good sleeping spots and places with some shadow to rest during midday. Sun is merciless burning down with about 40 degrees Celsius and we had to carry about 10 liters water with us at all times. One midday we found a very beautiful spot under one tree in front of ruins from an old village.

We had a new record in flat tires, in just two days we had seven punctures, actually some tires even had three holes at once. It’s dessert thorn’s, created by evolution to last even under worst circumstances, where is nothing else to eat around for hundreds of kilometers.

The same scenery was carrying on for days and we decided that this is not what we wanted and said for the last 200km to Esfahan we will hitch hike and really a truck stopped, took us to Esfahan and afterwards wanted the amazing sum of 150$. We started explaining that we could have also taken a bus if we wanted to pay and conversation were tiring since they spoke no English and we no Farsi. Police explanations in Farsi again couldn’t solve situations till we finally worked it out with tourist police and he got our idea and was satisfied with 30$ for which we could cross Iran three times..

Anyway, Esfahan was really beautiful, its bridges, the second biggest square in the world with a huge bazaar surrounding all this area, many green places and very big parks.

We also met nice cyclists again while staying for a couple of days in the same hostel. It was probably the last time on this trip we met them since from now on they are heading in a different direction, doing good old silk road, crossing all the Stans and trying to enter China after all. There was one very impressing guy, his name is Daisuke and he is from Japan. He is ten years on the road so far riding around the world in very big circles the second time. He is a legend under cyclists..

Our next aim is Shiraz taking mostly small roads, doing lots of high meters when crossing Zagros mountains.