Welcome to Iran

'Welcome to Iran' is shouted out the windows of almost every car that passes us.  People in the street say it to us too, followed by 'What is your country?'.  This question is usually followed with 'How do you like Iran?', an easy question to answer - we love it here.  What's not so easy to answer however is when they shyly ask next 'Why do people from the west think we are all terrorists?' Why indeed. 

Our taxi from the airport. 3 people, 3 bikes....no bother!

Neither Nick nor I have ever been anywhere where the welcome has been so big, so widespread and so overwhelming in its sincerity.  We have stayed in countless Iranian families homes, we have been fed and watered and not a day has gone by where we haven't received something free of charge.  The welcome is huge and across the board: children and adults; city folk and country folk; rich and poor Iranians.  They seem delighted to have people visit their country and ignore the 'black news', the bad press this country seems to generate in the western media.  They do their utmost to help us and leave us with lasting good impressions, to hopefully go home and spread the word.  Which we will, we tell anyone who asks.   The hospitality and friendliness towards us isn't just a bid to change the country's awful reputation abroad though.  It seems to be an inbuilt characteristic of Iranians.  They are a family and community oriented people, and if you enter into their community it seems you get treated as part of it.  It's not a need or a task they feel they must perform.  It's a default response and they seem to get as much happiness and joy out of the interactions with us as we do with them. 

Onwards, with a Unfortunate Change of Route

As I wrote in my previous post...

We’ve been in Dushanbe for a week now and have successfully got our Uzbeki and Iranian visas.  They are relatively straightforward to get.  The Turkmen one on the other hand is notoriously time consuming, and even then, not guaranteed.  We’ve to go back to the embassy on Thursday (21st July) and it should be issued to us then but we aren’t holding our breath…we’ve heard plenty of horror stories and loads of people that have just give up on it and re route instead.   If we don't get it, our only option will be to fly over Turkmenistan, which we are not particularly keen to do!  Just thinking about boxing up the bikes for a flight gives me a headache, so fingers crossed we get the visa and we'll be back in the saddle on Friday!

....and yet here we are, still in Dushanbe, on Saturday.  

When we went to the embassy on Thursday, the man made a quick call to someone in Ashgabat to enquire about our visa status, hung up the phone and shook his head.  So that was that.  No Turkmenistan visa.  So we did the only thing we could, which was to book a flight from here to Tehran, which leaves tomorrow.

The Spectacular Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan

The Pamir Highway (M41) and the Wakhan Valley

Where do you even begin to describe a place like the Pamirs?  The sights and sounds, the people, the experiences and the emotions…

It took us six days to cycle from Osh to Murgab, a distance of about 430km.  We reckoned it would take us another 8 days to cycle from Murgab to Khorog via the Wakhan Valley and then 6 more days from Khorog to Dushanbe.  It’s more common (a relative word!) to cycle in the opposite direction to the one we went in because the wind is more usually at your back and the gradient is slightly easier that way.  But, we’re travelling westwards, so we cycled the pamirs backwards!  Having done it, I now understand that the wind really is a game changer. We cycled into a very strong headwind almost immediately after leaving Murgab and we battled it more or less the whole way to Khorog, which in the end took us 9 long days.

We have fallen in love with Kazakhstan!

Cycling through Kazakhstan

Died and Gone to Kyrgyzstan

Heaven is a concept that I've always struggled with.  A paradise, a garden of eden, but also a place that can be all things to all believers.  I don't know anyone who could vividly describe what heaven is to them but I'm petty sure it's in Kyrgyzstan. When people say 'I've died and gone to heaven' after eating a particularly rich piece of chocolate cake or some other such thing, what they really mean is they've been transported to Kyrgyzstan.  They mightn't be aware of it, but believe me, the scenery that we've just cycled though, is out of this world, heaven-like, totally breath-taking and had I not seen it with my own eyes, it'd be hard to believe that such a place exists, so natural and unspoilt by us humans.  Instead of trying to contort the surroundings into a way that better serves people, or more usually, better serves more people and helps richer people get richer, here the people live in nature, with it and aware of it, taking what they need from it and no more, leaving it to continue giving and providing for generations to come.  The Kyrgyz nomads have it right.

**Photos are at the end this time instead of in amongst the text.  Feel free to scroll to the bottom to see them and skip the wordy bit!

A Most Hospitable Place

Kazakhstan has come and gone and we're in Kyrgyzstan now.  A place where I never imagined myself being.  A place where, before we started planning this trip, I'm quite sure I couldn't place on a map, name the capital city or even spell, yet here we are!  But first, let me talk a bit more about Kazakhstan...

I didn't have many expectations of Kazakhstan before getting there.  I knew that our route through the country was short and that our time there would be quick.  If I'm being honest, I had kind of thought of Kazakhstan as just a means of getting to the Pamir Highway.  Actually the only real thought I had was that the food was going to take a serious nose dive from the tasty treats we'd been used to in China.  How wrong I was.  The food was delicious and varied.  And so far in Kyrgyzstan we haven't been disappointed either.  The beauty of the countryside in Kazakhstan is hard to fathom, at least the small part that we went through anyway. The huge open spaces, the towering mountains, the quietly grazing herds of animals and the lack of too much human intervention into the natural world immediately brings with it such a sense of calm.  Being in Kazakhstan just felt good.  It felt relaxing.  It was a world away from the modern stresses of life, as we've come to know it, in the west.  The air was fresh, the sun was warm and I could actually feel my body and mind relaxing and slowing down.  Despite all this though, for us, it was the the people we encountered along the way that really made Kazakhstan the place it was.