Tehran
Arriving at the bus terminal early in the morning:
Roofs of Tehran:
New cat friend:
Crazy Tehran traffic:
Iranians love non-alcoholic beer. Cheers!
Moped parking:
Random wall:
One evening, we went to the north of Tehran with Robin and Arlen. It was a crazy area, at the foot of the mountains. One restaurant after another, and they all looked like attractions from a theme park:
We ended up in this place, where you can eat sitting on a carpet in the stream of the river:
When we missed the last subway to the center of Tehran, we experienced one of the many incredible examples of iranian hospitality. Mohammed Reza, who works for the Tehran subway company, insisted to drive us to our hostel with his car. He actually took off from work, paid a taxi to the next subway station, and then drove us 16km to the center of the city! Unbelievable. We will never forget this, thank you!
Visiting the bazaar:
Dinner in the hostel:
We met up with many other cyclists again! Stephane from France was already there, and it was nice to see Thomas and Jörg again! We also met Everhard again, who was staying in a hostel just around the corner from us. A few days later, Arne, another cyclist from Germany also joined us!
Group photo with Jörg, Thomas and Stephane:
Bike mechanic session with Arne:
Goodbye photo with Jörg and Arne very early in the morning... They are going to Mashad, trying their luck with the Turkmenistan visa. Good luck guys!
In the meantime we got a lot of things done: Making new passport photos, getting paperwork from the german embassy, applying for chinese visa, buying new clothes, applying for tajik visa, buying sunscreen (not an easy task, and very expensive!), buying flight tickets, contacting the airline for bicycle transport, getting wrapping materials for the bicycles and so on...
So after one and a half weeks in Tehran, we had sorted everything out, and were ready to pack our bikes:
Next stop: Dushanbe!