I’ve had some trouble getting the updates uploaded since we crossed into Iran but they should all be going up soon now. Thanks for sticking around.

We spent a couple of days in Baku looking around. Here are some photos

 

 
 
  
  

 

 
  
After a couple of days in Baku we left and started to ride South to the Iranian border. It was a long flat road and quite windy so we camped outside the city in an abandoned hut.

  
 

 

From our camp in the abandoned building by the highway to where we ended up today the road ran almost perfectly straight and flat. The whole region we were cycling through was below sea level which would explain just how incredibly flat the land was.

To top it all off we had a tailwind, and a fairly strong one at that. It threw us along at an incredible pace, something we were thankful for as there wasn’t much else going on around us. To the left the flat land rolled to the sea, and the right off to some haze mountains in the distance.

   At around 11 we pulled into a big petrol station. One of the attendants started talking to us in very good English, he had a masters in English literature for university. How he had ended up working in a petrol station I don’t know.
We we had stopped to make use of the ATM that stood independently at the edge of the station. We had to take out all the money we planned to use in Iran now. Due to economic sanctions, Iran has no access to the international banking system so we won’t be able to take money out once we get into the country. So we were slowly withdrawing money over the next few days. This ate must have been the only one for miles around as there was a constant queue of old Azerbaijani guys around it.

Queue might be too generous though, they stood in a sort of disorganised jumble and when someone else pulled up and got out of the car he would just wander into the group willy nilly and sure eventually they’d all get to use the machine.
We finally got some money out and continued on our way across the long flat. It seemed like there was some rain behind us, but it never did catch up to us.

 
We ate at Salian, in a busy roadside cafe/restaurant where our shorts turned everybody’s head. 
Moving on from there we stopped in town to pick up food for the evening and morning and then set about looking for somewhere to camp. The wind seemed to be threatening rain and we had our pick of abandoned buildings just out of town so we found one reasonably far from the road and pulled our stuff into it.