We had our first and only climb of the route to Yazd today. Given how flat and repetitive the morning riding was we were kind of happy for it.
Not much to say about the morning ride, events of note during the ride: pulled in for a toilet break at a petrol station. A man at the petrol station gave us a small cake to eat. We passed through the villages of Sejzi and Kuhpayeh. We had lunch just outside Kuhpayeh.

  
I’m not going to have much else to talk about for today’s post so I guess I’ll talk about food. For lunch in Iran we tend to almost always eat Kubideh kebabs, which are minced mutton kebabs. They are pretty much the only food you can find outside the city and they are cheap and sort of tasty. It’s probably the hardest part about Iran, finding traditional Iranian cuisine. Almost all places just sell Kebab, unless you can find a tourist restaurant or get invited to someone’s home. The latter happens frequently enough so a lot of tourists to get to eat the tasty food Iran has to offer. As the tourism there grows I hope that more places open up offering the Persian cuisine because whenever we found somewhere that served it it was delicious.
Anyway, we began to climb shortly after lunch and it was a pretty easy climb, very long and gradual and not steep. Richie naturally found it a bit tougher since it was only his second day riding. I felt a bit bad whenever we had to tell him that, no this wasn’t the top yet but he got up without much difficulty in the end. We could see a bit of snow along the ridges of the peaks we were passing through, something we hadn’t spotted since Tehran.

 

 
  
  
On the other side was an equally long descent down to the town of Naein. With a strong tailwind pushing us this we speed down the mountain as the sun set. Stopped outside the town to set up camp.