A mostly downhill day today to Isfahan, and if everything has gone according to plan, we should be able to meet up with Richie, Finn’s mate from back home who’s going to cycle with us from now on. Not that we weren’t getting on, but we were both looking forward to throwing someone new in the mix.
The mostly downhill day started with an uphill climb. We arrived at the top where a small town has grown up. And up here I guess they get a bit more rainfall or something because the town was built on the shores of what they generously described as a lake. Across the lake were the ruins of an old castle.

   

 Then the downhill started and before we knew it we were out of the hills and mountains back into the wide desert.

 

  
 The desert road led us, straight and flat, all the way to the outskirts of Isfahan. The road to the city after lunch was similarly straight and flat, though a bit busier. 
Once in the city we found somewhere to stay (couldn’t get in contact with the guy that was supposed to host us) and waited for Richie to arrive. He got in at about 8. Reunions and introductions and of course a cursory inspection of his bike followed.its was great to have him over at last after all the talk of it. Even better, he brought some Dairy Milk chocolate, a gift from Fins mum.

We had our first decent pass to climb over since leaving Tabriz today which we were strangely excited for. The long, flat, straight roads in the desert can become a bit mind numbing at times so a good climb seemed really appealing this morning.  

 An accidental but perfect piece of timing: today was the day Iran’s sanctions were lifted and the day we passed by one of its biggest nuclear enrichment facilities. It was on the road to Natanz, an apparently very pretty town at the foot of some mountains that was worth a stop at. 
The facility was right in the middle of nowhere along this stretch of road. We had heard it was somewhere around here and it sort of just emerged out of the ground all of a sudden, a tall earthen embankment that wrapped all along the huge facility. It was obvious this was the place, as soon as we passed by the main entrance a police car parked opposite beckoned us over. We were asked a couple of questions but they were actually pretty relaxed. After taking our visa info and warning us not to take any pictures they followed us down the road in the van until we were out of sight if the facility.

 

 
We then found ourselves at the foot of the climb. The road was set a bit into the hill with the rocky face on either side that drowned out the sound and wind so it felt quite calm all the way up. The town of Natanz was at the top.

   
 After a lunch at Natanz we went looking for the Jameh Mosque, a very beautiful mosque and worth a visit. We took a wrong turn and ended up halfway back down the hill we had just climbed, but freshly full we were happy enough climbing back up. We did get to the mosque eventually and it was, in fact, quite beautiful.

 

  
    
Out of Natanz we had a bit more climbing and a long descent. The ground was now a lot less flat, a lot more rolling and hilly. Also though still arid for the most part there was a bit more greenery, a few trees and some cultivated land here and there. 

  
The sun, as always, started to set so it was time to find somewhere to camp. We pulled off the road and up the hill to flat part of ground. As we were setting up a police van driving on the road we had just left, about 150m from where we were now, spotted us. They doubled back and looked for a way up to us, and I suppose when they realised there was no road the just off roaded up the dusty hill towards us. 

  

 
They couldn’t comprehend what we wanted to do. Eventually, after a lot of miming and showing them a few photos they got the gist. But then they were trying to warn us that it might snow. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky or a breath of wind in the air. It wasn’t going to snow. Finally they had a look at our visas and I guess got fed up with dealing with the idiot foreigners and left us to our own devices.
It didn’t snow that night.

  

Before we left Kashan this afternoon we wanted to visit the UNESCO listed Persian garden Fin Garden (fantastic name). It’s a bit out of town so we took the bus (driver let us on for free!) and on the way out there we met a guy who was starting up a hotel in town. It was his day off and he was heading out to relax in the garden. He knew the manager who he was going to meet there. 

 

 
At the garden the hotel owner got us in for Iranian entrance prices (a fraction of the tourist price) and then gave us a little intro to the garden before heading to enjoy his day off and meet his friend.
The gardens are a real little oasis, lush green trees providing much welcome shade and the flowing channels of water were cooling and soothing. We spent a good while just wandering around, though they weren’t that big. Infact I’d say them not being so big was a bit of a bonus for us after so many days out in the wide open desert.
We returned to the wide open desert soon though, after the garden we went back and picked up our bikes. We were out of Kashan by 3 and making good distance. By early evening we were cycling up and down stoney hills with open rock faces jutting out either side. We were riding on the first tertiary road since we’d come into Iran, and the lack of trucks was a relief.

    
 Enjoying the quiet riding so much we ended up cycling until it was almost dark and then pulled off the road along an old dirt track where we set up in an old quarry.

  

Mustafa returned in the morning with some bread and had breakfast with us before seeing us off. We were only maybe 30 or so kilometres from Kashan so we could ride in this morning and spend most of the day there. 

  
 A pleasant, generally downhill cycle in the cool of the morning followed to Kashan. Kashan is a relatively small city and so it was pretty easy to get into the city center compared to the likes of Tabriz and Tehran. We found Kashan to be very much to our liking, with tree lined streets and friendly people. 

   

 We tried to get a net connection for a while so we could get in touch with hosts we had messaged and see if they could put us up. It being Friday though meant that there wasn’t much open, and all the coffeenets were closed. Some computer repair shop was open and we were able to use their wifi though in the end. Unfortunately no one was available, but our guidebook recommended a nice old style guesthouse.
It was nearby and was very nice, a traditional style house with a central courtyard and the surrounding rooms a little bit under the ground which kept them nice and cool. We were only staying a night but had we more time I’d say I could easily spend a lot of time there.

 

  
 That evening we went out to look at some sights, there were old Persian houses (from the 18th century, not ancient Persia) that had been restored and we were hoping to look at a few of them. We got to one and found the entrance fee a bit expensive so only looked at one in the end.

 

  
   
While looking for somewhere for dinner we came across a guy from Afghanistan who was looking to practice his English. He was an interesting dude, some of his family had left Afghanistan and others had stayed behind (he said he had 17! siblings). Like a lot of people we spoke to he wanted to go to Germany. He helped us find somewhere to eat, given that on Friday everywhere is closed.
Went back to the guesthouse and crashed pretty soon after.

Camp was only 20 kilometres from the city of Qom, but we weren’t going to pass through it. Almost everyone we had talked to so far in Iran, tourists or locals, had told us not to bother visiting Qom. It’s a religious city, it has some famous shrine and most of the population and visitors are apparently pretty staunchly Muslim.  

  
 So we rode through the desert in the cool of the morning and took the ring road around Qom. A bit of a ruckus was kicked up riding past a couple of roundabouts and roads close to the city where people were just sort of hanging out. They’d see us ride by and someone would notice and shout ‘hello mister’ and soon everyone would be involved, whooping and hollering. It was kind of endearing really.
Outside of Qom some serious effort had been made to cultivate the arid countryside. Small irrigation channels provided a smattering of moisture in the fields and here and there patches of green broke up the sea of brown.

  
  
Lunch we found a nice place in a little oasis by the road. And then more desert riding for an hour or two. 

   
 Around half four we arrived at the town of Mobarak Abad which sort of gradually emerged out of the dust. We stopped at a junction to pull on our trousers (we can get away with shorts on the bike but need to cover up our legs walking around lest someone get offended) and while doing so a guy came out of a small walled off garden nearby and walked over to us. He invited us into his garden and said we could crash out there for the night in one of the old houses.
Well never the type to look a gift horse in the mouth we thanked him and agreed. His name was Mustafa and he was turning this old farm/garden grounds into a campsite for tourists. Work was just getting going it seemed but he’s a smart guy to get out in front of what I imagine will be pretty big tourist boom in Iran over the next few years.
We talked with Mustafa for a while and then he went home to his house in Qom. We unwound in the old house for a bit and then hit the hay, ready to ride the last few kilometres into Kashan the next morning. 

From camp in the park we set off this morning along the busy highway towards Kashan, the end point this morning. Before we left the groundskeepers who we were worried might reprimand us for camping on the park grass invited us over to their little shed for some tea. It was kind of a cold morning (not as bad as before Tehran) so good hot tea warmed us up well.
More urban sprawl riding today in the morning, the highway was busy with trucks. There were a few cars too but once we passed the turn-off for the motorway all that was left was trucks.
So we road through all this in the morning and stopped for lunch a bit early. It was actually lucky we did, as soon as we left the town at which we ate lunch we were out in the desert. 

  
We thought we’d been riding through desert before, on the approach to Tehran, but not like this. It was a total reversal from what we’d been through in the morning. From houses, factories and farms everywhere to just…nothing. Just rocky, dusty, arid plains for miles and miles. 

  
  
It got hot too. I can’t imagine doing this cycle in summer, it was mid January and still we were sweating. On one particularly long climb we at last gave up trying to wear trousers and swapped out for the sweet, cool relief of shorts. Air on my shins, what a joy! We’ve been riding in shorts since then and haven’t had a problem, even when talking to police, so I think maybe having to wear trousers isn’t all that strict, at least for male tourists.

 

 
The desert riding continued and so did the complete lack of any development. We had been climbing on and off all afternoon and at the top of a long descent we looked out, the land stretching for kilometres to the horizon and saw nothing. Only the strip of road snaking off and fading into the distance.

  
It was getting dark now and we were hoping to find a shop soon so we could buy dinner and breakfast. After a couple of false alarms, seeing neon in the distance that was just for a farm or factory or auto parts shop, we came at last, as the sun disappeared to the west, to a small shop. Relieved, we picked up the necessary supplies and a couple of ice creams and wheeled off a couple of meters down the road
We found an old broken bridge off the main road, I guess part of the old old road to Kashan and set up camp there. 

  

We spent about two weeks in Tehran in the end. Most of it was waiting for the Chinese embassy to open so we could make our visa application. We had happened to arrive in the city around the national holiday celebrating the prophet Mohammed’s birth so it was closed and then it was New Years and closed again and sure it only opened three times a week anyway.
At first we stayed in 7 Hostel, one of the first hostels to open up in Tehran about eight months previous. We met a bunch of interesting travellers and, of course, and Irishman here too. This was Redmond, he was over learning Farsi and with a great example of just how small Dublin can be, he went to the same school as me a couple of years below.
Getting around Tehran on the bikes wasn’t really an option, the city is so sprawling it wouldn’t be a very comfortable ride and takes ages to get anywhere. However, the public transport is great. We got to see a couple of the sights, the Bazaar, the old US Embassy, the Shahs palace but what we really enjoyed was meeting the young Tehranis who seemed to all know each other from hanging out in cafes smoking. They were all really friendly and a couple of them even took time out to show us around, take us to where they’d normally hang out and all the rest.

After three days we left the 7 Hostel and went to stay with Roham our Couchsurfing host. He was a quiet friendly guy with an apartment way in the north of the city, right by the mountains. Given our visa troubles we had to extend our stay and he was very easy going and let us crash a bit longer, he made what could have become a frustrating time go very smoothly. Roham worked as a music instructor and also as a purveyor of power tools at the bazaar.
One day we went to the Irish consulate to retrieve a letter of endorsement request by the Chinese embassy. This was a very smooth operation and I got a kick out of seeing the signs of home.

  
We also had to extend our visa which is a pretty simple process of you know where to go. We ended up at the old office the first time and that was closed now. If you happened across this and want to know about extending your Iran visa in Tehran check out this thread on caravanistan.com http://caravanistan.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=717#top
In the end we couldn’t get out China visa, they wouldn’t issue one that would be valid for entry for ninety days, only one for a month which wouldn’t be enough time at all. Instead we are going to have to apply in Islamabad, Pakistan. 
Our last two days in Tehran we spent up in the Alborz skiing, as per our first plan. The snow had come down in thermite we had spent in the city and the resort had been open two days by the time we got there. We opted to go to Shemshak which is meant to have better skiing but fewer runs. We stayed at the hotel Shemshak which is right in the slopes. We were the only guests there.
The night we arrived a huge dump of snow came down. Fresh tracks all morning and long into the day, there were so few people around using the resort, never queued for a lift. There wasn’t any big gondola or anything, just three chairlifts and a button lift but we were both more than happy to take the same runs with the conditions being what they were.

  
At the end of the day we met an Iranian guy at the bottom of the run as we sat outside the hotel. He told us about the resort, the other foreigners he had met and taken here and the apparently raucous behind closed doors party’s that go on out of reach of the morality police. He even informed us that the Shemshak hotel was the hotel that the Shah stayed in back in the day and used to have a discotheque.
After two days we hitchhiked back down to Tehran, the city is only a one hour drive from Shemshak. Crashed with Roham for one more night then left the city. We made sure to pass by Bobby Sands street before we left, or Babi Sandz as they spell it. The story goes that after the revolution the Iranian government renamed the street the British embassy was located on from Winston Churchill street to Babi Sandz street. In response the Brits bricked up the entrance and broke down the wall on the adjourning street so they wouldn’t have to be faced with the shame of such an address.

   
 Of course it took ages to get out of the city and it we were still riding through urban sprawl by almost dark. We spotted what looked like a large walled off wooded area and soon arrived at a huge gateway guarded by army guys. They all seemed friendly so we asked if we could come into this, what seemed to be, a park to camp. They all laughed and waved us through saying ‘Yes, yes you can camp with Imam Khomeini’. We were a bit confused by this but it was almost dark so we went ahead.

  
It was a huge park with what was pretty much a highway running through it, though that was devoid of traffic. We couldn’t see to the end of it in any direction. Soon we noticed there were graves, and lots of them lining most of the walkways that we could see. We eventually came across a grassy area next to an old climbing frame that looked suitable. We set up the tent, then got out the guidebook to confirm a suspicion that had arisen. What we though was right, we were camping in the complex of the Shrine of Imam Khomeini and the cemetery for the martyrs of the Iran – Iraq war. Well, at least it was quiet.

  

Our plan was to ride first to the ski resort north of Tehran for a halfway break skiing in Shemshak and avoid going into Tehran until after this. Surprisingly wisely for us we decided to swing by the computer shop I went to last night so we could call up the resort. Just to make sure it was open, it had been clear and sunny since we left Tabriz and from where we were standing there didn’t look to be much snow on those mountains on the horizon.
When I retuned of the shop with Finn the guy that ran it was delighted to see us. He beckoned us over to his computer and pointed at the screen. “See!” He said “Ireland!” He had been looking up Ireland in Farsi on Wikipedia since I left.
It was lucky we called up the resort, nothing was open and so we had to abandon that plan and instead head straight for Tehran.

  
From Hastgerd we rode through countryside for bit less than an hour until we were in city. Karaj, a satellite city to Tehran I suppose, has pretty much merged with the capital so all day we were in city. 
The riding was almost entity on freeways so the traffic wasn’t an issue until we started to get to the center of Tehran. On our way in we had a whole load of cars and pedestrians wave and say hello, one guy even bought us a an energy drink each while we were stopped looking at the map. We had a dude in a van pull over in the merging island on a busy expressway to chat to us.

  
We got into a center of Tehran, the city is so huge it takes ages to get anywhere even with the expressways. I guess there is a City Center but there’s also a bunch of neighbourhoods and districts that break the city up too. It was certainly the biggest city we had been to since Istanbul, though cycling into it had been a lot calmer and easier.

  
As with most cities in Iran and Asia in general all of one type of good or service were grouped on the same street. So you’d have cooking appliance street, electronic apparatus street etc. We found ourselves stopped at cafe street. We sat in one for some time mooching wifi trying to find somewhere to stay.
Given our change of plans we couldn’t stay with a host on Couchsurfing or Warm Showers right away, but we found a nice hostel, 7 Hostel, to crash at in the end. It was a surprisingly long day of cycling in the end so we wound up heading straight to bed wrecked.

Taking the day off for Christmas had been a welcome break but it was time to get back on the bikes. We loaded up and started to head out of the city.

From outside Qazvin the urban sprawl started almost right away. Riding on the highway towards Tehran we passed by apartment blocks, factories, other complexes and towns of varying size almost constantly.  

 
The riding wasnt particularly pretty or eventful. We were able to make good time thanks to a strong tailwind, but the wide flat scrubland that lay either side of the road didn’t make for very interesting views. There on the horizon were the peaks of the Alborz mountains, at the foot of this range the northern limits of Tehran were supposed to reach.

 

 
  

But we were still a day away from Tehran so we rode through the traffic and the dust. Stopped for a quick lunch at a rest stop and then on to Hastgerd, or rather the outskirts of it. The countryside was so built up it was hard to find somewhere to camp and eventually we settled for a small group of trees between fields. 

  
I rode into Hastgerd to call up my dad on his birthday. Turned out it was a pretty big town and it took a while to find an Internet cafe. Eventually, after wandering around for quite a while and sunset come and gone I asked in a small computer shop if they knew somewhere to go. The kind guy that owned the place said there wasn’t any coffeenet nearby but I could use his wifi.
On the way back to camp I went to pick up come kebab and rice take away for dinner and ended up ordering six kebab meals instead of six individual kebabas. We weren’t hungry at dinner or breakfast anyway.

We spent Christmas Day in Qazvin but to our dismay most of the shops and restaurants in the city were closed. It was a Friday, Muslim day of rest, and Qazvin is apparently a reasonably religious city so most shops were closed. We were hoping to Skype home, but, all the coffeenets in town were closed so we just sort of wandered around for a bit.

We had a look at the old bazaar and went looking for the Armenian church but that had also closed down in recent years. Things started to look up in the afternoon, Finn found some movies on his hard drive so we had a relaxing afternoon getting a long overdue dose of western culture.

Heading out in the evening we ran into a local guy who was an English teacher. He wanted to have a bit of practice himself and offered to show us around a bit. This has happened so often now we sort of stopped appreciating just how hospitable the Iranians are. This was a lovely little pick me up for our kind of underwhelming Christmas thus far.