After yesterday crossing the boarder and realising we could not access our bank accounts we needed to work out what to do next……. Time for a meeting!

When undertaking adventures such as ours, relationships are very important and in this case I was fortunate to have my Iranian work friend Milad Shahraiary back in Sydney and along with my wife (Kathy) who worked quickly to have funds transferred over to Milad’s parents in Tehran. After a few emails we had it sorted (big thanks to all involved).

So we had enough US$’s that we could exchange to get us comfortably by until we made Tehran and met up with Milad’s family, so we were underway and off in the direction of Tabriz.

The riding down to Tabriz (300km) was straight forward with passing over 2000m altitude at one point and spending most of the day above 1600m.

Just after lunch we made our way through Tabriz at which point while we were stationary in a manic traffic jam, I was hit by a car and knocked off my bike falling into the side of another car damaging the car door. At this point the Iranian driver received a lesson in French from me as I was dumbfounded by the irational behaviour of the drivers. Iranian drivers were clearly proving to be the most dangerous we had experienced so far on our Mad Ride

Luckily I was not injured and the bike was ok, we left the other drivers to sort out the damage to the car and were more wary from that point on. We pushed on to Sarein on our way towards the Caspian Sea.

Sarien is a popular holiday destination for Iranians due the natural hot volcanic springs that are in the area that we are “told” have therapeutic properties.

Due to the large number of visitors at the time a local car park was opened up as a camping ground which is where we ended up for the night.