May 10th: As said we enjoyed the evening in the very nice Hotel in Tabriz. Good dinner! We checked before closing the day a very last time our problem tire and just hoped the tires will last until Van. We left at 6h30am as we did not know how long the procedure at the border will take ultimately. How by now we know that is not the only thing we did not know. Overnight there was heavy rain in Tabriz so the roads still had been wet and slippery.
Leaving Tabriz that early we did expect similar traffic then in the other Iranian cities before…. surprisingly no traffic at all …. maybe because of Friday or they all had a long night out😂. After 20min we left Tabriz behind us and went direction Bazargan the Iranien border city. We planned to reach Van including the border within 7h…. bad judgment. First mistake was that we underestimated how busy the road would be and how narrow the streets are. The second one was that we did not watch the police. Two weeks without a fine nothing happened not even when Matthias was driving. That changed today. Slow trucks are an obstacle or not? So if you get a chance you pass them right? So we did …. but in one area it was not allowed at all …. but we missed that. We just saw a tiny policeman jumping in his white dress in front of our car and stopped us. He was lucky that Martin was the driver he stopped in time. Not sure if Matthias would have reacted in the same way😜😃. The guy was fluent in Farsie ….. unfortunately we not. There we go. He drew on a piece of paper what we did wrong (come on we knew😊) and said it is a fine of 2 Mio Rial…20 Euro… Okish. However he wanted us to pay the money into an account in a bank today and than Martin would get his passport back somewhere. Now it got serious by no means that was accepted by us. Eventually we convinced him to call his boss to ask for permission to collect the money cash from us , give us the passport and pay himself the money into the bank account. He agreed and after 30 long minutes we went off…. is the money ever seeing the bank?😉
Guess what after that intermezzo we followed the rules on the road 200%. But if you think that was it for the day…. forget it. Reaching the border area we passed a queue of waiting truck that started approximately 6km before the border …. can you imagine? At the border the chaos started. We parked the car and went to the immigration counter and asked for the process. English is not really a language they speak there. The Iranian guys explained us that the owner had to do the export/import procedure and that I had to go as a pedestrian. Not a big deal so far. Look I had been around a bit in the world and I saw some borders but this one was a very new experience to say the least. On the Iranian side it was easy for me. They let me pass without any obstacle. The gate opened to the Turkish side and I went into a fully crowded passage in which people waited for the passport control from the Turkish customs. It was unbelievable loud and stinking…. you can not imagine. As the guys were scared their spot in the queue if they would need to go to the toilet they did the needful where they were….
At the customs end of the queue you need to visualize the following to understand how it was: imagine when cows are move in this very narrow gate to get their marks burned in… that is how the crowd moves into that narrow gate…. my luck: I was taller than 80% of the guys and moved as fast as possible throug. After an endless time and a very unfriendly customs officer I made it…. I was in Turkey. But where was Martin? He made into the Turkish section as well however he took it all…. unloading the entire car, drive for X-Ray somewhere…. and that with people not speaking your languages…. uff. It took ages and I can tell you already now our day was only done after nearly 11hs .
Finally we set together in the car and after an other 3 controls we went of to Van. Honestly I am not a scares person at all but crossing the border to Turkey I did neither felt welcome nor safe in that area. However maybe it is just that very specific location there.
After an other mountain pass of 2650m we went direct to Van. As you remember we had a problem tire so we organized via Dimitrios a new spare Tire. So we went to a tire dealer in Van. He was aware we would come…. so we got a perfect service and were treated very nice…. here you go a different impression. Now the car is again fully equipped and we can be relaxed on the the tire side. What kind of adventures are still ahead of us we do not know. Eventually we reached our hotel…. checked in dropped our luggage and and and?…… Yes we had a BEER….
