Today we headed south with the plan that over the next 2 or 3 days we would make it to the desert town of Kerman. So as the day progressed the landscape dried out, and the temperature increased. We had company on our travels. We shared part of todays journey with the Seabridge-tours but about lunch time they turned more directly west while we contnued south. We also had the company of many long distance trucks.

The noteworthy event of the day took place in the town of Gonobad. As now seems to be the norm at the main entrance to the town we were confronted by a no-trucks sign and so from our GPS map we found another way that seemed to be ok and would eventually get us back onto the correct exit route. However at one roundabout our way was blocked by a couple of police cars, so we started exploring alternatives. After a few minutes a police car waved us over and 2 men one in police uniform and another in a soldiers uniform came up to us and wanted to look at our passports. That seemed all ok and they lead us back to that round about, got the police cars moved and (we thought) pointed us towards the way out of town. But then they told us (with hand signals) to wait. In short order a man in plain cloths turned up and inspected our passports and managed to convey to us that he wanted to get copies of our passports. After a brief hand signal discussion I made it clear that, if our passports were going anywhere, I was going with them. So the two uniformed men, the plain clothes man, me and the passports got into the squad car and raced through town to the local army office where photocopies of the passports were made. Back into the squad car we returned to the roundabout where another plain clothes man inspected the passports and copies. Then back to our truck and the episode was over.

I don't really know what it was all about but here is my deduction. The street we wanted to enter was closed at the roundabout for some kind of religous event (it could have been simply Friday prayers but the crowd seemed bigger than that). The plain clothes guys that were in among the police and soldiers at the round about (I suspect) were security officers. When they saw a strange looking foreign truck driving around while a large crowd of people were present they got curious/suspicious. Hence they wanted to know who we were.


Late in the day we found a nice flat patch of desert dirt 30 yards off the highway and pulled over for the night.