The next, and penultimate, leg of our Iran journey is to the village of Astara at the very northern end of Irans Caspian Sea coast. Our guide Hossein R (the one who oranized the vehicle entry to Iran) lives there and he has invited us to spend a night with him before we make the trek together to Bazargan and the Turkish border. We are to meet Hossein at Astara on Sunday night so we have two days to get to and explore a bit of the Caspian Sea coast.

We made the mistake of a very early start again this morning, why a mistake. Well much of todays route took us directly east into the morning sun. So for the first hour of so on the road we were dodging gravel trucks that appeared out of the sun and demanded their (and maybe some of our) side of the road.

From last nights camp to the city of Zanjan the terrain was much more mountainous and we gave the gears and engine brake a real workout. Along the way we saw not only more farm land but also a number of very large scale stone quarries and consequently many many trucks carrying large pieces of white stone. We also saw a number of those pieces of white stone beside the road where, presumably, they were dropped by a truck as a result of breakdown or accident. We also got a chance to experience some of the lesser qualiity Iranian roads.

We joined the "main" road between Tehran and the Turkish border at the city of Zanjan this afernoon and followed it towards Tehran for a little way before turning north towards the Caspian coast. There after we spent the remainder of the day climbing up into one of the two mountain ranges that border the Caspian.


We found a large informal camping area, flat area well off the road, and settled in for the night.