It was raining heavily this morning and that encouraged us to get an early start. Though to be honest we are struggling a bit with the time zone thing. There is a 1 and 1/2 hour difference between Turkey's official time and Irans (Iran is in advance of Turkey) and Turkey's time zone is dictated by Istanbul which is a long way west of where we are. The upshot of this is that the sun is down and it is dark by 4:00pm. So it feels more natural to keep to Iran's timezone, and that is encouraged as with the now short days we need to use all the daylight hours profitably.

So anyway, today was a driving day. Eventually we got to and through the town of Van (on Lake Van). There was a good deal of traffic in Van and we had a good opportunity to observe that Turkish drivers are much more civilized than Iran's. They actually wait for lights to go green, don't force their way onto the road way. All in all the traffic has been a pleasant surprise. So have the roads. Good 4 lane highways most of the time.

Winter was in evidence all over the place today. More snow on the peaks and rain all day as we followed beside the lake and then headed out into more bare mountain farming land.

Twice today we were waved over by police patrols armed with automatic weapons but as we got closer and they saw we were tourists they changed their minds and waved us on.

We saw a number of the smaller models of Unimogs today, some in army green parked in wire enclosed areas that were evidently army establishments of some kind. But also a few painted that bright highway orange being used by town governments as work vehicles.


As the day wound to a close we were a little short of the town of Bingol and found one of our favourite camping spots, a gravel pit.