The last outpost

Bright and early we were on the road to Erzurum, a city of 369,000 at some 1,800 m altitude. Our first priority was to locate the Iranian consulate, which we managed within about an hour. Charlie went in and gave the verification code he'd pre-arranged with Touranzamin to obtain his Iranian visa, and was told by the consulate staff that he could pay €150 for a same day service, or wait 4 days and pay €100 as I had paid in İstanbul for a next day service. Charmed Charlie somehow managed to get this unexpected wait reduced to the afternoon two days later, meaning we could still depart the day we'd planned, albeit later than we'd intended.

Next we found a hotel with the help of some local students we bumped into in the street. We haggled a bit and eventually got a very good price, and were allowed to keep the bikes in the vestibule outside our room. To my delight we had a Lavaş bakery directly below our hotel, baking lavaş all day long, as I had in İstanbul. We took some time to take advantage of the selection of food on offer and then set about the work of preparing for the next leg...

Spending the afternoon and evening exploring a bit, I really started to feel that my Turkish was becoming useful in my encounters whilst going about my business. While still pretty poor at conjugation, my vocabulary has grown fairly steadily since İstanbul, thanks to a lot of study and lots of conversations over cups of çay, etc.
 
Charlie and I both had blogs to write, repairs to make to clothing and tents, laundry, things to buy, punctures, etc and so didn't have much time to kick back and relax. We still managed to do some walking around the city centre in the evening, both of us enjoying the simple act of walking in the crisp air of this high-altitude city, and having a beer to celebrate a couple of nights in the city and out of the tents!

We returned to the hotel, and would have made a funny sight, both of us with sewing needle in hand mending various things. My own repairs occupied me until nearly midnight, and a scant few hours later I awoke to the sound of the pre-dawn muezzin, which was very loud from our hotel room and continued for nearly 10 minutes! Still, on balance I think I enjoyed the novelty of not waking in a wet tent for a couple of days.
 
A while later we ate a breakfast of lavaş and fruit, and I stayed in the hotel to wash my clothes and seal some of the seams of my tent which had been slightly leaky on a couple of occasions, under heavy rain.  With my knowledge of Iran's topography, it was time to dump some more ballast and so I set about sorting through my stuff to decide which things could be posted back to NZ or dumped.

We went out and found a bike shop we'd been told about by the very helpful owner of another bike shop, and although they had 700C inner tubes, they didn't have Presta valves, only Schraeder, meaning I'd have needed to drill out my rims for the wider valves. I decided to proceed on the five inner tubes I already have instead, armed with several puncture repair kits and about 60 patches.

Then I went to the post office, or rather, erroneously, an administrative office of the Turkish Post, which was not open to the public. I went in to ask for directions to the public office, and the guards took me upstairs. A few of the staff enjoyed practising their English with me and and then a telephone call was made to the public branch and a car ride arranged for me with some other staff leaving the building. During the car journey a mobile phone was handed to me by the driver and I tried to converse with the man at the other end in broken Turkish, the other passengers laughing at the results of our language impasse. At the post office main branch, a Jandarma in camouflage garb struck up a conversation with me and then led me to the public cargo office, where I could send my package for a cheaper price. Once again, the friendliness and hospitality of the Turkish people astonished me and exceeded my expectations.