Frontier towns

I woke very early in the morning and simply couldn't get back to sleep. There was the excitement of approaching Iran and also the question of which country I would go into after Iran to occupy my mind.

We got breakfast underway at 6 a.m. then packed up and got underway - early starts are pretty vital now with the days being so short. We quickly made the distance to the town of Agri (Ararat), where groups of young stone-throwing Turkish kids lined the highway being reconstructed with convenient piles of large rocks. We escaped their throws using a mixture of pre-emptive intimidation and evasive maneuvers, and rode onwards to what would be our last mountain pass of Turkey. Somewhere along the way, the long-awaited (for me, at least), majestic and snowy Mount Ararat came into view in all its massive splendour. I thought someone had told me we'd be able to see it from Erzurum on a clear day, so had been calling Ararat multiple times a day since leaving there, to the amusement of my companions.

Just before the pass, Leigh and Charlie managed to grab the back of a truck pulling away and so arrived at the top of the pass 10 minutes before me, where I found them chatting to some soldiers on my arrival.

On the other side, the air was much drier, and even the sun seemed hotter than it had been further west. We had lunch in a parched field and then made ourselves a peloton of 3 cyclists, using our slipstreams to keep our speed above 30 km/h all the way to Dogubayazit despite a strong headwind.

On arrival we sought cash machines and supplies, dodging the stone-throwing kids around the entrance to the town, and becoming quite frustrated with the other very young kids surrounding us and demanding money constantly. It was all pretty much harmless, although if any of the rocks they threw had connected it might have left a bruise or worse.

On the way out of town we were attacked again by some of the town's children, one of them wielding a sapling which he managed to lightly hit Leigh with (missing the spokes, thankfully) and to brush over my back as I swerved. Soon we were out of their range and took our time to admire the sunset and the nearing Mount Ararat.

We stopped for water at a freight depot and were invited in for tea and snacks, the usual Turkish hospitality a welcome return for us. Leaving at dusk we soon found a camping spot directly in front of Mount Ararat on an unsealed road. I was a bit wary of our proximity to the road and lack of cover, but there seemed to be little traffic...  until we got the tents up! The 4th or 5th car actually stopped for a while and looked at us before setting off again and then we all agreed to move to a more sheltered spot, which turned out to be less than 500 m away anyway.