J82 – 3/9/2006

What a night ! The wind started blowing in gusts around midnight, waking the whole team, who thought it was at high sea the way the vehicles were pitching around.  Luckily Joël didn’t fly away in his tent and in the camper we were almost sea sick.  So the night was rather agitated and Serge spent quite some time worrying about the coming day of running.

Up at 6H00, the weather seemed to have calmed down, in spite of occasional rain and gusts of wind.  Serge left for a long day.  At the end of the morning, the wind came up again and got stronger, blowing at more than 100 kilometers per hour.  It was impossible to stand up straight in the face of it.  Serge bent to a 15degree angle between torso and legs.  The struggle exhausted him physically and morally

At kilometer 56 Serge took his knapsack with his food, a cell phone and his passport.  The vehicles went ahead to the border in order to go through all the administrative formalities.  We anticipated it would take us 2 to 3 hours and that we would wait for Serge on the Iranian side.

It took us three good hours and we didn’t have much trouble.  The longest part was filling in all the papers to get the vehicles through customs into Iran.  We didn’t bring a stock of beer for fear the vehicles would be searched by customs.  They weren’t so it was too bad we didn’t.

We passed into another time zone, which strangely is +1H30, so we are now 2H30 ahead of France.  Noon for you is 14H30 for us.

Serge finally arrived as night fell.  It was 18H45, he was soaked and frozen because he had been blocked between the two fences for five minutes. A violent storm broke before he reached the border and he arrived wet to the bone.  He didn’t have time to savor  his arrival in Iran and went immediately to the camper to change. Two layers of clothing and two pairs of socks weren’t enough to warm him up.  He lay on the bunk wrapped in the duvet for the time it took us to get into the center of Bazargan, two kilometers from the border.  We had two more police check points to go through.

Tonight, contrary to our habit, we went to bed at 22H00, local time. Because it looked like the night would be noisy in the small, overheated hotel we had found, Serge and I went back to the camper, where we had a short night.

We look forward to tomorrow, when we will get some rest and, most important of all, will pass the 6000 kilometer mark !