Bingo. Persistence Pays

At lunch­time today I skipped mer­rily forth from the steel-fenced com­pound hous­ing the Ira­nian Embassy here in Yerevan. After paus­ing briefly in the middle of the road in order to frolic, I galav­anted with glee and chortled with mirth as I biked my jolly way home, car­ry­ing in my sweaty palm a pass­port con­tain­ing a visa to visit Iran.

I’m going to Iran… after all the wait­ing, red tape, pay­ments and delays, it’s finally going to happen!

In cel­eb­ra­tion, I painted my bike orange and green. I can feel the immin­ence of my depar­ture… the days are passing more slowly than ever… soon I’ll be in motion again, facing the unknown, start­ing a whole new chapter of my life. Bring it on.

Iran is a des­tin­a­tion that I’ve been sal­iv­at­ing over since long before I began to Ride the Earth. Widely cited as the coun­try in the world the friend­li­est and most hos­pit­able towards cycle-tourists, I find it dif­fi­cult to ima­gine that Tur­key and the Cau­casus could be rivalled in this regard. Not only that, but this part of the world gave rise to advanced civil­iz­a­tion long before Europe and the mod­ern West achieved modern-day pre­val­ence — a hum­bling thought indeed for the West­ern trav­el­ler. But I’ll leave my judge­ments until I’m there myself.

There’s another reason I’m drawn to the place. Tenny was born in Tehran. As a child, she lived through the 8-year-long First Gulf War between Iraq and Iran, dur­ing which the fam­ily slept under the din­ing table, ran their home’s light­ing off a car bat­tery, and had only plastic sheet­ing to fill their bomb-shattered win­dow frames. It sounds like the Blitz (ask your gran).

Her fam­ily still live there today. I’ll be vis­it­ing their home in the cap­ital to see what life there is like today, before we travel onward through the Middle East. I hope to be pro­gress­ing well into Africa by the end of the year — the pro­spect of another winter at –30C is not one that appeals to me right now.

In the future, with slightly bet­ter pre­par­a­tion, I’d love to tackle another winter ride. Right now, how­ever, I’m feel­ing remark­ably happy with the idea of 50C and deep sand in the Sudan…