We were in the middle of the Iranian desert, between Bu’in and Saveh. We had just spent two nights staying with some lovely Iranian families who invited us into their house. Freddie had even scored a new pair of fancy shoes as one the families were in the shoe making business!||

Earlier in the day we had been ordered by the police to get a lift in a pickup truck to a junction  some 25km away. The route had been deemed too dangerous to cycle on, which was true, but the police did not understand that we were actually cycling on a dirt track next to the main road. We guess that an incident would have also meant a lot of paper work for police… Secretly we were happy as we had already cycled 70km on dirt at 10km/hr and were fed up.

As there was only flat desert around us, with no shelter, we ended up camping in a highway underpass below the road that night. Quite a descent from our previous nights of sleeping on Persian rugs.