Day 10: Heading towards Isfahan

Bad awakening for Lucie

Just like the night before, we spent the night in a public park, me in my tent and Lucie simply without a tent and close to her bike. To our surprise, the next morning one of the panniers of Lucie’s bike was missing. The bike was maybe 3 meters away from her, but that was obviously far enough for someone to steal it. Luckily, there was only food in the bag. But for the future trip, the pannier has to be replaced.

Leaving Yazd

Due to the theft we left Yazd only 1 hour later, shortly after 8:00. We wanted to start early because today the whole trip went through the desert and temperatures will get very warm towards noon.

The landscape was quite monotonous. Basically, it was a straight road with sand and rocks on both sides. I guess that one road was straight for at least 30 km, which is not very motivating because you always see the whole road ahead and it seems that you barely make progress. At least a gentle tail wind accompanied us, however not comparable to the tail wind that supported us on the way to Yazd.

Lunch with local family

After 65 km of desert, there was the first village coming up with a campground. So we decided to stop here and eat our picnic. Today was however also an Iranian holiday, and the whole park was full of families having lunch together. It was only a matter of time until we got invited to one of the families and had a full lunch with them. Completely fed we left the campground around 1.5 hours later.

Fighting against the storm

While having lunch, the westerly head winds got very strong. Instead of in average 20 km/h we advanced only with half the speed for the next two hours. The dry air of the storm also made us lose a lot of water, so we decided after 85 km to go to a local village to get more water and relax from the tedious ride against the storm.

Dinner in local house

Also here it took only a few minutes until a family in a white car stopped next to us and invited us to their home for relaxing, showering and dinner. And because we were totally exhausted anyway, we accepted their offer. I was especially looking forward to showering because the two nights before in the park in Yazd there were no shower facilities and I was full of sun cream, sweat and sand from the storm.

Tomorrow we really want to head out early towards Isfahan because the strong winds normally come back around noon, so we want to cycle as many kilometers as possible.