Another day blown along by the wind. Today was the finale of this leg of the trip. We cycled along the freeways entering Tehran, and then through the ‘push through or be flattened’ traffic to our lovely host’s place. Time for visa shopping and a rest.
Tehran
Visa shopping in Iran.
I need a visa for Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. We spent days haggling with taxis to take us from one embassy to the next. We walked miles finding printing shops near the embassies to print out application forms – some in colour as required by the Turkmenistan officials. (We could have done the printing the evening before, but we still hadn’t filled out the forms – not well organized, I guess.) I was helped by a businessman who took me back to his office to print out some documents. A manager of an English language school also printed out some documents for us, and took us to a colour printing shop in the bowels of the earth, with signs heralding its appearance only in farsi. We visited the German embassy for various documents of invitation required by several embassies. I went through a repeat process of reactivating my Iranian SIM card – a 2 hour process of ringing hotlines, printing, signing and fingerprinting documents. After 3 days I collapsed. I needed a rest. Now its just a waiting game for the embassies to process my applications. Now I can sleep!
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