Today was Anna's birthday!

Today was Anna’s birthday! To celebrate it - and to make the most of our last few days in Iran - we embarked on a big tour (by car with a driver). About 550km 🛣 and 4 highlights:
- The mountain village of Kandovan, where houses and shelters for sheep are carved into the mountainside. The houses look a bit like the hats of the smurfs (but they are not white). We met a lot of shepherds and their animals.
- The Armenian monastery of St. Stephanos, a christian orthodox church/monastery that is nicely settled into the mountainside ⛪️
- The Araz River Valley and the border stretch between Iran on one side and Armenia/Azerbaijan on the other side. The valley is enormously beautiful, plus quite an attractive change to the desert lands of central and southern Iran. The valley also still bears the scars from the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia that began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and lasted until 1994. We saw a number of train-wrecks, abandoned villages and military observation points everywhere. Travelling on the southern (Iranian) side of the river - where we were driving - was, however, easy and without problems.
- Babak Castle, a 9th century fortress of which some ruins still remain. 🏰 To visit the castle, we would have to hike up for about 1 hour. We were quite disillusioned when we started the hike, as there was fog and clouds everywhere and one could hardly see 10 metres. However, as we climbed up the mountain, we actually climbed higher than the surrounding clouds and were rewarded with amazing views down on top of the clouds 😊

By the time we got back to the car it was already 7:30pm. The original plan was to drive to Ardabil, but this would have been another 4 hours. We were too exhausted and we didn’t want our driver to have to drive so long (+in the dark), so we got off at Ahar and left our Catalonian friend Martí and the driver to go back to Tabriz. We found a hotel and quickly realised that Ahar is not a city that’s on most tourist itineraries: the hotel manager speaks no English whatsoever and the check-in forms one has to fill in are also entirely in Farsi.

To finish the day, we went for a meal that turned out to maybe have been the cheapest meal of our entire world trip: two beer (non-alcoholic AND with pineapple and lemon taste, respectively = no beer) and two falafel sandwiches for about 1.33 EUR. Cheapest birthday meal ever 😉Read more