Qeshm, Bandar Abbas

The night before leaving Queshm it started to rain and rendered the roads on the island close to unpassable for my Lola but I made it to the harbour. Once arrived in Bandar Abbas the traffic came to a near halt due to flooding of the roads.
Refuelling diesel in Iran can be quite difficult, do you need a diesel card, for which you are not eligible as a tourist. So you rely on
a) diesel being available at a petrol station, which is not always the case. Particularly in areas close to borders to other countries diesel is scarce as they want to avoid the cheap Iranian diesel being smuggled out of the country.
b) either the petrol station having a fuel card or if they don’t have one, a truck driver giving you some of his diesel allocation
Now Bandar Abbas being close to the border, all the petrol stations I had driven past had long queues of trucks awaiting diesel delivery. Finally I drove into a petrol station that apparently had both: a diesel card i can use and diesel. As I was driving on my last drop, I was over the moon.
The attendant fills my tank. When he has topped it up to about 40l it occurs to me that this does not smell like diesel, so I ask him what he is refuelling with. And shock horror, there was a misunderstanding and instead of diesel he had filled in Petrol. Bugger!! One and a half hours later I had my tank emptied and refilled with diesel, and was ready to leave!
The next morning the ferry service to UAE was cancelled due to bad weather, and because my visa was to expire on that day I had to get an extension. Had I known, I could have spent a few more days relaxing on Qeshm.Read more