The Gulf

Once moving south, the weather became warmer and the landscape greener. How pleasant everything looks, once it has the green tinge. It was so beautiful hadn’t I seen green for so many months!
Finally, I reached the Persian Gulf. The last few days of my visa I decided to spend on Qeshm, an island in the Gulf. Weather conditions like in Port Hedland, that means a pleasant warmth this time of the year, sweet after these last cold months.
On Qeshm I have chosen one of the many wild camping spots on my overlander app and I could not believe to meet Boris and Leah from Switzerland here who I happened to meet on and off and always unplanned since Uzbekistan, and a German couple Louis and his girlfriend who I had met in Shiraz. So much for coincidence!
It was nice to spend 3 days with them and some Iranians here on the beach, talking, eating and taking walks together until it was time for me to leave to Bandar Abbas to catch the ferry to the Emirates.
In the night before leaving I started to rain and the roads on Qeshm were close to unpassable for my car but I made it off the island. 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, which you cannot get 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 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 in Bandar Abbas I drove into a petrol station that apparently had both: a diesel card and diesel. As I was driving on my last drop, I was over the moon.
He fills my tank, and at about 40l it occurs to me that this does not smell like diesel, so I ask him. 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