We slept at a filling station/restaurant/lorry park on the outskirts of Erzerum last night after passing through some spectacular mountain scenery between Bojnurd and Erzerum, where we drove above the clouds and above deposits of snow in mountain gullies. We had a splendid dinner at the lorry drivers restaurant: I had a beef stew and salad plus a pudding which tasted like a cross between ground rice pudding and yogurt which had been baked, and Jennifer had a chicken stew and salad. All for a total £8.
Driving into Erzurum today we picked up a young student, Sayeed, on his way to the Ataturk University, then found a Vodaphone shop to see whether Jennifer’s ipad could be repaired. It hadn’t been charging and a most pleasant man tested it and identified a fault in the wire. We bought a new one and the ipad is now working fine.
At the next town of Pasinler, which I remembered well from the early 70s, we stopped at a small supermarket to buy some bread and the very friendly owner invited us to have dinner with him. We had a most delicious meal of boiled chicken and couscous cooked by his charming wife, and we met his father and friends who came to meet us.
The road to Horasan has been upgraded from a two-lane gravel road full of potholes to a tarmacced four-lane motorway since I last drove on it, and I was saddenned to see that it now goes round a mountain; in the early 70’s it went right over the top after a dozen hairpin bends to a caravanserai where drivers from a dozen countries would stop. All the towns have had mssive increases in population (Dogubayazit used to be a small town of 2-3,000 people but now has 79,300) and most of the tiny roadside villages have disappeared. You no longer see roadside kebab-sellers which is a shame because they were delicious.
We drove to the border with Iran, turned round and pulled into a massive lorry park to spend the night.
