As fast as possible - Turkey again

We'd done 36 hour bus marathon from Bandar Abbas through Shiraz and Tehran to Tabriz. There we met with our friend Payam and his wonderful family. They were so nice to us that we felt they're our family as well. We spent the night in their flat and in the morning continued to Turkey. Payam took us with his car to the end of Tabriz and we hitchhiked from there.

Our drivers were very kind, they even took us further then they'd supposed to go and turned back after that. I'm not even talking about sharing food or drinks, we so got used to it ;) Then we walked a bit to the border crossing (almost everyone was surprised that we didn't take a taxi and some workers were joking about taking us with cement mixer car :) We left Iran on September 18th 2010.


When we arrived in Turkey I happily took off my scarf. Well, I have to admit it was tiring after some time. From the border we hitchhiked to Igdir (we did whatever we could to avoid Agri). We stopped a member of local city council and he arranged us accommodation in a teachers' house. We met three girls who were teachers there and we had some tea with them. 

In the morning, after watching celebration of a national holiday, we continued North. I was amazed and surprised how different it was from every image of Turkey i had in my head. It looked rather like central Slovakia or Romania, mountains were covered with trees, it was so green everywhere. Totally impressive.

Tabriz - the friendly city

After getting off in the city center we understood that taxi drivers are the same everywhere. We went around one crossroad twice and would go once more if we didn't protest. We were thirsty, so we went to a shop to buy some water. The price didn't seem right, so Tony asked random guys about the price. We found out that we got "tourist rate", higher than normally. What we didn't know yet, was that we'd just met really good friends. There were Babak and Payam. They invited us for tea near the Blue Mosque and we talked a bit. We also decided that it was a good place for Couchsurfing meeting.

That night we slept on a camp site but we didn't want to rent a tent and we just slept on the ground, a girl between two guys.

In the morning, a man watering the grass woke us up and told us to move. Then Payam and his friend showed up and took us for a ride around the city, helped us exchanging money and took us to an Internet cafe, where we send message to local CS community to come for the meeting.

After that we spend some time in a park with our new friends. We were talking and playing chess.

When the night was falling, Payam's mother came with a meal she cooked especially for us. It turned out, they lived nearby.

Before we realized it, we were late for the meeting we organized! We speeded to the Blue Mosque with Payam and his friend and were amazed by a number of people awaiting us.

During the meeting we found out that it was the very first Couchsurfing meeting in Tabriz and some people who joined us didn't even know what was Couchsurfing! They were just random people who wanted to talk.

That night we stayed at Amir's house and we talked till 4am. Funny thing, he was in Poland once :)

For the next day we arranged a trip to Kandovan.