Sleep is for the weak, so after arriving late we woke up early - mainly to begin the work on the panda, and take advantage of the hotels facilities. Real porcelain thrones vanished in Turkey, so needless to say there was a quite a queue. After washing in the hotel toilets, well the sink in the hotel toilets, I came back to find Po was still motionless in the middle of the road but a professional mechanic had arrived. A few hours and watermelons later we, well the other teams, were finally ready to set off - even if half the convoy had abandoned us already.

As the 4 (out of 10) of us made our way towards the Caspian Sea, we were making good progress when we pulled over to find our convoy was half the size it should have been with two teams missing. It seems Po had broken down again. The Swedish brothers had stayed with the British couple and their broken car to try to bodge the distributor, while we sat confused by the roadside. We quickly got bored and our guide had suggested we go to some local hot springs, which would only cause a minor detour up into the hills, so she was dropped off at the broken car to translate - I'm not entirely sure if anyone checked if she suggested the hot springs because she wanted to go herself first.

 

We left the broken car behind and made our way to the hot springs. After an hour or two we arrived in the town where the hot springs were supposed to be, but all we found was a traffic jam through the town.

 

I think Iranians don't see too many westerners in oddly coloured cars outside of the main cities, because we seem to be getting alot of attention. Most cars that pass on the road honk their horns, we turn to find them full of happy waving people. Honking, smiling and waving back leads to a car full of even happier people waving. As most people over take on the left, the passenger has been nominated the waver while the driver is the honker; this works on the motorway, but doesn't in a traffic jam. Every car and pedestrian wanted to chat and say hello as we slowly made progress to the other side of town, and then continued the slow progress back again after not seeing any hot springs.

 

Heavy traffic continued all the way to the Caspian sea as we followed a road close to Azerbaijan border, and since the traffic continued so did the waving. I waved to men, women, children, dogs, cats, trees, the road - basically it would have been easier to just constantly wave. As the road curved down the mountain and the day turned to night, a few locals decided to take a short cut down the dusty verge. "When in Rome", so we shot down the hard shoulder past the armed men at the border - smile and wave and kept on going. We were finally down by the Caspian, but still needed to get to the campsite a few hours away because blissfully unaware we had taken the scenic route.

An hour of manic midnight driving later, we decided to stop for some food in a village. As soon as we parked up we were approached by a few men, all interested to know why we were there and if we needed anything. They suggested a kebab from the stall across the street and followed to help us buy some. The 5 of us (me, Chris, and 3 from the other car)  sat at midnight in a small village eating a lamb kebab, while trying to communicate to people with interpretive dance. One family with a young girl who spoke excellent English invited us to join them for dinner and stay at their home for night - unfortunately we had to get to the campsite to meet the other teams on the convoy, and had to decline. Back on the road the traffic quite at 1a.m. So I put my foot down and we got to the Eco-park at 3a.m. We would have been quicker if we weren't led by a tall man and a young child walking us the last 500m like small lost children.