Peking to Paris in Turkey: Thoughts on the ‘Stans
I’ve just had a text from Hayden, which can only mean that the boys are now in Turkey, and possibly enjoying a tipple. My money’s on red wine for the Aussie.
 
Checking the Skytag site, they are indeed in Turkey, en route to Erzurum and having just clocked up 10,600 kilometres in total so far, with 3,800 left to go. The duo seem to be in convoy with Chuck and Lloyd in the 1949 Cadillac. Other cars we are tracking are not yet popping up on the satellite site, so must still be clearing the border.
The main rally site reports that Iran was enjoyable, so I’m looking forward to hearing what our boys have to say on the experience. The photo above shows them running through the first section of Turkmenistan/Iran “No Man’s Land”. The pic below shows their emergency road-welded rear arms versus the arms that Alan at The Stables had reinforced and sent out on the same day.
Blog reports elsewhere say the rally weathered a bit of a storm by the Caspian Sea, which cleared while crossing the mountains en route to Tabriz. Coming through the 2,800 metre mountain pass was ‘like running through Switzerland’, with acres of pine forests flourishing in the cool damp mountain climate. As the altitude fell away, the temperatures climbed and the landscape soon dried out into desert again.
Timed events have been cancelled on the last two days, once for exhaustion and once for fog, so Hayden’s prediction that it would finish as it was on the entry to Iran looks more prudent by the day. On the upside, friend of Team Lola Racing, Garrick Staples in his #106 Beetle has fixed a broken crank and is back with the rally, and the Aston duo have managed to repair a clutch problem, meaning the car is still in the hunt.
Hayden’s text is a summary of his thoughts on the ‘Stans they spent two weeks driving through. Here you go:
Misunderstanding the ‘Stans.
As we pulled out of Turkmenistan and waited in the arrivals hall to Iran, I had time to consider what I did not know about the three ‘Stans and how little my expectations could have been met by what I saw through the windscreen.
In general, Uzbekistan appeared to have the most universal level of development and visitworthiness: Tashkent and Samarkand being cities I would visit again as a tourist.
Kazakhstan had some beautiful scenery, but horrible roads. Turkmenistan was really a flat desert, roads were not as bad as Kazakhstan, but not much to see until we headed into the mountains dividing Iran from Turkmenistan, which give me great hope for Iran. This spectacular mountain divide – about 2000m through the pass – was the first of several we are scheduled to encounter in Iran.
Apparently, the wealth in both Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is in the oil and minerals, so quite invisible during our travels across the rural areas of these nations. Uzbekistan has a more clearly developed rural infrastructure, with commercialised farming and many neat smallholdings and lots of cotton fields. Some small irrigated sections of Turkmenistan supported corn, and a vast but broken aqueduct system was on display in Kazakh, clearly left over from the days of the USSR.
