No visas for India today, so we won’t be crossing into Pakistan with Claire and Emiel on the 17th as we’d hoped.
The one glimmer of hope is that the Embassy did say they would issue visas on the 19th and we will make use of that, and in the meantime we will continue our stalled exploration of Iran for a while then return to Tehran for the visas.
On a brighter note we attended the Iranian Police Office for Foriegn Aliens again this morning at 08:00am – courteous, efficient service and sixty minutes later we walked out with 2.5 week extensions to our visas when we had only asked for two weeks – now that’s the way a country can make international travellers feel welcome.
As an aside, when Karen and I were sitting in the office of the Special Security boss yesterday whilst he sorted out our visa extension request with Milad the young soldier sitting alongside us – I mentioned how much we loved visiting Iran and how friendly and genuine and generous Iranians are, and Mila replied somewhat despondently that “No one loves Iranians” – this seems to be a common sentiment amongst the people we’ve chatted with, and it’s sad as Iranians are truly the friendliest people we’ve met on this trip.
