Without dwelling on the process as it’s the result that counts – Karen and I gratefully received our tourist visas for India this afternoon from Faranak – the kind lady at the Indian Embassy here in Tehran who assisted us during one of our earlier visits.
The visas include the magical words “60 days stay to travel by road from Attari Wagha land border into India on motorcycle.” It doesn’t get any better than that folks !!!
Back-tracking to the morning, Karen and I started our day with a quick breakfast at our hotel before jumping into a taxi and scooting to the Indian Embassy, arriving just before 09:00am. Karen was able to hand over our passports around 10:00am, and we spent the rest of the morning scrounging up some rations (granita biscuits and baked beans) as we may need them during our upcoming rides over the next week or so.
In the afternoon Karen set to work updating our trip notes – she is maintaining a detailed log of where and when we’ve been places – and I pottered around with some packing – I’ve moved our 2 x 1L water bottles inside my pannier as when they’ve been strapped to the outside of the pannier the water has reached boiling point I’m sure and is quite undrinkable. Beyond that I wrote out some trip notes for Karen so she can guide us out of Tehran tomorrow morning, at the start of our 640km ride down to Yazd.
About 3:30pm we caught a taxi back to the Embassy, and after helping the copy-paper guy carry some boxes inside we waited for 4:00pm to arrive, and with it our passports. Faranak greeted us with a huge smile – she has been very supportive these past couple of weeks, and we had a lovely chat with her before we left, visas in our hot little hands. Faranak has MA’s both in tourism and computer engineering, and having spent time in India previously – including six months in Kerela in India’s south – she was able to suggest a number of places we should visit.
