Dear friends,
We wish you a merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!
Nathalie and I will be in BAM for Christmas (if you check "Bam" on Internet, you will find out which ingredient will be an important part of our Christmas dinner).
For New Year, we thought of kindling fireworks in the desert, but the proximity with the Afghan border (and the fact that "New Year" here is rather on March 21st) made us forget this plan; we are not willing to appear on newspapers.
I am now with Nathalie in a bus between Yazd and Kerman. The bus driver takes huge risks on the road. He is probably confident because we did repeat this morning a second time the "depature prayer" (for some reason, the bus had to wait 2 hours for other passagers and we took thus a second departure).
Our travel "Tout un Monde Lointain" continue to evolve in its conception, goal, organisation, etc.. We have changed the general route a dozen times and the last big change... -you will hear about it later... For moment, we are spending our last week in Iran (Kerman and Bam) and we should normaly enter in Pakistan in a few days.
The newsletter Nš1 was sent nearly two month ago in Ankara. We were planning to go northward and visit the Black See Region , and then to travel in the Eastern part of Turkey (Trabzon, Yusufeli, Erzurum, Van and Dugubayazit).
Since nobody could read the newsletter Nš1 through the end, I decided this time to be short: I am sure that the pictures will speak to you better than my bad English. Also, it would be possible to write a page about every day of travel so many are the experiences we have, so many are the visions, the facts, the smells which could be described. But these are our experiences and it is of course not the goal of the newsletter to try to report everything to you.
We entered in Iran five weeks ago. We stayed in Tabriz (where we met Peter Casanova -who is known by all travellers visiting Tabriz-, and received with this great man the first taste of Iranian actual complex character), Teheran (in order to ask the visa for Pakistan), Ispahan (where Nathalie got sick ), Shiraz and Yazd.
New-uploaded pictures ("East of Turkey" and "Iran") are now on the web-site.
The links (underlined words) in this email are not working, but on the website they contain anecdotes.
We hope you are all going well and we look forward to hearing from you soon! (We usually read emails several times a week)
All the best,
Nicolas and Nathalie