In the village of Djorde just before embarking on the climb. From left to
right: Mehran, Kiwi, Pehr, Ali and their uncle.
While starting writing this I was on a weird bus ride on my way to Tabriz from Ramsar. While finishing putting last touches on the post and posting it I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Tabriz and will hurry away for dinner in just a few moments.
Monday evening (june 6) we left Ramsar for a small mountain village called Djorde where Behramand Ali's family has a summer house. Its located on 2200m and the taxi ride up there, which lasted for a good 40min, was like taken from an Indiana jones movie. The old Peykan was shaking and rustling as the driver speeded through narrow mountain roads with vertical mind boggling cliffs on one side and the green misty mountain rising on the other. Crazy.
After having dinner, a good nights sleep, breakfast and yet another lunch we started our ascent at 2pm - two hours later than planned. I got to borrow a sleeping bag and some clothes from Mehran (but no shoes, as they didn't fit me) and together with food and water for two days we had about 12kgs each on our backs.
The 7.5 hours it took to reach the hut at the summit went pretty smooth although the sometimes heavy mist made you very wet and cold, also my indoor football shoes made my feet sore after a few hours walking on the rocks.
However, we arrived at he summit just before darkness and the view from above the clouds made it well worth the climb.
Apparently someone before us had forgot to close the door to the hut and which made it partly snow filled and very dirty. Nevertheless we managed to clean out some space for sleeping and started a fire for cooking and keeping warm. We curdled close together by the fire and had dinner which consisted of Naan (traditional Iranian bread), canned Tuna and Dates - very simple but oh so good. To this we shared a bottle of homemade, and highly illegal, fruit schnapps that Mehran brought. Taking account of the setting, this meal is one of the absolute best, or at least most random, I've ever had. Thinking aobut it, having dinner at a mountain peak at 3620m by the Caspian Sea together with a Kiwi and three Iranians was not something I expected when I left Sweden over three weeks ago.
Nevertheless, all this awesomeness didn't stop the night from being horrible. I had caught a nasty cold and was freezing intencive, and only managed to get about an hour of sleep in total.
After having more Naan, nuts, dates, cucumber and tea for breakfast we started the descent on a different route than the one we came up on. I'm almost willing to say that the descent was tougher and more demanding that the climb. You constantly had to focus so that you didn't put your feet on loose rocks or on to steep gravel, because if you did you were doomed to fall - which both Kiwi and I got painfully aware of. Also, hours of walking in steep downhill made my knee's sore which made me walk the last kilometers backwards (the mountain goats looked at me and shook their heads). In total the descent took 5.5 hours (including a one hour climb to get to the right valley).
Finally back in the village we had a well deserved rest before we headed back to Mehran and Ali's Grandmother's house where we ate and soon fell a sleep.
To quickly summarize events from there: The next day Grandma made us an awesome traditional Iranian lunch (see pics). Brackets: Grandma was one of the absolute highlights of the visit to Ramsar. She is hard to describe but let me just say her constant smile, her cooking, her hospitality and bare appearance is something I'll lever forget. We, me and Kiwi, also got to experience very old and traditional Iranian culture through her (Ta'arof).
Anyways, after that we headed to the bus station for the Tabriz bus at 5.30pm. However there were complications because the bus had broke down and after some unlucky events and some waiting here and there we finally arrived to Tabriz about 15 hours later. Today we've just been walking around in Tabriz, exploring it all by chance. Randomly we hooked up with a guy who studies English and works part time as a guide who will accompany us for dinner at 9pm (in 1.5hours).
Tomorrow we head for Van in Turkey.
