My friend Ghazal lives in Semnan, a mid-sized Iranian city two hours east of Tehran. After I got my Uzbek tourist visa and applied for the Turkmen transit one at the relevant consulates in Tehran, I continued my trip eastwards. I was looking forward to visiting Ghazal and her family in Semnan because part of the idea of this trip in Asia originated when I met her a couple of years before in Yerevan and we talked about seeing each other again in Iran, so that she can show me her country.Those were lazy times, after so much driving under the sun in Central Iran. I was starting to need another break and that was the perfect place to spend a few days without much to do... we ate a lot of nice home-made food that was a great change to the typical kebab fare of most Iranian restaurants, spent whole afternoons chatting and eating traditional sweets (I miss sohan!), playing with her daughter Saghar, taking naps... and yes, we did a couple of short day trips outside the city.

In one of them, I drove my bike to the desert nearby with three other guys: a photographer that was a friend of a friend of Ghazal (the guy who helped me restore most of my pictures from Iran), his brother (sort of guide who knew the area) and the owner of the second bike. I had warned them that I did not want any extreme stuff on deep sand, just to take a closer took at the desert, drive on trails and take some pictures. As expected, they did not listen to me and we ended up driving basically off-road in a straight line to where we wanted to go... this was one of the stops where the guys were trying to spot camels in the distance.

At some point, driving a 300kg monster bike with street tires in deep sand started to be rather annoying and I told them to stop and turn back... they still spent some time playing in the sand, which is what they wanted to do from the beginning.

It had been a nice morning in the desert but we did not get to see much...
After some more sleeping, nice food and nice sweets (I miss saffron ice-cream and faloodeh!), we decided one day to drive to the Caspian Sea to spend a day at the beach. I left Scarlett at home and we were five people in the car: Ghazal, her daughter Saghar, her husband Soroush and their friend Majid, who actually spoke a bit of Spanish. That day was one of the best in my whole trip, despite the long drive and the traffic jams returning to Semnan.

The faces of my two favorite Iranian girls show the atmosphere of the day... this is Ghazal right after having had a great lunch at a fish restaurant.

And Saghar learning how to ride a horse :)

After those great days in Semnan, which seemed to be a world apart from the rest of my trip, I continued my journey to Mashhad. This city is the second biggest in Iran, its holiest because of the remains of Imam Reza and it is also Ghazal's birthplace so she arranged that I stay with her family. I spent a couple of days with her mom, dad and sister, until my Turkmen visa was ready and I could continue my travels.

Have you ever heard of Turkmenistan?
You will in the next post.