A Day in Bandar Abbas

Saturday, August 13

Our car has arrived on the ship to Bandar Abbas (BA) on the 10th and we have come here yesterday, 2 days prior to the start of our trip.

All participants have to submit their passports and Carnet among other things to complete the formalities from the customs and the port authorities to have the car handed over to us. The team from AO is working with the local agent here for that.

Meanwhile we have no agenda till that time. AO has hired a local guide, Sarah to be with us throughout our stay here. So the first thing we did was to ask her to help us get local currency by changing our USD and Euro. We collected the money from the group members and Deval and I accompanied her to get it. We had USD 900 and Euro 1000 to change. 

We took a taxi and it was an eye opening experience. There are two parallel 6 lane one way streets full of traffic covering the main business district of BA. The car scene is dominated by French companies like Peugeot, Renault and Citroën, there is also an Iranian company in a JV with a Chinese company, they go by the name of Iranian Khordo and their cars are named Saipa, Samand and a few others  that I cannot remember. There are very few German cars and I did see some Hyundai and Toyota. All the number plates are in Farsi.

We visited 6 different exchanges but no one had enough cash. Sarah then spoke to her sister who works at a bank to help us out.

We went to the bank and they too had the same issue, the manager requested us to change the USD today and come back tomorrow for changing the Euro. We did not have much of a choice. What happened next was amazing. We got 27 crore Iranian Rials for 900 USD.  The notes come in ridiculous denominations of 100000, 500000, 1 million etc. It took us a while to reconcile the amount with a lot of help from Sarah. The taxi fare to and fro was 220000 rials.

Cash distribution

Iran is an enemy of USA but ironically the dollar will get you 30000 rials while the Euro gets 29000. It just proves that money has no colour.

In the evening we had a city tour. It's very hot and humid (40 ° C) We saw the Galedari Bath, the 265 year old Dilkhusha mosque, Jama masjid and a 150 year of Galadari mosque. There is also a Hindu temple that is not maintained well. A single wall painting of Radha Krishna and 2-3 idols of Buddha were there. After the tour we had dinner at Hotel Hormuz with the group and then retired for the night.