Day 01 & 2 - Cooling our heels in Bandar Abbas

Sunday, August 14

We are cooling our heels in the hotel. The AO team is at the port doing the paperwork for clearance of the vehicles.

Today we got 24 crores rials in exchange for Euro 800

Deval found a place called Roco Cafe that served Italian food. We had pizzas, pastas, mocktails etc. All of us enjoyed the lunch and the ambience was very nice. There was even a girl playing the piano live. Amazingly the bill came to 65 million rials (INR 1800) for the full group.

We spent the evening chit chatting in the lobby hoping that the cars would be with us tomorrow.

Monday, August 15

We left at 10am for the port to take the delivery of the cars.

At 4.30, after a lot of paper work we were told that the cars can be handed over to us only tomorrow. It was a disheartening six hours wait at the customs office. Bureaucracy is the same anywhere in the world.

Since we were 10 of us there were a lot of interesting conversations but after about 2 pm everyone was a bit down. However we are all taking this as part of the road trip learning experience.

After dinner we had a briefing and orientation about the trip. Our car is no. 7 in the convoy so we follow car no. 6 and car no. 8 follows us.