We spent our last days with Zoli, whose place we slept at earlier in Istanbul.
At first we hitched, the three of us. Our best lift were the three Kurdish guys, who constantly kept asking us about our religion (to avoid further conflicts, Zoli later learned the sentence "I believe in one God but I don't belong to any religion." in Turkish) and they made us listen to loud Kurdish music. We took a cool video of the party, but our current circumstances don't let me to upload it somewhere, so you'll have to wait a bit for it. :)
Then we arrived to a camping near to the city of Doğubayazit. It lies next to Mt. Ararat which is 5100 meters high and according to the Bible Noah moored his ark on its top. By the way the ark hasn't been found since then, but it costs a lot of money to be allowed to climb up there (do they have a secret?), so we had to pass up the chance to do it. In return we climbed up to a nearer, smaller mountain, where stands an old palace where the adventures of One Thousand and One Nights happened, as locals say. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and such:
From that point things got fast: we hitchhiked to lake Van, which is a beautiful and huge salty lake, and in the southern part of it there is a litte island. On the island there is an old temple which was recently renewed. We ate a lot for dinner and we drank our last beers (in Iran it's forbidden to drink alcohol), after that we camped on the lakeside and slept. The next day Zoli went to the island to see the temple, but we didn't feel like to go because the ferry went rarely and it was just all so complicated, so we started hitching again around the lake Van. We went back to Doğubayazit, from where the Iranian border lies just 40 kilometers. We took a lift to the border, there Judit hid in a toilet and changed her clothes to the obligatory ones in Iran (long sleeves and scarf) then we headed to the border...
(Translated by K. Attila - thanks mate!)
