Day 5 - Tehran to Karaj - a day of frustrations:-)

This was meant to be headed "Tehran to Nowshahr" but as you will see, this was not to be. Started the day with an extremely helpful young man, Sephyr arriving at our hotel with a car that was much smaller than what we had requested and which clearly would not take our luggage. So first stop became the Europcar office in suburban northwest Tehran to sort out the mix-up. Turns out they didn't have a Renault Tordan as requested as all their vehicles had been rented for the unexpected week long holiday. Got introduced to the very affable and generous Mr Mohammed, owner of the franchise who then offered to buy a car for us and in fact was in the process of doing so. As this transaction was set to take a while and the car needed to be fueled etc we were invited to share lunch with Mr Mohammed and the car vendor, an Iranian who had purchased the vehicle in Iraq and brought it to Tehran. Lunch was a tasty meal of rice, koresh, yoghurt and tea and was very filling. Next problem that then arose was the absence of a requested GPS unit. This necessitated the purchase of a unit from a friend of Mr Mohammed and this involved a trip to another office with me at the wheel and Sephyr riding shotgun. After another long wait we obtained the GPS unit from yet another vendor who brought it to the office. And so we set off much later than we had wanted in the direction of Karaj hoping to find the Chalous road. In no time at all I became an expert Iranian driver managing to dodge the oncoming vehicles and deal capably with all the absurdities that pass for driving over here. At Karaj we experienced our first real problems trying to locate the Chalous road. Without decent maps and a GPS that actually showed roads it was proving impossible to find it. Eventually we did, though, only to be told that the road was closed by the police and no explanation as to why other than we were told it had something to do with the non aligned nations meeting. Anyway this meant we now had to find a hotel in Karaj which we hadn't planned for. This proved almost impossible in the face of peak hour traffic and  us having no idea of anything. It wasn't until after almost collecting a ticket from a policeman for double parking that we enlisted the help of a kind taxi driver who then drove to the Hotel MarMar with us following. Settled in for the night and after a short walk looking for restaurants we opted for the hotel restaurant. Fairly basic but nevertheless good food.