What a relief!

One of my (very) few disappointments with Google earth/map imagery is that it can be very difficult to get any idea of relief. Mountains often don't look very big and the summits can seem like the valleys and vice versa. Today's latest GPS plot is a good example of this. The minor road heading west looks like it crosses a summit when in fact it is following the valley ...The aerial view shows Mark heading south from Yazd with some high terrain to his west. I happened to look at the atlas and saw that this high terrain is in fact a mountain peak called Shir Kuh which rises to over 4000 metres. This will be the sort of view which Mark has had this morning (though probably with less snow on it). This photo of the mountain is again from the galleries of Brian McMorrow which I discovered yesterday as a source of lovely images of the region. Here is another which illustrates the difficulty of reading road signs in Iran .....

I have also finally found a good relief map of Iran - in German but it serves the purpose...

There is not a lot of low, flat land in Iran! Having cycled along the grain of the Elburz mountains in the north, Mark is now following the Zagros mountains in the west.