It is difficult to imagine how you must be feeling when you've almost completed 5000 +miles of cycling through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India but I guess, as well as the elation, you do pause to consider a little of what you've seen in the last two months. I thought today, therefore, as Mark approaches Calcutta, it might be worth revisiting what have been for me the geographical 'highlights' of the four countries.
Turkey kept the best until last and it was the sheer size of extinct volcano Mt Ararat, four times the height of Ben Nevis, which made the most lasting impression..
You can re-read the posting about Mt Ararat
here .It is harder to choose an Iranian highlight - probably because so much of what I saw there was a revelation! The salt deserts and the sand deserts described in the postings of
17th September and
23rd September respectively were intriguing....
But the most beautiful was surely what I called 'the painted desert' in the mountainous terrain close to the Pakistan border described in the posting of
24th September ..
On and into the Pakistan part of Balochistan was a stretch of desert, described on the
28th September which sticks with me because there was just nothing there. This has got to be the emptiest, most featureless view you can find on Google Earth...
In a recent radio interview Mark described the descent through the Bolan pass from Quetta as a scenic highlight of his journey and I certainly recall being impressed with dry river torrents which featured on that section of the route as described on the
1st October...
And, finally, India where almost every posting was dictated by the Ganges and its tributaries. The Ganges first got a mention here in the posting for
13th October....
... and from that day, the whole of Mark's journey across the Indo-Gangetic plain seemed dominated by water - and lots of it - from exquisite oxbows described
here on the 16th October..
... to vast floodplains like this on the
19th October .
Volacnoes, mountains, deserts and vast rivers ......Leg 2 will be a hard act to follow geographically.
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