This morning we have a walking tour of Erzurum after breakfast. It is a public holiday today because Ramadan finishes tonight so the town is still asleep at 8 am as we first walk to the main square and visit the Yakutiye Madrese dating from 1310 and Mosque which is closed.
We then walk to the old city wall and climb to the top which gives us a great view over the city.
We then visit Cifte Minareli Madrese dating from the late 13th century and has 2 lovely fluted minarets.
Behind the Mosque we walk past 3 tombs which are in excellent condition and are all different shapes with lovely conical shaped roofs with the oldest one believed to date back to the late 11th century.
We walk past some quaint buildings before heading back to our hotel for morning tea.
We have 438 km to drive to Sivas today passing through many police check areas without a second glance in our direction by the police. We drive on some lovely roads through hilly countryside and stop at a lake for a driver changes & stretch. The area where we stop has 16 different wild flowers growing including thistles, they are so colourful we can’t help but pick some.
As we approach the edge of Sivas we are all pulled over to the right side of the road. We are leading today so Shiraz is the first car in the line. We are all asked for our passports that we hand over to the Policeman. He indicates to Michael that he wants to look in the back of the car which is locked. When Michael gets out of the car the policeman frisks him. The police ask us to remove our bags which we do and they proceed to go right through our bags removing everything that we then have to repack. They repeat this exercise with Shamrock and Vulcan. They don’t find what they are looking for, whatever that is we can only speculate, as they don’t speak English, Dutch or German. They eventually tell us we can go and give us back our passports, so we head off not knowing why we are targeted. We guess that we were checked because we are driving a foreign car.
Our hotel provides us with a delicious meal and we are also able to buy an Efes beer which goes down really well as we haven’t had a beer since Turkmenistan as Iran doesn’t sell alcohol, other than on the black market and Erzurum is a very strict Muslim town and we couldn’t buy a beer in the restaurant we were in.
After dinner we go for a walk into the main square and wander around the Mosque and Madrese.
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