Best Nissan dealer in Astana. Terra motors)

We found a Nissan dealer who currently have our car in their tender care repairing our gearbox. Hurrah! Also phone interview with their press office. 

Istanbul to the Iranian border

===Disclaimer==== This has been written with very little sleep, no spell check on a little pad, the spelling is shit, the grammar is shit, the content probably makes no sense, if you can't hack it, we understand, but politely refrain from being an arse, cheers ===============

We rocked into Istanbul following a taxi we'd paid to apparently get us lost for an hour, in hope of finding our hostel. Eventually the taxi driver got bored of being lost and decided to find our hostel, well one with a similar name anyhow. The hostel was actually awesome, a great place to store our bags and take a quick glance at the shower before hitting Istanbul for beer, kebabs and Shisha.

We hooked up with a few teams in Istanbul had some drinks, got rowdy, then like the grim reaper dragging a bag of kittens to the kitchen sink, 3.30am came around and I was dragged sobbing from the comfort of the badass bar we'd all found to make our home, into our golden stead to hit the road for a 24 hour driving marathon to the Iranian border.

The 24 hour drive, blurred into an absolute pyschadellic hallucination, we witness robots chasing sheep, cars eating people and James even awoke from a nightmare that we were crashing, grabbing the steering wheel in a desperate attempt to kill us all.

Finally we got to the border... We were meeting a small convoy of other cars to cross the border with. They were late. We spent about 4 hours waiting on them. As we were all still tripping balls from sleep deprived driving marathons, we begin to take in the sites of the border... Magnificent truckers pissing sat down, feral dogs as big as cows and as ripped as 50 cent. Trully magestic.

One thing we were particuarly annoyed at was the insessant 'change' guys. Asking for change, like a scene from south park... they wanted to change our money into Iranian Rial for us, which they insisted was in our best interest, but we weren't having any of it. We were convinced plastic cards were the way forward (they weren't it later transpired). These change demonds were actually really trying to save us from the days that were to unravel.

Eventually we got through the turkish side of the border, being stamped out and crossing into the Iranian side.... which was carnage. One truck driver decided to just plough into our convoy for the sheer thrill of it.

We got a stamp in our passports and we were officially in Iran, our car wasn't quite there yet...apparently we needed some magical piece of paper (carnet). Which was about $1000. At this point we find out we should have probably read one of those newspapers the clever people on the train read... Iran is currently under embargo and cannot trade with countries outside of its borders or something. Basically we couldn't use our magical plastic cards to purchase freedom vouchers (cash). At this point we began to panic. So we sought out a change goblin, gathered what cash we had in all sorts of currencies and began the haggling.... This consisted of 3-4 guys at any one time operating 6 calculators and shouting in Persian at me, themselves and each other. It was weird. Eventually after a few games of 'give me my cash back you fuck' we managed to raise some cash for a carnet.... it wasn't really enough for one of those fancy $1000 ones. So we found a lovely fellow who was basically the Tony Soprano of the Turkish-Iranian border. He made us an offer we couldn't refuse... $500 for a carnet... after haggling, a few sessions on the calculator, some gutteral screaming and atleast 2 paper rock scissor handshakes, we struck a deal ... 16 million Iranian Rial for the carnet (something like $300 -$400 (we're still not sure on the bloody exchange rate).

This dodgy carnet basically involved Jake jumping in a taxi without a visa going into the city in what he described as sort of trading floor for documentation and coming back to the border. At this point we realised we'd actually been a little robbed by one of the change goblins for about 6 million rial, however this was the least of problems.

Over the next 4 hours, our passports and car documents were lost and found an average of 4 times per hour.

Eventually we were ready to leave, the paper work made abuot as much sense as their math skills, but we were ready to get out of that border. It was a million degrees and we were fed up for politely telling Iranian gangster we didn't want any fucking change!

We hit the road on a 9 hour trip to the capital, where things got much more fucked up.

Thanks to those who have been donating, it's for a great cause, we don't keep any of the money it all goes to the awesome cool earth people, litteraly saving the world!

We've arrived

First Romanian party about to kick off. We've just arrived at our plush hotel for the evening. ... rubing water and electricity that isn't powered by our car.

First breakdown.. fixed with sausages

After blitzing it to luxembourg last night to meet a friend who had already fallen asleep waiting on our horsepower deprived chariot we decided to carry on to Germany and pitch tents at the side of the road.

This morning we rocked up in Rasmstein singing the appropriate miss pronounced lyrics.

Upon trying to leave rasmstein we discovered our car refused to start. First we tried swearing but the car seemed un phased . So we decided to pop the hood and really scare it into starting... the tough bastard wasn't having any of our idle threats and continued its denial of service.

We noticed a small sausage shack lurking in the distance, we had a sneaking suspicion that all our golden beast needed was 3 hours of curried sausage farts ... and what would you know... after an hour of sausage consumption our golden chariot came roaring to life just in time for us to anally roar in return.

We're a couple of hours from the prague border we think, aiming for the Czech out party.