As apparently I can't get to Arabia without forcefully stopping at a workshop, so can't I without writing about cold. Serious cold in the house.
When some of you are already skiing (and doing stupid things on the track), we only experience ski temperatures. I woke up Friday morning because of cold. 12ºC in the house. The heater reports an error. I jump off the bed to get the user's manual. Flame failure. Hmmm. I try to reset and restart it, without success. It's eight in the morning so I get to the bed again and try to sleep the missing hour till wake-up call.
In the afternoon, the heater returned to normal. A great relief since I am not able to imagine continuing the journey through central Iran without it. It's not just about the appartment temperature, a very serious problem would be water freezing. Bad mood and worries dissappeared so I could freely dedicate myself to the argila from the previous post.
Without worries were Carmen and me putting the previous post on the web till midnight, Webasto heater was meanwhile heating the appartment. Despite having already said goodbye, Masoud from the coffeenet appears next to the truck in his Iranian version of a Renault five. It was then when we took the adjacent photo. Two police cars stopped and we left Zanjan in big style.
We picked our camp at 2 am somewhere pass Soltaniyeh (highway exits are not marked, you simply get off the highway wherever you feel like, using one of the many tracks that get you to the parallel road, so we missed the town), but I was woken up at 4 by the heater. Problems again. Outside temperature -8ºC. Restarting it doesn't solve the case. I try to start the diesel ceran cooker. Trying its best, but no way. I understood the situation.
After seeing how they drive in snow conditions (we were by far the fastest vehicle on the slightly snow-covered highway while running at 90 kph) I started thinking they might be not ready for these climate conditions. Which could also mean diesel they sell is not Winter diesel. It means the truck engine could start having problems as well if the temperatures at 1700 metres drop even lower. Our petrol supplies for the power generator were dried-out (there are kilometres of queues of Iranian Paykans waiting to buy petrol which you can only get using a government chip card allowing you to buy certain ammount per month. Carmen says you have to take a holiday to get the petrol) so in the worst case we could have remained even without electricity.
An immediate action was due. We had to move to a lower elevation. Before that, I had to pump the fuel from the additional into the nearly-empty service tank. The engine was still warm so the truck started in a blink of the eye. At 5:30 we were ready to take-off. To take-off directly to the east. I had to stop when the sun started to rise. We slept for an hour or so twice on our way to Tehran. On the seats in the warm cabin.
But the heater software locked itself after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to start. And waited for the Webasto-workshop computer to unlock it.
It was a shock for me. Here I have a completely new product onthe world market. It's one of the first three that were mounted in Slovenia. I am in contact with Webasto Slovenia, we're trying hard to solve the case through the whole Saturday. No advice helps. In the evening, Mr. Andrej Ločniškar thinks of another trick. Which works!!! And we manage to unlock the software even without all the fancy software and special connectors thanks to a sincere support from Webasto. Carmen and I were so happy that we were nearly jumping of joy at midnight. The temperatures here in Karaj, Tehran's periphery, are so high that I'm not afraid of not-winter-diesel anymore. I couldn't believe when I didn't a minus sign in front of the outside temperature. 6ºC.
Now the piggy has to be washed. It's salted and dirty which impedes any work to be done on the chassis. And yes, it needs some small jobs to be done there. Karaj, where we stopped since we didn't want to enter Tehran at night, is actually one big Tehran's car&truck workshop. What I don't get or do here, probably won't be done anywhere else in Iran.
The people? Friendly as always. A few more words about them in one of the following posts.
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