This post is part of the series Overland ’18. The aim is to drive a scooter from Iran to Switzerland.
An overview of the articles can be found here.

How the idea was born

As a student I have 11 weeks of vacation in summer, and I was determined to spend the whole time travelling. I had been looking into backpacking the Caucasus for a while. Eventually I came up with the idea of combining it with a trip to Iran. One evening sitting in front of my big world map I figured I could make the whole stretch back to Switzerland in this timeframe.  ThenI decided that doing this all on a scooter would be a lot of fun. I looked into buying a scooter in Iran which turns out to be quite the problem as a foreigner. At the latest I would run into trouble when trying to cross borders with a scooter not registered in my name, as it is not possible to get the right papers in Iran as a foreigner.

So, I would have to ship a scooter to Iran.

Shipment

After having found a traveler who had flown his bike from Shiraz to London on horizonsunlimited.com – by far the best website for planning a motorcycle trip! Be sure to check it out.

I figured a shipment to Shiraz would be worth looking in to. He had gotten a great price with IranAir cargo. I tried to figure out their homepage many times, but I could not figure out the table of rates in English.

I was also to find out that googles’ chrome translator does not do well with Farsi. Luckily a friend of mine speaks Farsi and so he translated the page for me. It was all beutifully cheap.

looking good… until I found out that no airport in Iran has customs that deal with vehicles…. Great, just great.

So I considered sending it to the port of Bandar Abbas in the south of Iran. I could not find anyone who would do this for anything short of a ridiculous price.

So I came up with the idea of sending it to Dubai and then taking it across the Persian Gulf by ferry. I had some trouble finding a good price for this too. But things are looking good now.

Keep in touch
I will keep you posted on how I am modifying my Honda and will be writing on the journey. After my studies I plan on going on a very long trip and I plan to finance everything off of this blog. So simply by following me on social media (also under construction), adding comments to my articles (feature not activated yet) and telling your friends about me you can help keeping me on the road.