We can feel summer coming now that the days are getting longer. By 5am the birds were chirping outside our tent and we were out of our sleeping bags a few minutes later. Before midday we’d already put 50km on the clock through the flat landscape. We don’t need to push so hard just yet though. The dates are fixed on our Turkmenistan visa so we have plenty of time to cover the remaining distance the border. Instead of pedalling on, we rolled off the road and had a lazy lunch break under our tarp. It didn’t take long for a shepherd to come along and check us out although once he discovered we don’t speak Farsi he soon wandered back to his flock and we returned to napping. A fierce headwind came up in the afternoon and we probably wouldn’t have gone far at all except that we needed water so we struggled through the remaining distance to Mazdavand. We thought the path to the border was going to be mostly flat so it was a surprise to see a large mountain road with switchbacks looming in front of us. With the wind growing in strength, we didn’t have to think too long to put that off until tomorrow.