The route we are taking was born partly out of a desire to see these countries and partly out of the necessity of avoiding some of the more dangerous parts of the Middle East. If this trip would have happened 10-15 years ago, the route would have probably looked very different as Syria would have been accessible and we would have wanted to also travel through Jordan and Lebanon.
Nowadays, the corridor you can go through is getting smaller and smaller and to make the trip a bit longer and more interesting we’ve added Armenia and Georgia on the way to Europe and Turkmenistan on the way back. Besides these countries a good amount of time will be spent in Iran and Turkey (with the two being the largest countries on our way) and then a couple of weeks through Greece, Albania and Croatia before cutting across Serbia to arrive in Romania.
If you look at the map above, in blue you will see our route from Dubai towards Romania, while in green is the way we are coming back. The ferries are marked in orange – one crossing from Sharjah in the UAE to Bandar Abbas in Iran and another one crossing from Bodrum in Turkey to Kos in Greece and then further on to Santorini and Athens.
Hi guys, how do you go about visas / export of the car from uae to these countries?
I want to ride my motorcycle from Abu Dhabi to Madrid, spain
Mark, things are fairly straight forward. We only needed to get a visa in advance for Iran which we applied for at the embassy in Dubai as you can’t get visa on arrival when you arrive through a land border. For the car, again, the only paperwork we needed was for Iran – you need to get a Carnet de Passage which is a document issued by the Automobil Club in Sharjah. You essentially have to put down a deposit which you collect when you return to guarantee that you are not importing the car in that country. The Carnet needs to be stamped at the entry and exit from Iran (make sure they stamp it otherwise you can’t get your money back). If you are just doing a one way trip and keeping the car in your home country (or somewhere else in Europe) you will need to export the car and that’s a different process with which I am not that familiar (but there are plenty of forums online for this). I hope this helps.