The mountainous Pamir Highway was precisely the type of terrain that our 1-liter Nissan Micra hatchback was not suited to handle. One of our friends had described it as a car "that you would expect a 60-year-old woman to drive to the supermarket twice a week," and now we were pushing it to ever-greater extremes, keeping our fingers crossed that it would somehow persevere. So we weren't totally surprised when our luck eventually ran out.

Our car was running once again, but now we faced a handful of new mechanical issues, just as we were about to embark on the roughest part of our journey yet: a 600 mile stretch of mostly unpaved and mountainous road along the Tajik-Afghan border that's considered one of the most spectacular and potentially dangerous routes in the world.

We'd been on the road for three weeks and had driven more than 5000 miles across all of Europe and the western half of Asia. While the journey so far had been enjoyable and we'd gotten to see a lot, it was also incredibly tiring. So when we learned we'd be stuck in Bukhara, Uzbekistan for a week, waiting for our car to get repaired, we were actually thrilled at the opportunity to finally relax and get some much-needed rest. But things didn't go according to plan.

In the three weeks since we started our journey, we'd broken down about four times, been to half a dozen mechanics, and tried all sorts of stop-gap measures to solve our car issues, but there was still some sort of big, underlying problem whose name we didn't yet know. Finally we were about to find out.

When it comes to welcoming foreign tourists, Turkmenistan is close to the bottom of the list. It was hard enough to get visas in the first place, and when we did, they were only good for 5 days. Now broken down with serious car problems, we have to try to convince officials to give us more time.

Driving a small, crappy car was a prerequisite for anyone participating in the Mongol Rally. The point was to make the journey more exciting and adventurous. We liked the idea at first, but now we'd broken down yet again, and our mechanical issues this time were worse than ever.

"Las Vegas meets Pyongyang." That's how our guidebooks described Turkmenistan's capital Ashgabat, and from what we saw, that seemed like an apt description. In fact, there was something about the entire country that was downright odd.

"Honestly, most Americans -- when they think of Iran -- probably think of 3 things," my brother said. "Desert, oil, and nuclear capabilities." And it was true. Before our road trip across Europe and Asia last summer, we didn't really have much of an idea what to expect.

Our eighteen country road trip across Europe and Asia last summer left us with a wealth of memorable stories and experiences. But if you asked me to name the single most fascinating and thought-provoking place we visited, the answer would clearly be Iran.

First there were a series of terrorist attacks in Istanbul and Ankara and a threat from Kurdish separatists vowing to target Turkey's tourism industry to inflict economic harm. Then an attempted military coup followed by a government crackdown on dissent. As we followed the news in the months leading up to our planned drive across Turkey, it was easy to feel nervous and uncertain about just what we would encounter.