A couple of kilometres out of town, I zipped off the legs of my long pants. I had read, it was generally accepted for foreign men to bike in shorts (though not tight bike shorts) as long as we put on long pants when stopping for a break. It was 200k to the nearest big city Mashhad, so I asked people for the conditions primarily to plan for water. They declined it was through a desert and technically it might not have been because it was not loose sand - but to me it was very desert-like with 45C in the shade...