Day 55 - 25 September 2009 onto Quetta

I miss breakfast in the morning as it seems the Pakistanis can’t agree what time zone they are in.

There is a tense atmosphere amongst us truckies. There is talk of a meeting tonight to discuss whether we follow the planned itinerary, which includes the ‘wild west’ Peshawar, more recently home of the Taliban in Pakistan, or just go to Lahore and out of Pakistan as quickly as possible. From my point of view, I am not comfortable with going to places where we have to be guarded by gunmen. It’s frustrating that we rely only on what we are told at checkpoints, ignoring any external sources of information, like newspapers for instance! I have been reading over the past couple of years of numerous suicide bombings occurring in places that we are planning to go to, especially Peshawar.

We depart to Quetta with one gunman in the cab with James/JC and another in the passenger cabin. Along the way, we spot lots of wild camels and trucks decorated with elaborate illustrations with vibrant colours, though the base colour is almost always green.

A Pakistani truck, comparatively restrained believe it or not...(D Jones)

We drive nine and a half hours to Quetta, which was just 350km due to frequent guard changes and bad roads. It is dark when we arrive in Quetta, which may or may not have been a good thing.

There is now a regular group of people who take upgrades whenever possible, so there is plenty of room for the tent dwellers such as myself on the flat and lush grass in the hotel courtyard at the Hotel Bloomstar. It seems like luxury. The hotel gate is locked up in the evening, though the truck is parked opposite the hotel and attracting a lot of attention.

Relaxing in the hotel courtyard

Day 54 - 24 September 2009; Dalbandin

We had been told that our escort to Quetta would arrive at 8am but after 8am passes, we are told the guards will be there for 9 o’clock. In the meantime we play a cricket game with a plank of wood and Meg’s plastic cricket ball, which gets stuck on the hay matted roof of a nearby wicker hut several times. Some of the customs guards take part as well and one is a seriously good spinner, and not a bad bat. It is our first bit of fun for a while.

cricket (photos Dave Jones)

howzat

We eventually set off for a journey through the desert at about 10am. Our escort leaves us after an hour or so, and we have to stop at checkpoints every 10km and show our passports. What is striking about uninhabited Pakistan is that it would be perfect for movie settings for westerns or as an alternative planet for Star Trek / Star Wars films.

photo from Meg J

We arrive at Dalbandin at about 2pm. On previous trips, the hotel had been rat infested and I was going to sleep on the roof, but the hotel had since been renovated and was quite inhabitable with new toilets. Sleeping on the roof would not have been practical anyway, as we garner a lot of attention from the locals, with groups gathering outside our hotel just to look at us on the balconies. It turns out the hotel is owned by a government minister, though it is more a residential hotel than guest hotel, Dalbandin not being a major tourist or business stop…

There is a local bazaar, but we are told by Lucinda not to go, as six Germans had been kidnapped from there in August.

However, I need to change some money and am told that I must wait for a ‘police escort‘. While waiting, I chat with the hotel staff who tell me the town is safe, although that would not explain the need for an escort. People here and Iran have a strange fascination with American 'Pro' wrestling, which blares out of the TV of the staff room. When the escort arrives, he appears to be just as man with an old well worn car. We drive no more than ½ km through the town, which consists of a series of concrete blocks like garages. I am escorted to a backroom of one these blocks, where several men sit around in a circle chatting over tea. One of the men goes to a safe behind a desk, where I am given 70 rupees to the dollar, the same exchange rate offered by hawkers at the border.

Outside the hotel, a bus stops with some goats loaded on top. They are passed down by hand. I suspect this is our dinner.

There is an armed guard outside our hotel and people are starting to feel tense. Dinner is a bad tempered affair as some people don’t get served while others are getting extra portions. The dinner is not goat, but a salty chicken (on the bone) curry with a pleasant enough dhal.

Some of the truck group have decided they will catch a train from Quetta to Lahore in a couple of days to skip out the most perilous areas of Pakistan.

Power cuts mean that the room fan does not work, so it is a hot night’s sleep.

Day 53 - 23 September 2009; into Pakistan

 It is only a few miles to the border, but we take 6 hours to get out of the modern Iranian border compound. I note that the map of surrounding countries in the passport control building shows Israel as Palestine.

Before we leave the country, we are asked to fill in a questionnaire about our experiences in Iran, which the officials say is part of a university study. We comply, but it is a frustrating addition to the time we take to get through.

The Pakistan border control is a shack, but here reactions to us are more jovial.

We are expecting an armed guard transport through Pakistan, but today we only get as far as the customs compound near the border. Phony Welsh Dave (he doesn’t speak Welsh, he doesn’t sound Welsh…) and Shay, our superficially very serious Irishman, explore the compound. They go to the top of the building opposite to where the truck is parked to find a man making a hash drink, mixed with a small amount of milk. He is holding a machine gun, probably an AK47 and his eyes are very red, having drunk about 8 cups while they were talking to him.

I spend another night sleeping on the truck roof, and this time I sleep quite well, despite the presence of our seriously stoned and seriously armed roof guard.

Day fifty two - 22 September 2009; Bam and Bandit country

Today we drive to Bam. There is a melancholic feel to this place as it is the site of a devastating earthquake in 2003. The town is in the process of being rebuilt, although it must be said that much of Iran seems to be in a process of rebuilding or decay - it is hard to tell which is which.

The Arg-e-Bam mud city dating back 2000 years would have been a magnificent site before the earthquake, but it too is being rebuilt, the earthquake having reduced it to a relative pile of dust. Having said that, Iranian construction workers never seem to be particularly overworked.

the ancient mud city of Bam, standing until 2003

We drive on from Bam, from which the Lonely Planet suggests we should have an escort, as we are starting to enter bandit country. However, it is a good few hours before military personnel lead us through the desert with their pick-up trucks with mounted machine guns on the back.

At one point we drive through a valley surrounded by small rocky pinnacles looking very much like the setting of an old western ambush scene.

We camp at a military police compound near the border. They seem to be friendly, although we were not initially welcomed to camp there.

Many of us are starting to feel quite crotchety including me. At night, I camp on the roof laying my feet up facing the guards on the roof of the compound building, which is about a football field length away. Lucinda demands that I lay the other way to avoid giving offence to gun totting teenagers. I think she is being paranoid and I initially refuse to sound of myself and Pete the retired scouse headmaster exchanging FOs, but I give in to Lu when she gets on the truck roof to remonstrate. She threatens to leave me here in the morning, although the suggestion seems quite ridiculous to me. Having said that, on reflection I think she may well have been right to be alarmed, as I am not sure that these soldiers would suffer any penalties for shooting up a bunch of Europeans. Certainly the British government’s reaction to Iranian acts of aggression in the recent past won’t have done anything to discourage them. The bottom of my feet stay safely unexposed for the rest of Asia.

Day fifty one - 21 September 2009; East Iran

Today is a non-stop drive day as eastern Iran is more unpredictable. At one point, we drive through a crevice between some small rocky mountains which would be a perfect setting for an ambush scene in an old western.

surrendering to the tank unit - photo courtesy of D Jones

We stop in the desert for our bush camp hidden somewhat behind a mound and we have a game of desert baseball. Given the tracks and nearby holes in the landscape, we seem to be in a tank training ground, the second we have camped at in Iran.

Day fifty - 20 September 2009; Yadz

At breakfast at the hotel, we bump into a motorcyclist we met at the hotel in Esfahan. There seem to be a number of people following a similar route to us via motorbike.

Another tour of bazaars and mosques does not appeal. I spend the afternoon going native and laying about on a carpet in the hotel courtyard, although Iranian men mostly do their laying about in mosques and Iranian women are probably not allowed to lay about in public. A few of us also go up to the roof. From here we can see more mosques and the surrounding homes and shops built with mud very convincingly doing the job of cement. I find out our hotel is one of them when I try too hard to climb a wall to get a better look, and bits of it crumble in my hand.

Later in the day, a member of the religious police comes into the courtyard to tell our women that they are breaking the law by not wearing their headscarves in the courtyard. Sneering, they reluctantly put them back on.

I go out to dinner with Meg, Dave, Gaz, Rhiannon, Andrew, big John and Tracy. Cliques have developed in the group and this is who I tend to spend my time with at this stage of the journey. We have dinner at an old bathhouse with tiled floors and partially filled group baths preserved from its previous use. We try to throw Andrew in the one near our table at one point. The restaurant is not busy so nobody is disturbed by our tussling. I have a tasty chicken, walnut and pomegranite stew called a Fesenjun. Iranians like to mix their sweet and savoury, and to good effect.

Outside the restaurant, John and I have a conversation with an Iranian who speaks very good English and who urges us to tell our friends that Iran is a good country and doesn’t want to be the west’s enemy.

Later we find out that some our crew have bumped into some Americans. In Iran! We had been told that 99.9% of visitors applications from US citizens do not get accepted and I had left my US passport at home (I am a dual national) so I didn’t get caught with it on me on my travels, especially in Iran and Pakistan. However, these guys on a work related trip for an oil company, and obviously not an American one, so they must be some of the very few Americans to visit Iran (and not get arrested).

Meanwhile, some of the ladies had gone out and got talking to a woman who invited them back to her family’s house for dinner where they were treated like old friends.

Day forty nine - 19 September 2009; Yadz

We drive to Yadz, our last city stop before leaving Iran. I try to watch The Incredibles on Dave’s iPod but someone decides to put music on in the truck as it neared a conclusion, so I didn’t hear the end dialogue.

On arrival, I walk around Yadz a little bit with Jen and Hughie. Yadz seems to be a much more conservative town than any we have been to so far. The dress for men and women is more rigidly traditional. I buy Meg a top as the ‘man-shirt’ she has taken to wearing instead of her chador is probably not quite conservative enough. The market stall owner takes dollars, which we had originally thought was a widespread practice here, and other parts of Asia, but I haven’t really found that. Perhaps the government frowns on the practice, though of course Iran’s only big export is sold in dollars. Anyway, the stall owner is another friendly voice and tells us we are welcome in Iran, though he is not so welcoming to my haggling attempts.

 

the view from the hotel roof

 In the evening we are subject to an outside broadcast of the call to prayer and then the prayers themselves from the mosque near the hotel. From the roof, we get the full blast and it goes on for about two hours.

Day forty eight - 18 September 2009; Perpolis

Dave and Meg had talked about going to the protests early in the morning before we leave Esfahan. Personally I thought it was a terrible idea to be westerners at the protest, whether it turned out to be an anti-western rally or an anti-government protest. Either way, some people there wouldn’t like it. In the end they don’t go, but probably just because they are too tired.

We drive onto Persepolis, but with the protests all over the country there are many roadblocks which, at one point cause us to do a U-turn.

a view on the road

Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BC), is a mass of ruins laid out on a flat part of ground at the lower part, and then some temples mounted on the hills overlooking. The short climb to the temples provides a good view over the ancient city, but the ruins are not generally as well preserved as Ephesus in Turkey. They are also more randomly spread out, so you don’t get such a strong feel of what it was like in its heyday. This may be partially due to the fact that initially wooden columns were used when building the city.

view from the climb up to the temples

one of the temples

We are a little embarrassed to find graffiti, some from British archaeologists, on some of the relics.

Tonight is another bush camp, this time in the forest on the road to Persepolis.