The End Of The Road

The roads are good in Iran. And it’s a good thing too, I have just ten days to make it through this country, which means I’ll have to do all of my sightseeing from the saddle of my bike.
True to reputation, the Iranians are proving to be uncommonly friendly. Several times in Mako I am stopped in the street and welcomed to Iran. There’s always a firm handshake and an enquiry after my health and place of origin. They’ve all heard of Scotland. “Aah! Escotte-land.” they say and nod. It appears we are famous for two things: whisky and Celtic Football Club.
On the drive south I fill up about every two hundred kilometres. It costs about $1 US. As I arrive at each petrol station a small crowd gathers, welcomes me to Iran and finds out I’m Scottish and in good health. As I leave a small knot of men grins and waves goodbye, shouting “Goodbye! You are welcome! Thank you!”

In Mirjaveh I get lost. I know just one thing about Mirjaveh: it has only one hotel. For about half an hour I ride around, realising I am never going to find it by pot luck. As I sit at a junction wondering what to do, four boys on two diminutive Hondas pull up.
“Hello.” I grin. “I am from Scotland, very well thank you and cannot find a hotel.”
They offer to show me the way. At about ten miles an hour we cruise sedately through the town in the setting sun. It’s a very ordinary town of little shops and tree shaded pavements. Respectable looking men with straight backs and steel grey hair walk purposefully through the milling crowds of howdahs. It’s the end of the day and the people are out in large numbers, shopping, socialising, and getting on with life. It’s an atmosphere curiously at odds with the red sun settling into the western horizon, lighting the swirls of wind blown dust that occasionally rush like wraiths across the road. Here in the centre, life is modern and prosperous, but the wild, mountainous desert lies right at the edge of town.
At my hotel, the boys queue up to shake hands and then grinning and waving, shout their goodbyes; roaring off into the sunset barely above walking speed.

In Qazvin, a little over 300km further to the south and east, it continues. In a shop, I collect together some snacks to see me through the evening. Among them is some processed cheese that proudly proclaims itself to be “55% Fat in Dry Matter,” and some alcohol free beer, intriguingly labelled “Apple Flavour.” The shopkeeper, as has become expected, welcomes me to Iran with all the usual pleasantries. Then he leans forward conspiratorially,
“What do you think of our government?”
Hmmm. A tricky one.
“I think all politicians are crazy.”
He straightens up and looks out of the window a little sadly,
“We do not like our government. They do such stupid things.”
“Mine too.” I answer inadequately.
Suddenly he brightens up and waves dismissively at my bag of snacks,
“You are our guest. You do not have to pay.”
But I insist and eventually he takes a suspiciously small sum of money for my bulging bag of fat in dry matter and bizarre tasting beer.

It’s not until I’m well south of Tehran that I hear the news. A few days previously, twelve people had been shot dead on the road between Kerman and Zahedan. A ‘considerable escalation in violence’ is making the province of Baluchistan into a no go zone. Local tribes have effectively waged war on the Iranian government on the only road between Iran and Pakistan. Indeed, the only road between the middle east and the sub-continent.
It is one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. A fourteen year dream is being threatened with a premature end.
The difficulty is that I have no experience of this kind of risk. Put me on a leeward mountainside with a fresh fall of windblown snow and I can give you a rough estimate of how likely that slope is to avalanche while I cross it. Put me on the same mountain in a blizzard and I would, in most circumstances, be equipped to extricate myself from the situation. Right now, here in the South East of Iran, I have absolutely no idea what the odds are on getting shot on the Kerman/Zahedan road. Is it one in a thousand? Perhaps it’s one in ten? Fifty-fifty? And should I be presented with an angry tribesman waving a Kalashnikov I would have no idea how to get out of that situation.
With no way of evaluating the risks I need expert advice. I phone the British embassy in Tehran and their advice is clear: The whole area is extremely volatile right now, people are being killed, tourists have previously been singled out as targets for kidnapping , with British tourists being especially vulnerable. As I am 100% of the tourists I have seen in Iran I’m not particularly liking the odds. In the end it is pretty unequivocal: “Tourists should not travel overland between Iran and Pakistan.” As ignorant as I am, I decide it would be criminally irresponsible to ignore the experts. Live to ride another day. Live to ride West.

The following morning a hot wind blows through the vents in my jacket and I can feel the dust gumming my eyes and drying my lips. The white sun seems to fill the sky and the world is polished and painfully bright. The way is filled with short snatches of scent; burning wood and diesel, dry soil and chemical fertilizer; the sudden rushing aroma of vegetation in the cool wind over a river. And always the steady drumming of the engine and the rattle of crippled aluminium luggage; then suddenly, the rich, throaty growl as I drop a gear and push past a line of trucks.
From inside my helmet, battered by the slipstream for fourteen thousand kilometres, I watch the passing landscape strangely disconnected. This road is no longer my road. It’s just the way home.

THE END

From Turkey into Iran

The road to Dogubayazit, as far as Erzincan, is dominated by a low mantle of heavy grey cloud and intermittent rain. It is, I believe, what our glorious Met Office call ‘organised showers.’ It is the only possible reason I can find for the vindictive personal vendetta which precipitation has for me. There has to be some organisation behind it, bad luck just can’t explain the pernicious pursuit of yours truly across deserts, mountains and continents by what can only be described as ‘Caledonian’ weather conditions.
The following day, however, is much better, and the last 400km of the road to Dogubayazit has deep blue skies with an artful distribution of candy floss clouds. The country becomes drier the further East I travel. High mountains of broken brown and grey rock rip up into the blue sky. Between them, in the valleys, are little pockets of pasture, startling green below the crumbling peaks. Huddled in little groups, like giant white mushrooms, are the circular tents of the shepherds. The shepherds themselves stand immobile on the hillside with vast flocks of sheep which vary in hue from cream to chocolate and every shade in between.
Little can have changed for these people for countless generations.

Nearer Dogubayazit the mountains pull back and a wide flat valley marks the way to Iran. Above the town broods the massive, snow plastered bulk of Mt. Ararat. It is doubly impressive because none of the surrounding mountains come close to it in stature. I get a little lost in the famous, dusty frontier town known as ‘Dogbiscuit’ to the overlanding community, but eventually find my hotel.

A rest day gives me the opportunity to visit Ishak Pasa Palace, an ancient mosque/fortress/palace/cafeteria complex perched high above the plain in a classic defensive position. It is stunning, both the building and the location, and I rattle off dozens of shots hoping to get a picture that does it justice.

Walking home after a Has Has (it has meat, cheese and bread: the three essential food groups, and is lovely) at a local restaurant, I meet a boy of about nine. He thrusts a set of bathroom scales at me and grins. I’ve seen this before, it seems to be a way of investing the act of begging with a little dignity. The provision of a notional service for a fee, I have weighed myself in Kathmandu, Asilah and now Dogubayazit. I offer him the equivalent of about ten pence for the privilege and he gives me the thumbs up. Apparently, including a rucksack full of photography gear, I weigh 95 kilos.
“Blimey!” I say and pat my stomach. He laughs and pats his own. As I turn to leave he snaps to attention and salutes. Solemnly, I draw myself up and return his salute like Monty at El Alamein. It’s a strange world this, I reflect, that has one saluting small boys in busy Turkish streets.
That evening I relax in my hotel and prepare for Iran. I have my last beer until India and listen to some music. As Aretha sings about a ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ I am intrigued by a the curious male backing vocals I have never noticed before. It is a full minute before I realise it is the call to prayer resonating through the window of my hotel room.

Dogubayazit is a mere hop, skip and jump from the border with Iran and I’m soon wandering around in that state of confusion that goes hand in hand with trying to temporarily import a vehicle into another country. After an amount of shuffling, queuing, stamping, queuing, sighing, tutting and more stamping I get out of Turkey and into Iran for a bit more stamping, shuffling, and sighing but no queuing. Everyone is very friendly, the whole process is actually very smooth and over in little more than an hour.
Another short ride through dry mountains to Mako where I will stay the night and spend some of the enormous wad of rials I now have secreted around my person.

Turkey 2

I arrive in Ankara in the early evening. It’s cold and wet and I am about to experience the full and terrible majesty of Turkish city driving. Up till now it’s just been practice, the light-hearted frolics of the only partially demented. In the ensuing melee it’s hard to stay upright and moving, never mind find your way round the city. In the apocalyptic cacophony of horns, squealing tyres and revving engines I just keep moving blindly, determined to stay at the first hotel I see. I don’t care if it’s Bates Motel, I’m checking in and having a shower, it’d be safer than staying out here.

Eventually, exhausted by what can only be described as the Turkish ‘Shock and Awe’ driving technique, I see a tall, slender finger of hope rising from the smog. It’s a twenty storey Radisson. I shamble in, trying to look more rakish than ravaged to discover it’s forty five quid a night. I decide that despite this being three times my normal budget I really don’t care and book in. I’m whisked up to the seventh floor where a scene of unparalleled luxury awaits my gaze. It’s all so clean and comfy. The bed is huge and flat and unbearably soft, there’s free wireless internet and little doodads of soap and even shampoo. ‘Oh my hairs getting a treat tonight!’ I mumble happily, ‘Yer actual shampoo!’ It’s the first time it’s seen such David Beckham style pampering since I left the UK. I turn on the shower to see if it runs asses milk, but no, it’s just steaming, hot water.

On goes the telly, and yes there is the usual, hypercoloured Turkish soap operas: smouldering eyed, moustachioed men and breathless women who appear to be a curious mixture of ecstatic and stroppy. But there is also BBC World. Only just managing to refrain from saluting the female newsreader in dewy eyed gratitude for the British Broadcasting Corporation, I sink back on my bed and let her clipped, perfectly formed vowels and consonants wash over me. It’s the perfect antidote to the stresses of the day. Tomorrow I’ll have to move somewhere cheap and grubby, but for now I’m in heaven.

Two days later it’s Monday, time to apply for a visa for Iran. I take a critical look in the mirror before leaving the hotel. My hair is combed, the worst of the fluff picked from my t-shirt and I am wearing my least oily trousers. I notice I’m getting split ends on my moustache and make a mental note to stop chewing it. I’m looking as respectable as I’m going to get without a high pressure hose and somebody else’s wardrobe, so head to Embassy. It’s all much easier than I expected, there’s hardly a queue and the official speaks good English and is very helpful. I will find out the next day if I have been deemed respectable enough.
And, to my surprise, they give me a ten day transit visa, a grin and an ‘Enjoy your trip!’
I’d been preparing myself to be rejected following the current contretemps over Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, but it would seem not to have been an issue.
One last kebab in the great, greasy eatery around the corner from my hotel and I’m off for Amasya in Eastern Turkey.

Amasya huddles in a rocky gorge 330km north east of Ankara. It’s sympathetically restored Ottoman houses crouch on the banks of a café au lait river, tiny private balconies overhanging the water. I find a hotel with rooms possessing just such balconies and move in for a couple of days.

The following day I do an oil change and head up to explore the rock cut tombs that surround the town. Hewn from the living rock the black eyes of their entrances have stared out across the valley for two and a half thousand years. The tombs are the size of a small room with a door raised between three and six feet from the ground, the lower edges of which have been polished to marble smoothness by two millennia of curious hands who’s owners have stretched to peer inside.
Wandering around I find a heavily overgrown path and can’t resist the urge to see what it leads to. I follow it up through the bushes as it climbs on and on. I consider giving up but decide there must be something at the end of it. It gets steeper and steeper and soon I’m clambering over smooth rocks and tiny ancient steps to the base of a cliff. In the cliff is a natural cave. It looks like it may have been widened by human hand but it’s hard to tell. I wonder if this cave was also used as a tomb. Perhaps it was the first, giving the inspiration for the tombs lower down. I creep slowly into it’s dark depths wondering what strange rituals may have been played out here. Suddenly my foot lands in something soft. I peer into the gloom to see what it is and discover a pair of pants half buried in the mud, circa 1970, the ‘Bri-nylon Period’. It occurs to me these pants might lie here for a thousand years before some archaeologist in a silver jumpsuit and Buck Rogers haircut discovers them and soberly displays them in a museum as ‘grave goods’.
On the way down I am given a chicken sandwich in the latest of a string of friendly gestures from the Turks. I wander back to the hotel happy with the Turks and regretful us Brits aren’t more like that.

That evening I sit on my own private balcony as the sediment laden waters rush past on their way to the Black Sea. I study my map in search of the road to Dogubayazit as night falls and the town eases to a halt in natural symbiosis with the darkening sky.

Turkey 1

My map says it’s 32km after a certain junction to the Turkish border. After 55km I’m thinking I might be lost. Hmm. Everywhere is a dense green forest, a pleasant enough environment for a Sunday cruise but when you are trying to pinpoint your location it makes things a little difficult. There’s no villages, junctions, farms, anything.

Fortunately I used to be a Boy Scout and in between all the fire raising and boozing we did learn a few things. One of which was: “When you realise you are lost, keep on going until you find somewhere to navigate from.” Either that or it was “When you realise you are lost, stop immediately and retrace your steps.” I decide it was the former and keep going down the seemingly endless winding road threading it’s way slowly through the impenetrable forest.
As luck would have it, just as I’m about to turn round and laboriously retrace my steps, I suddenly pop out of the forest at a border post. I’d been on the right road after all, but those pesky cartographers (I’ve met a few, an idle bunch if ever there was one) hadn’t taken the sinuosity of the road into account and vastly underestimated it’s length. I imagine my chagrin had I spent the rest of the day trundling around the forest in search of a road I’d already found.
After visiting half a dozen different little windows and getting a sheaf of forms stamped, inspected, shuffled, restamped and handed back I am free to enter Turkey.

The roads are pretty good and I make good time, arriving in Kirklareli mid afternoon. I’m soon wandering around town checking out Turkey. It makes a good impression. The people are very friendly, when I stop in shops where the proprieter doesn’t speak English, instead of the curt ‘No’ I’d got used to in Romania, they drag in a friend from a neighbouring shop who speaks a few words. Nothing seems too much trouble and there are plenty of genuine, welcoming smiles.
It would seem rude not to have a kebab on my first night in Turkey so I indulge. It seems it is possible to cook a kebab that is tasty even to the unintoxicated. Just not in Britain.

The following day I head to Gallipoli. It proves to be a beautiful part of the world. The natural beauty of the peninsula seems to make the terrible fighting here all the more poignant. High on a hillside, at the end of a dirt track, I find a tiny cemetery. The graves face out over the azure waters of the Dardenelles where dozens of ships of all nationalities cut snow white trails between the Aegean and the Black Sea.
It’s more sobering than I thought it would be, much more so than an ordinary cemetery, which have little or no effect on me. More sobering than the vast memorials on the peninsula. Perhaps it’s the personal nature of the graves.
I wonder who Private G. Lake of the Australian Infantry was. I wonder if he realised, before he died, he’d lie here for ever, under the Turkish sun. I wonder if he’d think it was worth it.

I leave Gallipoli for Pamakkule and its famous limestone pools. The last stretch is packed with ‘excitement’. In the afternoon it starts chucking it down with heavy, windblown rain. The sky is so dark it’s like riding through dishwater. At a junction a car pulls out to pass a lorry that has stopped in the right hand lane. I’m about 30 feet away and doing 60mph. I squeeze the bike through a gap which feels 6 inches wider than the panniers. The idiot gets the full brunt of my horn and I swear so much my visor steams up sadly preventing him reading my lips.
In Denizli, in heavy, speeding traffic, a piece of plastic trim four feet wide and 8 inches thick comes bouncing out from under a lorry. There’s no time to react, I just brace myself and hope it goes under without knocking me off. BANG! The bike hits it centrally and it is spat out behind me for the next driver to worry about.
Five minutes later a van pulls to a stop in the middle lane of a three lane highway. My stopping distances are better judged now and I stop effortlessly but the truck behind me blares his horn and rips past in a cloud spray about two feet away. By the time I get to Pamakkule I’m exhausted. I spend the the rest of the evening and most of the next day reading ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and pretending it didn’t happen.

The pools are empty. I leave for Ankara to see if the Iranians will give me a visa.

Out of Romania, through Bulgaria

The whole of Bulgaria looks exactly lıke thıs...

I can’t swing my leg over the bike unless I stand on the left hand foot peg. It’s a precarious move, but there’s only so much ‘American Chopper’ on Discovery you can watch, and I have to move on.

Bucharest is surprisingly nice. Kind of like Glasgow without the great architecture but in better nick. There’s some nice parks, wide streets, chain stores and Ronald MacDonald is doing his best to supersize the population. Although, the Palace of Parliament, a Ceausescu monstrosity, has to be seen to be believed. I’ve never seen a building that so screamed at the world: “COWER IN SERVITUDE, PROLETARIAT SCUM!”

My first hotel, the Hotel Muntena, is appalling. Sullen staff put me in a grubby room. The bathroom is in the hall and the fittings look like they’ve been recently salvaged from a long sunken trawler with a dysenteric crew. Outside my room is a nightclub that goes ‘Thump..thump..thump,thump thump..thump..thump,’ till 4am. On the second day the manager comes and angrily asks why I have had the effrontery to park my bike in the locked alley next to the hotel.
“Because your staff said it was OK.”
It’s the truth and the only possible answer. He’s not happy. In a confusing babble of Romanian, German, English and conspicuous idiocy he explains (what a shocker!) I have to pay for the privilege. It’s only a couple of quid but in my depressed state it irritates the hell out of me.
The next day I move to a new Hotel. There’s a nice looking lass behind the desk who does this weird thing with her face. It’s like a frown, only upside down. Slowly, through the haze of time, long forgotten memories stir and recognition comes in a flash. She’s SMILING!
My new hotel has clean, quiet rooms with TV, friendly staff and included breakfast. At last I find a bike dealer (after two days of failure) who has some enduro handlebars in stock, things are looking up. I am only just in time to stop my parents sending the bars off my Enfield by courier (not the first thing the poor beleaguered folks have had to sort out for me while I’m off on this jolly) and my only regret is that I won’t get to see what my XT looks like with a set of 1950s chrome handlebars!

After 4 days in Bucharest the miles of pavement pounding searching for handlebars and 8mm Allen Keys have meant my knee is not much better than it was when I arrived but the bike is ready to go so so am I. I’m off to Bulgaria.

Customs at Ruse is relatively painless and I’m soon cruising through a country I know nothing about. As I sit eating my lunch, staring at rolling, forested hills, I realise I don’t know anyone who’s been to Bulgaria. It’s a good feeling and the warm content that comes with exploration accompanies me right through this remarkably green and pleasant country. I have a day off in Sozopol on the Black Sea, and it’s on to Turkey.