Iran and Turkey: High Speed across the axis of friendliness and the beginning of the end

Current Location: Istanbul, Turkey

“Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by?
We never get to stop and open our eyes.
One minute you’re waiting for the sky to fall
Next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all”
- Bruce Cockburn

“Young Iranians may grumble, wear jeans, drink Pepsi and watch football. But they are nationalists whose instinct in the face of external attack will surely be to rally around their leaders, no matter how flawed.”
- The Economist – Special Report on Iran, July 2007

I love it when the plan comes together” – Hannibal, The A-Team

Iran has got an impressively bad reputation with much of the western world. It is represented in the media as a dangerous country of fanaticism and aggression. In my experience however, in many ways Iran felt like an incredibly “normal” country, and it hardly needs to be said that the image we in the west have of the country is rather misleading.

The people are friendly and hospitable; the roads are smooth though clogged with traffic; the towns are packed with fast food and icecream outlets, fun fairs and museums, book shops and markets. Amazing carpets for sale – yes, but also Pepsi and pizza.

There are also noticeable elements which illustrate the extraordinary meeting between eastern and western culture – the women wear slightly menacing black cloaks and hoods, the men wear tight t-shirts and pull wheelies on their motorbikes to show off their manliness (though it is illegal for them to have girlfriends to show off to – or alcohol to drink or satellite dishes to watch). There are photos and portraits of the martyrs from the horrific Iran-Iraq war plastered up on bill boards everywhere – and there are occasional posters of bitter rhetoric against the USA.. The geography meanwhile is magnificent and varied – not a uniform rocky desert (as we often imagine the whole middle east to be), but a spectacular mixture of great mountains which dwarf the Alps, teeming tourist towns beside the beaches of Caspian Sea, and lush fields of rice and fruit in the humid lowlands.

The hardest thing about travelling in Iran is getting the visa which allows you to enter in the first place. I had to pay a travel agent more than 200 USD in order for them to email me a six digit number which I received whilst in India. Armed with this expensive code scribbled down in the back of my diary, I set off to visit to the Iranian embassy in New Delhi. There, in a clean air conditioned waiting room I presented my passport along with the code to a sombre, bespectacled, grey stubbled man who looked at my application and took a folder from the shelf – and to my surprise opened it to reveal a sheet of paper with my name and full details on it… Tehran had already approved my application and shortly afterwards I was walking back out onto the Indian streets with an impressive new visa sticker in my passport. I was all set to go.

3 months later, having cycled through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, it was finally time to put the visa to the test. The border guards laughed good naturedly when I said I was English – but did I detect a little sense of uneasiness when they realised that I was from “the little Satan” (America was given the title of “great Satan” by the late Ayatollah)? Actually, the police throughout the country were to prove extremely hospitable – often giving me tea, inviting me to stay in their roadside porter cabins and in one restaurant even insisting on paying for my breakfast.

Two days after crossing the border I reached the great eastern city of Mashhad – home to Iran’s most important shrine (that of Ali Reza – the martyred 8th Imam of the Shiites). Wheeling my bike round block after block of ugly concrete development looking for a place to stay, I eventually decided to try phoning a carpet dealer whose number I had been given by a traveller in Samarkand. An hour later I was settled. Mr Vali had been trading in carpets all his life – both within Iran and in London and Switzerland, so it was great to finally hit on a trustworthy source of presents for a few people back home.

2 days later I was back on the road again, pedalling fast through arid scrub and dusty towns. I spent the the night camping in a small pine forest near the road and in the morning a shepherd with a gentle young face squatted on his haunches as I ate a breakfast of tasteless Uzbek biscuits (I was not too disappointed when one of his sheep sneaked up and stuck its nose in the bag – giving me a good excuse to feed the rest to his dog). The road continued on into some mountains before beginning a long winding descent out of the rocky wind-scaped hills and down towards the lush fields which lie beside the Caspian Sea.

Much of the Caspian coast was heavily built up with ugly resorts and horrible traffic jams, but in one seaside town I was invited to stay with some bright young undergraduates. Within a few hours they managed to make me inadvertently behave like a dangerous outlaw. First of all, I tried some of their highly illegal but widely produced home-brew wine (”made by my aunt” my new friend said). The next night we really laughed in the face of danger by having a meal with their girlfriends. As we sat chatting and eating burgers I was not really conscious of the fact we were doing anything wrong – and it was only afterwards that my friend explained that all through the meal he had been nervously scanning the roads for police cars. He had once spent a night in jail (and had to be bribed out by his father) merely for walking down the street with a girl who was not their sister or mother.

On one hot afternoon I also met a Canadian lady in a cafe who told me of her experiences of 30 years in the country married to a local restaurant owner – she had seen the empty bazaars during the uncertain months of revolution, and she had heard the Iraqi bombs dropping in the war of the 1980s. She also told me of how although it seems that the women (in their compulsory black cloaks) appear subdued and oppressed by men and religion, it is actually the women not the men who rule the roost. It is not unusual, she told me, for men to arrive home from a hard days work, only to be ordered to drive their wives around the town to visit friends and relatives – or to buy them more expensive jewelery. Refusal for the men, is apparently not an option. I do not know how far this situation goes, but it is certainly interesting to note what a different picture you get by talking to insiders rather than just observing things from the outside. It is a special privilege of the cyclist to frequently meet unexpected and interesting characters along the road, and I always especially like this when I am able to understand what they are saying. (One of the great disadvantages of a country hopping trip like this however, is that I never have time to learn the language – so I must depend on meeting English speakers from time to time to get an insight into what is going on).

After 3 weeks of riding up and down – through mountains, past seas, amongst forests and across deserts, I eventually rolled my bike up to the western border of Iran and crossed into Turkey. With awesome Mount Ararat (where Noah beached his ark) towering snow covered to my right, I sped on towards tangibly close Europe, and felt triumphant to realise that I had now got through all of the complicated bureaucracy and daunting security issues of the middle east and that the plan – to get the visas, avoid the terrorists, and cross the deserts had in the end come together near perfectly. Like getting through Siberia safely almost three years ago, and getting to Australia safely 18 months ago – making through a difficult stretch felt great!

Two days ride into Turkey and it was time to dump my bike temporarily with a friend and catch a bus 1000 km to to Ankara in order to fly back to England for my sister´s wedding. It was great to be briefly home once more – seeing friends and girlfriend and family again – this time in so much happier circumstances than my previous flight home in April. I was very glad to be there to witness my sister Rosanna marry Mark Brodie and to share in all the celebrations that went with their great day.

And then, before I knew it I was flying back to Turkey and getting ready for the final stage – into Europe and home at last. Having now spent so much time at home in recent months, it almost feels silly to keep returning to the trip to finish it off “properly”, but having now invested 3 years into cycling home from Siberia it would be silly not to finish it properly, wouldn´t it !

As always, many thanks for your many prayers, emails and kind donations to Viva Network – with your help, over seventeen thousand pounds has now been raised! We are hoping to make it over the twenty thousand mark before I get home, so any further donations to their amazing work with children at risk around the world (street children, orphans, abused children exploited children, child soldiers) is very much appreciated. Please see www.viva.org for more information about the amazing work that they do or visit www.justgiving.com/cyclinghomefromsiberia to donate to their work tax efficiently .

Best wishes and God bless,

Rob
www.cyclinghomefromsiberia.com