by Paul Archer
We were trying to figure out how on earth we were going to find somewhere to stay when none of us had any clue what the Persian for 'hotel' was, when a friendly young man with impeccable English approached us and immediately invited us over to his place and then out to dinner. It dawned on us that we were still technically among the good ol' Kurds.
Over dinner in the city's finest fish restaurant we learnt that Ali and his friends were some kind of commodity traders, flitting between Iran and Dubai. They offered to let us stay at their offices for a few days, but more to our surprise, one of them returned from an errand sporting a plastic carrier bag stuffed full of cans of high-strength Special Brew lager: totally unexpected in what was supposedly a dry country. Each sip made us feel even guiltier as they explained that the cans were hiked through the landmine-ridden mountains from Iraq by poor smugglers looking to make a quick buck and so the alcohol-to-weight ratio was crucial to making it worth their while, especially as those who were caught were shot.
Iran regularly features in the Western media, but rarely in a good way. When you say you're going to Iran, most people's reaction is comparable to telling them you're going on a sailing excursion along the Somalian coast. However, although the government and its foreign policy supposedly presents one of the largest threats to 'Western' security, the country we saw was safe, pleasant and rammed full of some of the best sightseeing we had been lucky enough to experience.
The regime, however, is never far away. A few weeks before we arrived, the president, Ahmadinejad, announced that the rains had not arrived in Iran because the British had stolen them, and that is the reason why it always rains in England and not Iran. He also gave a speech to announce the celebration that Iran is completely free of homosexuals.
Iranian people, however, could not be more different from the image of the country portrayed in the media. Fiercely proud to be Persian (and not Arab; if you fail to make this distinction you will be met with some very stern looks indeed), they are articulate, intelligent and, from our experience, all appear to despise the government. Men dress in a Western manner with an open silkshirted Persian twist; the women wear skinny jeans, inches of make-up and finely coiffed hairstyles. All this effort is covered by the mandatory hijab-veil and a shirt-cum-dress that does a very effective job of hiding their figures in accordance with the strict laws governing women's dress. But as soon as you enter a liberal Iranian home, the veil and dress-shirt are removed and their TVs display illegal satellite programmes from abroad that show you the real Persia, if its people were free to do what they wanted.
Variety shows in Persian, filmed in London, allow people a sort of escape from the constant repetition of the ruling ayatollahs' speeches and propaganda that infest the terrestrial airwaves. BBC Persia provides them with news from a different viewpoint, film channels from the Emirates beam Hollywood's banned finest into their front rooms, while soap operas from South America, Australia and the US provide housewives with badly dubbed distraction.
Although the roads up to the capital, Tehran, were smooth ribbons of new Tarmac, the driving was the craziest yet, especially in the cities and towns. Vehicles assaulted us from every direction and constant attention was required to keep track of the bikes, cars and trucks, which were all vying for space. Speed limit signs appeared to dictate the minimum speed at which to overtake an unusual foreign car before cutting it up and squeezing through an impossibly narrow gap in front of it. Everyone seemed to drive at breakneck speed lest they arrive at their destinations ten seconds late.
Upon the advice of a friend who had visited Iran a few years before, we decided to escape the never-ending traffic of Tehran and head up north to the Caspian Sea for a few days.
During the early route planning we had been surprised to discover that it's possible to ski in Iran. They have a proper resort with lifts and the works. This is because the hills north of Tehran are high enough that they are blanketed with snow for much of the winter.
However, in the middle of summer, it is very hot.
And those hills are still very high.
And slap bang between Tehran and the Caspian Sea.
And when your radiator is a reduced sized unit built in a yard in Iraq and you've been driving uphill for half an hour, your engine will overheat.
So we pulled into one of the many restaurants on the side of the road.
The restaurant we chose to eat at was colourful, with plastic tables and chairs overlooking the beautiful valley we had just climbed up. We settled down into a pile of cushions and asked the prices of the shish kebabs pictured in the menu.
'Two hundred thousand rials,' said the waiter.
We had been in Iran for over a week and eaten in myriad places, from seriously grotty roadside joints to some very fine establishments in Tehran, and had a pretty good grasp of the cost of living. The price of these kebabs was reasonable – not dirt cheap, but not expensive – so we ordered.
Our plates of charcoal-cooked spiced minced lamb arrived on a piece of flatbread as big as the table, with yoghurt and salad. Ripping off the bread and sharing the food is customary so we dug in and filled our boots as Hannah's overheated engine cooled in the shade of some trees.
The bill arrived; the meal came to 400,000 rials, about £2.50. This was extremely reasonable and it seemed like the waiter's meat prices must have been arbitrary as we handed over the cash.
'No, no, no, no,' he said, 'four hundred thousand toman.'
The value of one rial is less than 0.0001 penny, so, to make people's lives easier, Persians lop one of the zeros off and call it toman. However, there seems to be no logic or consistency with this practice, and in a country under strict trade sanctions you sometimes find the most bizarre things cost a fortune (eggs) and some cost next to nothing (fuel). As a rule of thumb you should always ask whether the price is in toman or rials, even if it does make you look a bit stupid.
We were also still getting our heads around the completely alien Eastern-Arabic numeral system, so we had always taken extra care to confirm prices before we actually bought things. After a few minutes of finger-counting and working out with a paper and pen, it became clear that this man was trying to con us. He tried to charge £25 for what we knew should have cost no more than a tenner. Johno and I left to start the car as the waiter carried on shouting at Leigh, getting redder and redder by the second. Eventually Leigh dumped £20 down and jumped in the car.
Now the waiter started to really lose it, following Leigh to the car and reaching halfway through my open window to punch me as we drove off, his legs flailing out of the side of the cab. He carried on trying to throw punches halfway up the mountainside, and when he eventually gave up we all breathed a sigh of relief.
It was 30 minutes later, the incident almost forgotten, when an old blue saloon slowly started to pull up close behind us, honking its horn and veering towards us.
It was the waiter.
And he had brought a gang.
We were now in a comically slow car chase in two overheating cars, over kebabs. I didn't want to stop for these crooks, but when we saw a set of flashing lights behind us we pulled over. Within seconds we were surrounded by an angry mob, with the waiter at the head of the gang spurring them on. Where so many people had appeared from was anybody's guess, but they all seemed hellbent on attacking the three lads in the funny car. The police forced their way through the crowd to our windows but they barely spoke any English, so we couldn't explain that it was us who had been conned. It seemed the only way to break up the riot and save Hannah from the beating she was getting would be the old favourite – handing over a wad of cash to an undeserving party. The police tried to shoo away the crowd as we paid the waiter, but it didn't stop them kicking poor old Hannah one last time as we pulled away.
The whole time this was happening, a guy was having a long chat with Johno through the back window – apparently oblivious to the riot that was kicking off – asking him where he was from and whether he liked Iran.
GLOBAL POSITIONING MELTDOWN
Despite a few more third-party attempts by helpful friends, Leigh and Paul had still not been able to secure their Pakistan visas. To the immense relief of their worried mums and girlfriends, it would mean they would have to skip this leg of the trip. Our most likely looking option was now to ship Hannah from Iran directly to India; a cripplingly expensive process that would probably have us picking fruit in Australia for years to pay off the cost.
With all this in mind I had been thinking about travelling through Pakistan on my own using trains and buses and meeting the guys in India – after all it seemed a shame to waste the visa it had been such a hassle for me to obtain.
Leigh didn't seem particularly bothered by my suggestion and although Paul tried to act unperturbed I could tell he was less than happy at the thought of missing out on such a gnarly section of the trip.
I was trying to explain my choice and we were talking through options when a familiar accent interrupted us. 'Alright lads, where you from?'
Mohammad was in his early 20s and had lived near London until he was 15, before moving back to his family's home country to study in Tehran. Like many of the Iranians we met – especially the more Westernised ones – he candidly told us his opinions on the failings of his government and explained that his overly vocal criticism of them had landed him in trouble with the religious police in the strict capital. This had led to him moving, or being moved, to study in the smaller coastal town where he would cause fewer metaphorical waves, although his beachfront house meant many more of the literal kind.
He invited us into the typically messy student digs that he shared with three friends and a ceiling fan that was on the verge of shaking itself to an early grave. While we waited for a takeaway meal they told us that their landlady was a crazy old woman addicted to opium who had died during a recent religious festival. Ever since then, no one had been around to collect the rent, which suited them just fine.
The next morning, Leigh was carrying out his usual tinkering with the car. Whenever we stopped for any length of time he loved to fiddle with anything mechanical or electrical, sometimes carrying out essential maintenance that Paul and I didn't have the skill or motivation to do ourselves (fixing our ever-breaking electrics, repairing the alarm, changing the oil), but often just meddling where no meddling was required (gluing coins to the roll cage, making new switches for the dashboard, recarpeting the footwells).
As part of the record attempt, Guinness needed many different types of evidence to prove that we were really driving where we said we were. This ranged from a witness book, signed by policemen and other officials (including Santa Claus), to news articles charting our progress. However, the most essential part of the evidence was the track provided by a second GPS unit that showed exactly where we had driven since leaving London. So far it read slightly over 14,000 miles. The only problem was that the GPS ran on batteries and we were constantly forgetting to recharge them and having to scrounge from cameras and torches mid-drive whenever we saw the dreaded 'battery low' message.
Consequently, Leigh had decided to attempt to wire the GPS into the car's electrical system. When I looked over and saw him with live wires in one hand and the open GPS in the other I automatically asked, 'Have you backed it up?'
'Yeah, yeah, of course,' he replied, reassuring me that the vital track was saved to his computer's hard disk.
So, when a few minutes later I saw his face drop and watched him frantically trot in and out of Mohammad's house with the GPS and various screwdrivers in hand, a feeling of terror hit me.
'Leigh, what's wrong?'
No answer.
'Leigh, is the GPS OK?'
'No, it just won't turn on,' he said, rapidly leafing through the instruction manual.
'But you backed it up.'
He didn't answer and carried on ripping through the pages.
'Leigh, you backed it up, right?'
We had lost thousands of miles of recorded route from the world record and now had no GPS unit to proceed with. Understandably, Johno flipped out.
Leigh managed to locate the only shop in Tehran that repaired and sold GPS units, but he told us we had to be there by the next morning or it would be shut for the weekend. After what turned out to be an all too brief 24-hour stop by the coast we headed back across the mountain pass to the capital.
As I manoeuvred my way through the lighter-than-usual traffic, we entered a large roundabout, ironically named Freedom Square, to find ourselves face-to-face with a battalion of riot police. A young man on a scooter sped past us and yelled through the open window, 'Bad timing, friends!'
It appeared we had inadvertently stumbled across a prodemocracy protest.
In Iran.
In the depths of the Arab Spring.
The GPS shop was now only ten minutes away and our eyes were anxiously darting around for signs of trouble at every junction we neared – crowds were milling around and the occasional gang of riot police stared out from their visored helmets. As we approached the final large intersection I was somewhat preoccupied and missed the signals of one of the many uniformed traffic police that were placed around the city. They were all dressed in a smart white uniform with a red cap, wore mirrored aviator sunglasses and sported designer stubble. They took the place of traffic lights at most junctions, and after a while they tended to just blend in.
A police officer stood bold as day, aviator glasses glinting in the sun, as he held his hand up in a stop signal. He couldn't have stuck out against his drab surroundings any more.
Johno ignored him.
By the time I had seen the particular officer, who had motioned for our lanes of traffic to halt so he could start moving the six lanes of buses, cars and bikes running perpendicular to us, I was already committed to crossing the junction and tried my best to weave through the impossible gauntlet of tonnes of metal approaching from each side.
Have you ever had one of those moments when you're certain you're going to die? I hadn't until Johno drove me through Tehran. The traffic came at us from all sides, just as Leigh started shouting, 'Shiiit!', I ducked my head down, closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable impact, metal on metal, metal on bone and flesh, that bright light in front of my eyes… are we covered by travel insurance in Iran?
Maybe.
Maybe it would help pay for the repatriation of what was left of our mangled bodies back to England.
I slammed the brakes on and waited for the seemingly unavoidable crunch, but it never came. Somehow, as if in a scene from an action film, I had managed to dodge everyone else (everyone else managed to dodge the idiot in the London taxi, more like).
Paul, who had appeared to be resting in the passenger seat, was jolted upright by a sudden increase in volume of car horns, the abrupt stop and the sickening sixth-sense feeling you probably get when a ten-tonne bus screeches to a halt inches from your face. In the back Leigh was clinging on to the old passenger handles so hard that I was surprised they were still attached.
For a second there was relative calm as the stunned drivers stared at the black cab wedged amongst them, then the horns blared with a vengeance and a mob of police ran over shouting and gesturing angrily.
Worst of all was the reaction of my terrified teammates.
'What the ruddy flipping hell did you do that for! He was telling you to stop you silly ninny!' I shouted (or possibly something a bit stronger).
Unused adrenaline was pumping through me with nowhere to go and the bus's radiator was inches from my face.
'I didn't see him.'
'He had to jump out of the way of the ruddy-flipping car, how could you NOT flipping see him?'
The police were shouting in Persian, my mouth was still wide open with the shock, but Johno just gave his best English, 'Terribly sorry', blatantly ignored their obvious commands to stop and drove out of the jumble of vehicles. Within a few seconds there were six lanes of moving traffic between us
and them and they couldn't catch us anyway.
Soon, I pulled up outside the shop and sat shaking as Paul and Leigh went to find out the fate of our GPS. I took in exactly how close our near-miss had been while the local people gawked in amazement at the car.
The repairman told us he could recover most of the data, but that the GPS unit itself was truly fried, so all we could do was spend some of our dwindling supply of money. Obviously we were on a tight budget throughout the trip, but in Iran we couldn't withdraw any cash due to the strict UN sanctions and currency restrictions. That left us with the limited supply we had brought into the country in the cab's secret compartments. After replacing the GPS, which cost the equivalent of £150, we were left with a budget that fell below £6 a day each.