It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  Nowadays the cave is home to one of the most important Zoroastrian temples in the world and a centre for regular pilgrimages. The diminutive spring is little more than a trickle (Chak Chak literally means 'drip drip') but this tiny amount of moisture in an otherwise completely arid area has allowed a huge tree to flourish far up the mountainside.

  We were given vague directions to the area and for a while we followed the road signs by figuring that two identical Persian letters next to each other must mean Chak Chak. However, soon these signs dried up, like the precious water in the hot sand.

  As we drove along we scanned for someone, anyone, to ask for directions. Then we saw him. An old man standing next to a battered car that once might have been called white on the side of the road. When we pulled up beside him he appeared to not be the least bit surprised to see an old London taxi full of bedraggled foreigners.

  'Salam,' started Paul, who was behind the wheel. 'Er… Chak Chak?'

  The man beamed and vigorously nodded, 'Chak Chak!'

  Paul glanced back around at us for guidance but meeting a sea of shrugs turned back to the old man.

  'Chak Chak?' he repeated, this time pointing backwards and forwards along the road with an enquiring look.

  'Chak Chak!' said the man.

  Paul looked confused. 'Um, I don't think he knows the way guys.'

  He turned back to the man. 'Er, thanks… shukran… merci…'

  He was just about to pull away when the man played his trump card: 'Chak Chak!' he said forcefully, this time holding his finger up in a 'wait here' motion.

  He wandered around to the other side of his car, prised open the rear door and lifted something shiny out. He brought it back around to our open window and passed it to a very puzzled Paul who passed it to me.

  I looked at the thing for a moment. 'I think it's an urn of tea?' I announced with uncertainty.

  As I looked up, Paul passed me something else: a carrier bag of sugar and a collection of small glass cups.

  'Guys… what's going on?' asked Leigh as the man locked his car, tugged our door open and planted himself firmly on the back seat next to Craig.

  'Chak Chak!' the man cried triumphantly and pointed directly down the road ahead.

  'Do you want us to…' Paul started ask.

  'Chak Chak!'

  'OK, so I'll just go…'

  'Chak Chak!'

  So we looked at each and started driving.

  'Chak Chak!'

  As the miles passed our new passenger made himself comfortable, singing Persian songs and chain-smoking next to Leigh. Any slight hesitation from Paul was quickly rebuked with the man's two-word catchphrase and a swift clip on the back of the head.

  He was about 65 and barely pushing five foot tall. He had stickers all over his chest where an ECG had been attached, a hospital wristband on his arm and his left sleeve had a large blood stain on it, as though he had wrenched out a drip. He started to speak rapid-fire Persian, pointed to his chest and then made a cut-throat motion.

  It appeared as though we had inadvertently picked up a dying man who had escaped from a hospital and were driving him into the middle of the desert to pray one more time before he died.

  Out came a packet of cigarettes and the old man sparked up, right in front of the no-smoking sticker in the back of the cab. Realising his rudeness, he offered them around (there were no takers), spilt ash in Leigh's ear and then berated me for driving too slowly. Trying to tell him that we were going up a hill in a massively overheating taxi with five people in it was beyond our two-word vocabulary and he continued to hit me and shout at me for my tardiness, occasionally sporadically breaking into song between drags because our sound system wasn't working.

  We arrived at Chak Chak three cigarettes later and parked up. The temple is at the top of a hill and we started to make our way up. Our geriatric escapee, however, had other plans. First he insisted we share his tea – obediently we drank the obscenely sweet concoction – before setting off for the hill. The old man immediately started to lag behind, and looking back I could see him bent double, heaving, possibly just minutes away from death. I went back down to join him. He pointed at his heart, then coughed and spluttered and started to make his way up, only after insisting I take a photo of his bare-chested ECG patches.

  The temple's caretaker was sat beneath a sign that informed women not to enter during menstruation and he greeted us warmly as we approached the gaudy bronze doors.

  'Eternal flame?'

  We nodded.

  'Yes, yes, this way.' He hesitated, made a fist and flicked his thumb at us in the way that someone asks for a lighter. 'You have fire?'

  We had been trying to explain to the dying man that we were planning to camp in the desert that night, and we thought he had said that it was OK as he was also going to stay at Chak Chak, but as the evening wore on it became clear he wanted to go back to his car. A little charade developed where we would all wave him goodbye and start towards our car with him waving us off cheerfully, but as soon as we started the engine he would hastily gather up his tea and sugar and come running to the back seat.

  We tried in vain to figure out what to do.

  'It's a two-hour round trip back to his car…'

  '… but we can't just leave a dying man in the desert…'

  '… nobody's leaving a dying man in the desert!'

  'But we don't have enough fuel for a return trip!'

  'Oh…'

  'Well, we could, maybe…'

  'Dude, we are not leaving him here!'

  'Well who's taking him back then?'

  As we debated the moral repercussions of leaving a dying man alone in the middle of the desert, I realised that our merry band of travellers would soon be breaking up. Leigh had received an email to say that our Pakistani visa attempt had failed once more. Luckily a friend of ours Leigh had contacted at the last minute, who had some contacts at the Pakistani Embassy in Dubai, had said he was able to pull some strings to ensure we could enter Pakistan, and so Leigh and Paul would be catching a coach back to Shiraz to get a flight to Dubai the next morning.

  While we were arguing away about our unexpected passenger, the old man flagged down the solitary passing car, jumped in and drove off. Well at least one of our problems had been solved.

  CHAPTER 24

  DEPORTED FROM IRAN

  Raul was waiting for us in arrivals; cool as can be, in a smart, stylish skinny jeans and black waistcoat combo. Leigh and I, who 20 hours previously had been in what felt like one of the remotest spots on earth, were wearing very tatty jeans, ripped T-shirts, Iraqi Arab scarves and Talib-eards that would make any Pakistani militant proud.

  Dubai is a big, brash, money-obsessed show town, filled with big brash, money-obsessed people, driving big, brash expensive cars to big, brash shopping malls, cinemas and American fast-food chains. It could not have been any further from the places we had been in the past three months and we were both suffering from the culture shock as Ferraris and Lamborghinis sped past us.

  We stayed with our friend Jane, a war correspondent and probably the toughest girl either of us have ever met, on the 14th floor of a luxury tower block, where we made the most of the luxuries available. A courier from the embassy arrived, collected our passports and disappeared, leaving us with an unexpected free day. I would be heading back to Iran as soon as possible so I wanted to ensure I had lots to tell Johno as he was currently stuck in the desert with the Aussie. I bought cookies, Cadbury chocolate, crisps, coffee, cheese, English magazines and (most importantly) cereal and cold milk – the greatest Western invention not yet to have noticeably travelled east.

  After a hearty breakfast and a dip in the pool, the passports were returned by the courier, who told us we had no fee to pay. After six months of angst, failed embassy trips and plan Bs, our visas to Pakistan were finally in our hands and we hadn't even had to pay for them.

  Hannah had been having intermittent problems with her cooling system ever since we
first experienced the rising temperatures of southern Turkey and northern Iraq six weeks earlier – a car designed for the soggy backstreets of London just couldn't quite cope with the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, especially at her ripe old age.

  Now as we drove further south the problems returned and each slight incline saw the engine 'TEMP' needle slowly creeping towards the red danger band. The temperature sensor on Craig's watch showed 60°C and the gearstick and pedals became too hot to touch with bare skin.

  Unfortunately, car whizz kid Leigh was now sunning himself next to a private pool 500 miles away, but before he left he had warned me not to let the needle hit the red under any circumstances.

  During one of the frequent cooling stops, Craig and I were peering under the hood of the car and pretending we knew what we were doing when I suddenly noticed that the large cooling fan on the front of the engine had somehow wedged itself against the back of the radiator, leaving a scary-looking gouge in the delicate cooling fins. We would need a quick fix to get us over the hills that rose up on the path before us.

  The only option I could see, short of taking everything to pieces by the side of the road, was to cut the fan down so it was clear of the radiator and try to reattach it to a shaft somehow. Thirty minutes later my soft middle-class hands were blistered from hacking at the tough plastic with the sweat drenched wire cutters, but the fan was clear of the radiator and wedged back in place, and Hannah drove smoothly once more. Apparently I didn't need Leigh after all.

  As holder of dual nationality, I was eligible to get a new visa-onarrival for Iran using my Irish passport, but as a Brit, Leigh would have to meet the rest of us further down the route in Pakistan. So the next morning I enjoyed a delightful flight to Tehran, perched between Granma Omani and her family on their holidays, none of whom wanted to switch with me to be closer to their loved ones because it would mean forfeiting their window seat. This meant that they settled for shouting over me in rapid, spittle-infused Persian for the whole three hours.

  Upon landing I went to the window marked 'Visas' and waited. A young, smiling Iranian prodded a form over to me, which I dutifully completed and returned to him, along with my passport, which he took away into the back office. I waited and waited, until I saw my young friend appear, trailed closely by a man in a neat suit and overly shiny shoes, who was clearly his boss. They pointed at me, looked at me sternly and then returned to their office, deep in serious conversation. Half an hour later the boss emerged and asked me the usual visa questions about why I was visiting Iran. I answered, and boss man disappeared for what seemed like an age.

  Half an hour later I saw a petite and very attractive girl in a hijab wander past, clutching my passport and clearly looking for someone.

  'Hi, can I have my passport back please?' I asked smilingly.

  'Oh… are you Paul?'

  I nodded.

  'Ahh, I thought you were Iranian, sorry.' She looked at me askance. 'I was looking for an… um, Irish man.'

  It appears I didn't fit her image of small ginger men in green, sat on pots of gold with shamrocks in their hats.

  'I need two hundred euros,' she said matter-of-factly.

  'I thought it was fifty euros?'

  'Fifty? Most of them are costing four hundred, I've called in a load of favours from friends in booking to get you two hundred.'

  I was confused. 'But everywhere I've read says it's a fifty euro fixed-price visa?'

  'Huh? This is for your flight,' she said. Now it seemed she was the one confused.

  'What flight?!'

  'Home.'

  'Home, what, where?' I stuttered, getting more and more frantic. This wasn't going well at all.

  'I'm coming to Iran, not leaving it,' I explained.

  She looked at me pityingly. 'Yes, you are.'

  'No, I'm not, I'd think I'd know…'

  'Yes you are, you're being deported.'

  'DEPORTED?'

  I've never quite understood those moments in films, when somebody gets some bad news and the whole world starts to spin, until then. This was it, the expedition was over, finished, kaput, and I was desperately trying to focus on the pretty girl with my passport.

  'Is it because I'm Irish?'

  'No, of course not, we always give visas to Irishmen.'

  'But whyyy?' The 'why' came out as more of a suppressed primal yelp than a word.

  'Something on our computers said no, your passport has been flagged and we can't let you in, I'm very sorry. If it was up to me…'

  She trailed off as vivid images surfaced in my head of the policeman with squiffy eyes photocopying every single page of my passport asking why it was we found ourselves camping by all that firepower.

  Every single page.

  Eventually it sunk in, but still dazed I handed over the cash and was escorted to a cell with my own personal guard.

  I had about £1 worth of credit, so I called Leigh. He didn't pick up.

  CHAPTER 25

  ARMED ESCORTS

  After a long search through the abandoned streets of Bam, Craig and I eventually tracked down an Internet cafe, and after a quiet word with the owner fired up the illegal proxy software that would allow us to bypass the nationwide ban on our email and Facebook accounts and check for any news from Paul and Leigh.

  The good news was they had finally managed to secure the visas that had eluded them for so long. The bad news was that Paul was being deported.

  The only plan we could come up with was to meet in the Pakistani town of Multan, over a thousand miles away. I sat there as it sunk in that I would be doing such a huge and important chunk of the journey without the friends I had shared the past five months of trials and tribulations with.

  But with our rendezvous set far in the distance, Craig and I traipsed back to the hotel, loaded up Hannah and headed towards Baluchistan.

  Baluchistan is the name given to the large expanse of barren desert that straddles the Pakistan–Iran border. The desolate area was used by Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons less than 15 years ago. Over the past five years, Baluch separatists and bandits have carried out a spate of kidnappings of Western tourists. It is so notorious for drug-smuggling, banditry and kidnappings that all foreigners must be accompanied by compulsory armed escorts.

  We had heard various unsavoury stories about the escorts so we were pleasantly surprised that the first group, a ragtag group of bearded Lawrence of Arabia lookalikes, seemed well organised and friendly. Still, it was unsettling to be ordered to hand over our passports and then watch them speed ahead to the next checkpoint in their souped-up four-wheel drive, while we gunned Hannah as much as we dared to try to keep up.

  As Bam receded in the mirror and the signs for the city of Zahedan began to count down, each new escort seemed to pack more firepower. First AK-47s, then Russian PK machine guns and eventually truck-mounted 50-cals with about half a dozen soldiers.

  It was when we got to the city that our problems began. Instead of nipping around the bypass and quickly covering the final 50 or so miles to the border, the escort directed us to drive into the choking traffic of the city centre and dropped us off at a police station. The next six hours were a nightmare of rising tempers as each new police checkpoint tried to organise the next escort to take us a mere few miles to the next one where the whole process would start again. What's more, the Ramboeqsue escorts had now transformed into nervous-looking unarmed teenage police recruits sitting on the back seat.

  As we crawled through the gridlock, we watched the clock tick towards the time the border would close for the evening and eyed the fuel needle edging towards empty with increasing frustration.

  As we had got further south diesel had become harder to come by, and we'd heard that across the border in Pakistan the situation was even worse. As we edged into the last quarter of our modest fuel tank I was increasingly frantically looking around for the next gas station. So when one came into view I pointed and told our skinny police escort that I needed
to stop and get diesel, or gazole in Persian.

  'No gazole!' he said flatly, motioning ahead. 'Straight, straight.'

  I assumed he must know a better fuel station around the corner, so I reluctantly continued forwards. When he directed us to pull up outside the next police station, jumped out of the car and walked off to the station, we were less than happy.

  'Hey! What about the gazole?' I shouted.

  'Yes, yes, after lunch,' he called back, disappearing inside with our passports.