by Lois Pryce
While their morals might be questionable, their power was not, and I could imagine revenge being enacted after today’s incident. It was impossible for me to keep a low profile on the bike in Iran, and while most road users greeted me with the usual excitable honking and waving, there was often a police presence at toll booths and on the outskirts of towns, and I felt the eyes following me as I passed through. Omid had explained the multiple factions of the different police and military agencies in Iran and assured me that the traffic cops in their green-and-white patrol cars were the most benign of all, but I couldn’t help get twitchy at the appearance of anyone in a uniform.
Alone for the first time in a while and still anxious after the events of the day, I found myself racked with homesickness for the first time on this trip. Would I go home now if I could? I always asked myself this question in times of loneliness or difficulty, and the answer was always no. I knew from my previous journeys that this gloominess was a passing phase, all part of life on the road, but it didn’t make it any easier in the moment. It wasn’t about being brave, or toughing it out, or any of that air-punching motivational language; all that was required in these moments was to keep plodding on, quietly, resolutely, without fuss or drama. As I rolled along the darkening highway towards Kashan, I thought about home, our little houseboat on a still canal, warm and cosy in a quiet backwater of a benign city, and felt a physical pang of longing. Would I go home? No, I was still excited to be here, trying to unpick this strange land of exotica and intrigue, but I missed Austin and the easy pleasures of domestic life on the gentle English waterways I called home – all so removed from this harsh, scorched landscape I found myself in. But still, I wanted to press on, discover more; I wasn’t ready to go home yet. Fernweh and Heimweh, the words that Germans have to describe these opposing urges; Fernweh, the longing for faraway places, and Heimweh, the longing for home. Today the endless battle of Fernweh and Heimweh was tiring and seemingly unwinnable. Could I ever be satisfied, I wondered.
I was heading for Kashan, an ancient town in the desert about 150 miles south of Tehran. The Karkas Mountains appeared on the horizon with Kashan nestled between its two highest peaks. The incident in Tehran had delayed me and the sun was beginning to sink, casting a dusty orange glow over the range. Would I ever manage to arrive anywhere in daylight? The highway was almost empty now and the relief that this day would soon be coming to an end flooded over me. I knew that everything would pass, and accepted that, for now, my bike and this open road was my home, and that was OK.
I had been lost in my thoughts, as is easily done on a long, desolate road, and only a chance glance over my shoulder meant that I saw the vehicle bearing down on me. It was a minibus with blacked-out windows and was barrelling along at a terrific speed. I assumed it would overtake me at the last minute, in typical reckless Iranian style. At the same moment I saw there were roadworks immediately ahead, with the two-lane highway narrowing to one lane. The bus showed no signs of slowing down; in fact, it was speeding up. We were both gunning for the same space. The traffic cones cut across the lane in front of me and the road workers, with a clear view of what was about to happen, waved panicked arms, motioning for me to move out of the way. But with the roadworks looming, there was nowhere to go, no hard shoulder or verge. The bus was gaining on me. For a moment everything went into slow motion; I watched over my shoulder as the bus accelerated towards me, engine screaming. At the last minute my brain snapped into gear and I launched my bike out of its path, crashing through the cones and barriers into the work zone and skidding to a halt, only just managing to remain upright. The bus missed me by an inch, showering me with gravel as it flew past. The road workers stood around me, staring after it, shaking their heads, equally confused by what they had just witnessed.
I limped into Kashan with trembling hands, legs of jelly and a few tears trickling down my dust-covered face. I’d diced with death on roads the world over, but never in my life had it reduced me to tears. Dammit, I’d almost been flattened by a truck in São Paulo and I didn’t cry then! But it seemed my British stiff upper lip had eluded me on this occasion. Should I be paranoid? Who was driving that blacked-out minibus? Was this just the usual careless Iranian driving, or something more sinister? I was losing my sense of the line between reasonable wariness and paranoia.
Later that evening I took a walk around Kashan’s Fin Garden, a world-famous sixteenth-century example of a classic Persian garden. It was an attempt to soothe my soul. The rose bushes and orange trees cast fragrance and shadows across the grounds, and soft uplighting illuminated ancient, intricate tile work, reflected in the joobs, the traditional water channels that bordered the flower beds. The locals promenaded quietly, giving me friendly smiles and snapping themselves on their mobile phones. It was a haven of tranquillity, but, as with everything in Iran, there was another, hidden story lurking beneath. These seemingly innocent gardens had a darker side; an Iranian prime minister had been assassinated here in 1852 on orders from the king, who disapproved of his modernisation plans, the same old story that has been plaguing Iran for centuries. The gardens had decided to memorialise this slice of history with a bizarre diorama in the bathhouse where the murder had taken place.
The display featured mannequins dressed as the key players, entombed in Perspex cases. It must have been a huge political scandal at the time, but this half-hearted homage failed to capture the gravitas. The mannequins were a bit too small, poorly constructed and slightly grubby; some even had body parts missing. When I came upon the pièce de résistance, the killer himself, I almost burst out laughing. A five-foot dumpy little figure with a hangdog expression and a droopy moustache painted on his plastic face, draped in Qajar-era robes and headdress, his plastic box bore the unconvincing title, Secret Agent. As I stared at this unlikely assassin, I wondered if my tormentors of today would one day end up displayed in Perspex. In 150 years’ time, would the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij be considered a curiosity from a brutal bygone age? I hoped so.
It was my second encounter with Iran’s secret agents that day, but the first one I’d found amusing. As usual, Iran served to fascinate, terrify and entertain in equal measures. It was all in a day’s ride in the Islamic Republic.
11
The Rial Thing
THE HIGHWAY TO Isfahan provided the desert road trip I had been dreaming of: open plains of parched brown with nothing but the faint shapes of distant mountains breaking up the horizon. There were even stretches where I was the only vehicle on the road, a sensation to be savoured in Iran. After the intensity of my time in Tehran, it was soothing to be reminded of the uncomplicated pleasures of motorcycle travel, to revel in its simplicity. I recalled the early days of my first road trips, that heady rush of liberation, not just from my old office job and the tedious obligations of everyday life, but from Stuff. That had been the real eye-opener. Back home my closets still groaned with clothes, handbags, shoes, books, records, knick-knacks; all of it desirable, so little of it actually essential. Here I had everything I needed packed into two bags, and all I had to do each day was find fuel and food. There was nowhere I had to be, no phone calls or emails to return, no meetings to rush around for. My choice of bike, a 250cc trail bike, meant that in theory I could go pretty much anywhere I fancied; no dirt track or sandy trail was off limits. But in Iran it was not quite that simple. While my ability to explore was not hampered by my choice of vehicle or constrained by the timetables and itineraries of public transport, it was tempered by something far more unnerving.
The winding trails that led off the road into the desert were alluring, but upon investigation I would often find they led to anonymous industrial complexes or sinister-looking compounds, ringed by barbed wire, sometimes with tanks guarding the entrance, and I would beat a hasty retreat, remembering Omid’s warning about taking photos. Anything linked to the military or Iran’s nuclear activities was a definite no-no and I still had enough of the previous day’s paranoia coursing through
my veins to be wary about making too many off-piste explorations, especially in this area. On the outskirts of Isfahan was a particularly contentious nuclear site, a uranium conversion facility where there had been a mysterious explosion in 2011. The Iranian government initially denied it had even happened, but then amateur footage of smoke billowing from the plant appeared online and Isfahan residents reported their windows shaking. People were suddenly evacuated from their homes amid claims that Israel was to blame, but the truth never fully emerged.
Indirectly, it was Iran’s secretive approach to its nuclear activities that was causing me to roam its highways and byways with millions of rials and fistfuls of dollars crammed in my bra and secreted about my bike. Due to the country being cut off from the international banking system, I had entered Iran with the entire funds for my trip in US dollars, changing them into local currency as I went along at the numerous exchange bureaus that were to be found in every town.
It was a strangely quaint, analogue feeling to operate entirely in cash; the only real problem was the sheer amount of notes I had to carry with me. With Iran’s escalating inflation rate, the currency had lost so much of its value that the government was considering knocking a zero off. But nobody talked in rials anyway; the numbers were just too big to be practical. With the exception of petrol pumps and the most official transactions, everything was priced in the unofficial denomination of tomans, each one worth the equivalent of ten rials. Each morning I would organise my millions, laid out in stashes of peppermint green, candy pink and sky blue, hundreds of different-coloured Khomeinis flashing in front of my eyes like a sinister Andy Warhol collage. But despite some heavy-duty mathematical DNA in my lineage, I still found myself confused with the sheer number of zeroes and I ended up creating my own do-it-yourself foreign exchange system, colour-coded for dunces: the pink note is twelve quid, the green one is six quid, and so on. As I stowed them about my person I wondered what Mr Khomeini would make of me stuffing his face into my cleavage each morning.
Peeling off from the highway, following signs for the centre of Isfahan, I wondered if I was ready for the onslaught of another Iranian city. But it is impossible not to be charmed upon arriving in Isfahan. Nuclear experimentation aside, and if you ignore the thundering steel industry on its outskirts, this is Iran’s pretty city. The former capital during the Safavid empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a high point for Iranian art and architecture, during its heyday it was bigger than London. In those days it attracted a steady stream of Europeans, traders, artists and what used to be known as ‘merchant adventurers’, a most enticing job title if there ever was one. Although Isfahan’s political power has waned, it lives on as Iran’s glittering jewel, the Rome of the Middle East. Back in Britain, any news story focussing on Iran’s nuclear ambitions or politics will be accompanied by pictures of glowering clerics or flag-burning protestors, but a positive piece about Iran will invariably feature images of Safavid-era Isfahan – most commonly the grand Naqsh-e Jahan Square, with its illuminated fountains, or the Si-o-Seh Bridge, its thirty-three spans and covered walkway of stone arches stretching across the Zayandeh River. But despite Isfahan’s film-set appearance and the famous Persian saying, ‘Isfahān nesf-e jahān’ (‘Isfahan is half the world’), the city doesn’t seem to engender the love and devotion in Iranians one might imagine. Whenever I mentioned to people that I was heading to Shiraz their eyes would mist over with talk of nightingales, Hafez and the famous charm of the Shirazi people. But Isfahan had the opposite effect; their eyes narrowed amid jingoistic warnings about the Isfahanis and their wily ways.
As I weaved my way through the outskirts, noting, happily, that the drivers were not quite as homicidal as in Tehran, I was greeted by the usual unofficial welcome party of young guys on little Chinese motorbikes. They pulled alongside me at traffic lights, excitement flashing in their eyes at the sight of a foreign bike, inviting me home to meet their mothers and drink tea. But I pressed on into the centre, cruising tree-lined boulevards and passing ancient gardens, mosques, minarets and palaces. Golden domes caught the late afternoon sun, intricate patterned tiles of yellow birds and pink flowers and the classic blue Persian geometric designs decorated every building, and in the warm breeze the fronds of palm trees swayed, casting long shadows across the streets.
Downtown it was clear that all this antique charm, history and exotica in one package attracted tourism dollars. But Iran’s pariah status means that tourists are of a certain variety, mostly from the Far East, where visas are easily available and the mention of Iran does not invoke images of terror or come attached with centuries of baggage. Coachloads of Malaysians and Chinese were being bussed around the town, deposited at the key sites accompanied by gentle-voiced female Iranian guides relating historical facts while their charges fiddled with their photo lenses. The other, less common tourist tribe were small scholarly groups of elderly Europeans. A far cry from the dashing merchant adventurers of old, these modern-day Persophiles were mostly Germans in stout shoes and sensible safari-style clothing, frowning over textbooks and making notes. Khomeini could rest easy in my bosom, it would be a long time before Isfahan became a stag-party destination.
The result of all this was that, despite the grandeur and beauty of my surroundings, I felt strangely isolated in Isfahan and I wondered if all those warnings had some basis in fact. Isfahan was known as one of Iran’s more conservative cities, but in reality, the unsavoury reputation of the Isfahanis was more likely the result of being the closest thing Iran gets to a tourist town. Here, for the first time during my journey, I was hustled in the street to buy carpets and trinkets and I quickly learned to avoid the eyes of the pushiest of the handicraft sellers, with their obsequious enquiries about the health and happiness of my family and the whereabouts of my husband. One hawker had constructed a line of patter that involved enquiring as to the home country of each female tourist that passed his stall. He would then make a reference to whatever relevant famous countrywoman he could come up with. I heard him comparing a sturdy German woman to Angela Merkel and I thought he might be on to something, but he lost any potential trade from me when he claimed I reminded him of Margaret Thatcher.
The atmosphere in the city centre was a world away from the easy welcome I had experienced elsewhere, and it felt as though the natural warmth and hospitality of the nation was being exploited, although I could hardly blame these guys for trying. Times were tough, sanctions were wreaking the intended results, and a weary bazaari told me that in warehouses around the country a surplus of Persian carpets was piling up, unable to be exported to the usual western buyers. Fortunately, travelling by motorcycle provides an excellent excuse for not buying carpets, but he would not be deterred that easily and instead offered me Persian carpet mouse mats, complete with fringing. ‘Perfect for carrying by motorcycle!’ Impressed at his quick thinking, I bought a bunch of them as gifts. Further guilt-induced, sanction-easing souvenir shopping resulted in an Omidvar brothers situation: how do I get all this stuff home? At this moment, Eman Bakhtiari, a shipping kingpin, import–export guy and all-round useful man about town appeared at my side.
A tubby straight-talker with a tight shirt and a loud laugh, Eman was quick to point out that the Iranian postal system was horribly unreliable and that he could ship my purchases home safely. If I would just like to follow him to his office, everything would be taken care of. It had all the warning signals of a scam-in-waiting, especially considering the Isfahani reputation, but I had a good feeling about Eman. When travelling alone, a well-honed instinct is all the security you have and I had learned to trust mine, especially when it came to choosing which strange men to hook up with, and besides, I was keen to get away from Isfahan’s tourist traps and see the everyday life of the city.
Our arrival coincided with lunchtime, which involved the handful of staff and any customers who happened to be in the little shedlike office downing tools and shoving aside piles of paperwork to make room for equally exces
sive piles of rice, meat and bread ordered in from a local café. We were an unusual dining party: Eman at the helm, keeping everyone fed and in good spirits; Laleh, the competent young office manager who emanated the natural warmth and unspoken solidarity that I had found in many Iranian women; Dariush, an office junior with a puppy-like devotion to Laleh; and a customer who was trying to track down a package that had gone missing en route to his son in France. He was ranting at Dariush, who was attempting to placate him with kebabs.
‘That doesn’t sound very hopeful,’ I said to Eman, who was ushering me to a plastic chair and thrusting a cold can of 0.0 per cent Carbonated Malt Beverage into my hand, the closest thing you could get to a beer in Iran.
‘Ah, don’t worry!’ Eman assured me. ‘This guy is just having a small problem. We can send whatever you want, wherever you want. This is what I do. My main business is in dried fruit and nuts, but I ship everything! Nowadays I have to take whatever work I can, the economy is terrible.’
His brand-new, shiny black SUV parked outside didn’t look like the ride of a man who was in too much financial trouble, so I guessed that he was either exaggerating his woes, or that he had fingers in various useful pies. I suspected the latter.