Bad roads, nice terrorists.

October 19, 2008

Where to begin.
On reflection I should have made a blog post before I left Turkey.
‘Oh, I’ll do one when I cross the border’
Little did I know the Iranian internet infrastructure was slightly lacking capacity.
I’m writing from the first internet cafe that has speeds above 56k per computer, which means I can get on to wordpress, yay!
Downside is I didn’t expect this, so the only photos available are those that I uploaded before I left Turkey.

Aaanyway.
After leaving DoggyBiscuit Stefan had to go back down south so we bade him faretheewell and as 2 bikes and three men headed north for Ani.

We stopped briefly at Diyadin for their famous hot spring baths, in the process locating a hotel for 5 lira a night each (approximately 2 pound fifty).
‘Twenty Lira’
‘But we were told 1 lira!’
‘Twenty Lira private bath!’
‘Well lads, let’s be sociable!’
We stripped to the undies (undies and swimming trunks in my case as I’d taken to wearing swimming trunks rather than trousers under my leathers in the hotter weather) and climbed in with everyone else.
‘Aaah, this is the life’ I said to no-one in particular as I stretched my arms along the edge of the pool, sitting comfortably on the wide shelf just under the water.
First bath (as opposed to shower) I’ve had since leaving England. Beautiful!

We woke the next morning properly refreshed and headed once more in the direction of Ani.
‘Get there tonight, stay somewhere close by, visit the site in the morning’ I suggested.
‘Sounds good’ Chris agreed.
Little did we know three nights would pass before we would actually make it to Ani…

We took a right off the main road onto an ‘important link road’ (as classified by the map) that cut around 250kms off the main road’s path, and based on previous experience, roads of this classification were generally 100km an hour roads.

The road was OK to start off with, lumpy tarmac, but reasonably well maintained.
Soon though the road started to become pitted with potholes, then degenerated to massive roadworks which left only a narrow path for the bikes, a car would have had to turn around.
But we soldiered on, even when the road turned to mud and the poor CB’s road tyres clogged with mud and took Wez and Chris for a tumble.

Eventually the road came to a little village, where the surface finally turned into the same consistency of mud as potters use as ‘slip’.

And slip we did, Wez and Chris landed right next to a locals car, who immediately came out and pointed angrily at the rust patches and paint cracks on it, as if somehow caused by us…
As the bike had landed on Chris’ foot, this was the last thing on his mind and he rightly ignored the opportunistic local and stood the bike up and gingerly rode out of the mud.

Immediately after the village the road forked, and the direction marked on the map went uphill and showed no signs of improving, whereas the unmarked road started off paved and went on the flat.
According to a local…

… A rather eccentric local, the paved road would take us out onto the main road in fairly short order.
Meanwhile Wez and Chris stop to take off the mudguard on the CB, which is acting as a perfect ‘mud distributer’ and liberally caking the wheel with fresh mud each time they clean it.

Pretty cool vista I must say…

We soldiered along the road, and after coming over the top of some spectacular mountains, picked our way carefully down a seemingly endless series of alpine style hairpins covered in gravel.
After getting to the valley floor we rode through a small forest, me leading and I very nearly binned the bike into the hedge when suddenly a massive Armoured Personell Carrier came charging round the corner, gun barrel pointed directly at us and rumbled on past oblivious.
Eventually we came to a small village, modest, though large enough for a chai shop, where we gratefully stopped after our ordeal.
‘Oh great, here come the Jandarma’
Usual rigmarole, follow me, passports please.
Except this time it took longer than usual, and they were rather more pleased to see us.
Wez made noises about being hungry and we were promptly sat in front of an omlette and a can of coca cola each.
‘Cor, so this is where our tax money goes!’

Muuch better! We headed off again to stop at Digor, a tiny town which when we rolled up and asked for directions to ‘otel…
‘No otel’
‘No otel?!?’
‘No otel..’
‘Balls..’
*psst*
We whipped round and saw a mustachioed gentleman who made signs that said we could sleep in his house.
His ‘house’ as it turned out was in fact the middle-floor of a bakery, and after getting settled in he queried.
‘Efes?’
Efes being the Turkish Beer of choice we nodded vigorously and were shown the ‘back’ of a local chai shop.
*Some time/beer later..*
#Onsi fan dari don… Neden#
‘Neden!’ The three of us chorused, being unable to remember the rest of the oft-repeated lyric fragment.
Our mustachioed amigo sat up in his chair, pulled out his mobile phone, played with the buttons for a while and passed it to me.
In front of me was a picture of him holding a submachine gun in full camoflague gear.
I handed it to Wez and Chris slightly concerned.
He pointed to himself, and then to his two friends who were drinking with us.
‘Peh Keh Keh, Peh Keh Keh, Peh Keh Keh’
‘I think they’re part of the PKK…’
The tone was still jovial, and we spent the rest of the night drinking, learned what the Kurdistani flag looked like, and went to sleep in the bakery.

A few hours later I was woken by the sharp squeak of a walkie talkie end-call tone.
I half opened an eye to see an armed figure standing in the middle of the three beds, Chris and Wez were standing up.
Somehow my sleep-addled brain thought this unworthy of waking up for, and I immediately put my head back down and went back to sleep.

Chris related in the morning that at about midnight the Polis burst in in an armed squad of 20 and demanded to see passports.
Fortunately there only being two bikes outside, they didn’t notice me and I was left undisturbed!

We spent that day visiting a nearby Armenian church, which, while locationally impressive (why you’d bother to build a church on such an inaccessible outcrop of rock I’ll never know) was not especially beautiful, and personally I was thinking only of Ani.

After another night spent at the PKK bakery we set off in the morning for Ani.
According to our map (a familiar phrase!) the road to Ani was half way between Kars and Digor.
Well, there was only one road in the right direction even approximately halfway between Kars and Digor, so we took it.

Beautiful bit of road, all the better for not being sealed.

Striking countryside, though the road has now turned into a tractor trail that’s mostly invisible.

At the bottom of this valley is a river crossing, which both bikes deal with with panache.
photos/392991849-S.jpg
Having got to the other side, we now have to climb up the hill.

Oh come on lads, this is ridiculous!

Getting the bike from the bottom left hand side of the picture to the top right was far more difficult than it might appear.

Having crested the hill I was simply happy not to end up like the guy in the foreground.

We found the gravelly broken road to Ani and set off.
By the time we arrived the place was about to close (it was getting dark) so we attacked the local grocers shop (which had only 4 eggs) and were promptly invited to stay the night with a family of Turkish farmers, which we whiled away teaching each other card games (with varied degrees of success)

The next morning we stormed Ani.

Being an ex-UT geek I found ‘The Church of The Redeemer’ hilarious and a place of worship simultaneously.

From the inside.

The inside of another church, nearer the canyon that is the natural border between Turkey and Armenia.

The ceiling of the same.

Broken steps.

Another little Chapel.

Perilously close to the edge!

Quite an effective natural border I’d say!

Some of the patterns feel almost Celtic.

The minaret of the oldest-mosque-in-the-area-now-known-as-Turkey (named for factual accuracy) which me and Chris climbed to the top of before noticing the ‘Do not climb minaret’ sign round the side…

What’s the best thing to do with graffiti on your ancient Armenianchurch?
Why whitewash it of course! Historical conservation, Turkish style!

This blog post has taken a surprising amount of effort to write, I’d hoped to be able to write about Iran while I have a reasonably fast internet connection but I’ve run out of time.
I don’t know when I’ll be able to update next so apologies if it’s a long time!
If you really get desperate for an update I’ve got an Iranian mobile now, the number of which is…
+98 937 093 6325

Guli Guli! (or the farsi equivilent!)

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra

October 27, 2008

‘I think… I think… It was a cat’ I replied, tenatively prodding the gelatinous lump on my plate that seemed to be staring at me eyelessly.
‘Don’t think about it, just eat it’ Ben said firmly.
I’d met Ben and his brother Sascha almost immediately after crossing the border into Iran, as they were simply passing through the town I’d holed up in when they saw my bike and came to investigate.

The first meal we all had in Iran wasn’t exactly appetising, none of us spoke any farsi so we simply communicated ‘Whatever you have’ to the restauranteer and sat down at our table.
We really wished we hadn’t…
Unless of course anybody is able to enlighten me as to a domesticated (and edible) animal with vertebrae approximately 3/4 inch in length…

Ben and Sascha were driving from Germany to the UAE where Ben was working, and wow what a schedule!
They’d got from Germany to Iran in 11 days and were due to get to Bandar-e-Bas (south of Iran) to catch a boat a week after I met them next to Turkey.

The next day the three of us took the roundabout route to Tabriz, going via the Azerbaijani border.

By and large the scenery so far in Iran was much similar to Turkey, so I didn’t bother taking many photos.

Many dusty and warm (in comparison to Turkey anyway!) hours later we stopped for our first petrol fill-up with our new Iranian petrol cards.
We zipped to the front of the queue (being the arrogant tourists we were!), which was surprisingly long for a country that extracts and refines its own oil, and I was selected to try and figure out the pump.

Simple enough, put the card in, wait, start pumping.
Wait.. 14 litres.. surely no—
*SPLASH*
“Holy shit!”
Err yeah, lesson one, not all Iranian fuel pumps have auto-shut-off switches…
Drenched in fuel I sheepishly pushed my bike to one side and let Ben and Sascha fill up, with somewhat less embarassing results.

Tabriz is a big place, and despite more road-signs in English than we’d expected, we still fail to find the centre of town.
At one point we tried to do a u-turn (which involved slowing down in the fast lane) which nearly got Ben killed as the car behind him screeched in a cloud of tyre smoke to a halt mere inches from his rear wheel.

Eventually we stopped by the side of the road and Ben wandered off to ask about a hotel and came back with a friendly Iranian chap to give us directions.
At about this point a lady came up to us and asked in English.
‘Are you looking for a hotel?’
‘Yes, do you know of one?’
‘No no no, you should come and stay with my family!’
After the traditional three-time-mock-denial we followed her at a walking pace back to her home.
It must have made quite a sight, three heavily-laden bikes, larger than anything allowed in Iran, following a lady at a walking pace down the highstreet.

As it turned out the entire family, of which our saviour was the mother, spoke wonderful English, and their hospitality surpassed anything we could have expected.
In researching my trip, I’d read many times that people are always surprised by how incredibly friendly and generous people in Iran are, and good god I have not been dissapointed.
I honestly think you would have to rugby tackle an Iranian to stop him from paying for a meal at a restaurant, I always offer three times (at least!) but they always refuse and almost seem insulted! Pushing my wallet back into my pocket and frowning at me.

As I’d was suffering a recurrance of a dodgy stomached I’d contracted from unpasturised milk in the last few days before I left Turkey, I was more than glad to accept their hospitality and slept for most of the next two days.

In between my mammoth sleeps I said goodbye to Ben and Sascha, who had to continue pell-mell south through Iran, and spoke at length about England and Iran with my hosts.

As it turns out Iran is a much more ‘liberal’ country than I’d expected.
Having lived in Saudi, the women dressed in black Abyahs (not sure what the Farsi word is for the shawl) and headscarves came as no surprise, but what was shocking was the beauty the women could convey through their faces alone.
I don’t know whether Iranian women are unnaturally blessed with beautiful eyes or whether their dress simply focuses the mind, but call me crazy I could almost start to think dressing in this manner a good idea!

Western music is technically banned in Iran, but you’ll hear it played openly in taxis, and blaring out the windows of ‘the kids’ cars, and if you turn on PersiaTV, an Iranian Music channel, you will see scantily clad ladies (comparable to music videos in the west) singing the latest Iranian pop music, which sounds indistinguishable from western pop music barring being in Farsi.

At the same time of course, there’s a lot of opression going on, for example I’ve been told that a woman riding a bicycle down the street in Tabriz would likely be stopped and warned by the police for ‘Abnormal Behaviour’.

Having spent two days with my faultless hosts in Tabriz, I journeyed on by their reccomendation to Orumiyeh, a city next to the second saltiest lake in the world.
A bridge is currently under construction over this lake, but as it’s only about 20% completed I opted to take the ferry.
On this ferry I met Professor Mohammadi, a lecturer and researcher of Animal Genetics at the university of Ahvaz, who invited me to stay at his home for a few days.
‘Sounds excellent! I’ll see you in three days time!’ I said, thinking to myself
‘How far can the south coast be?’
1,300KM that’s how far!

Orumiyeh didn’t fulfill my expectations of a lakeside town, and I embarassingly spent my entire time there without actually going down to visit the lake.

I had to continue my journey south through the mountains.

A water trough in the middle of the mountains trickled softly as I stopped and ate my bounty of fresh dates (which since discovering I’ve been eating by the kilo)

It’s not all mountains round there!

A local bus thunders past, unfortunately I haven’t got any photos of the beautiful bright-blue pickups that are so common around these parts.

A photo of my home made radiator guard made from 25cm of free chicken-wire!