We pulled over next to what was basically a lake of oil; a huge expanse in the middle of the nodding donkeys and rusting equipment. Two workmen in cheesecutter hats and heavy coats were maintaining an old pump. One of them, a cheerful soul called Tahir, with chipped gold teeth, told us the lake was filled with crude oil pumped directly from the wells: it formed this lake and was then pumped elsewhere. He didn’t seem to know where exactly, but he was paid $200 a month to keep the pump working. I think oil was about $115, maybe $118 dollars a barrel, so that gives you an idea of how little the state oil company was paying him.
While Tahir was talking we saw a couple of cars pull up, the drivers jumping out and opening the bonnets. Taking a can apiece they climbed down to the edge of the lake, scooped up the oil then poured it straight into the engine. Bonnets closed, they turned around and headed back to the city.
Further south we stopped to take a look at a natural spring with gas bubbles in the water: it had been piped into a fountain for drinking but if you put a match to it the water would appear to catch fire. It was just about the weirdest thing I think I’d ever seen.
We followed the coastline, the Caspian Sea on one side, the other flat and featureless save for the massive burning oil towers in the distance. Russ was in the back-up van, checking that Mahmood, our Iranian guide, was going to meet us in Astara. I was looking forward to Iran; it was just so different, and as Mungo said we’d heard nothing positive about the place in years. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, had seemed such a strange, incongruous place - the oil industry with its massive cranes and drilling platforms set against a historical walled fortress, and natural flames bursting out of the mountainside.
We arrived at the Iranian border just as it was about to close at six p.m. We decided to make a go for it, and leaving the cars we hefted our gear and walked up to the Azerbaijan checkpoint. It was one of the weirder crossings; we had to make our way on foot through a labyrinth of narrow outdoor passages. Mungo said it looked like some kind of strange toilet complex. Eventually we came out between two bricked-up derelict buses that served as offices. We presented the immigration people with our passports but they were the ones stamped with our Iranian visas and not the ones that had been stamped as we came into the country. That threw them. We always travel with more than one passport, as some countries don’t like you visiting others and a spare passport is back-up if anything goes wrong.
‘Here we go,’ Russ muttered, ‘confusion is going to reign after all.’
I’ve said it already - I hate going through border controls. Your life is in the hands of people who could confiscate your documents, detain you, lock you up and throw away the key. I’ve seen the maddest things. Right here there was a woman wailing and screaming because the contraband she was smuggling was being taken off her. In Turkey we witnessed a driver and a cop bitch-slapping each other; at another crossing we’d seen a car bumper ripped off when the driver decided to argue with an articulated lorry.
The different passports really didn’t sit well with the officials in the derelict buses. We explained as best we could and they had a bit of a conference. Luckily, our late arrival worked in our favour for once: in the end I think they just wanted to go home. They made a decision, stamped the passports and we walked out of Azerbaijan and crossed the river heading towards Iran.
On the far side a soldier with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder was waiting, watching us every step of the way. Russ was alongside me, Mungo a little behind. ‘Here we go, boys,’ Mungo muttered. ‘Get ready for Iran.’
But as we got to him the soldier just smiled. ‘Where are you from?’
‘London,’ we said. ‘England.’
He nodded. ‘You’re welcome here. Welcome to Iran.’ And stepping aside he ushered us into his country.
9
A Mass of Contradictions
Mungo talks about the buzz when you cross a border. We all felt it then; it had been a tiring day but now the adrenalin kicked in and we looked around with a renewed sense of curiosity. After all the hassle - the changes in plan, the dashing around in Baku - entering Iran was as simple a crossing as I’ve ever experienced; a couple of minutes with customs and immigration and we were in. Russ said we were due a smooth passage after all the hoops we’d had to jump through and finally we got one.
We were in the border town of Astara, walking along a puddle-soaked street into a new country. All I could think about was that this was a religious dictatorship and I had no idea what to expect. But as we crossed further into the town, there was a sudden sense of energy, people smiling and nodding. It was quite a change from the rather dour atmosphere in Baku.
We met our guide Mahmood, a short, friendly guy in his late forties, a little chubby, with greying hair and a twinkle in his eye. He flagged down the driver of a Lajvar, a kind of tuk-tuk with a motorbike front and a trailer, only you sit side by side and there’s a steering wheel instead of handlebars. The owner - a young, good-natured guy called Ahmed - let me up beside him. Two minutes in Iran and I was driving one of the vehicles they used to carry goods back and forth between the checkpoints.
Ahmed showed me how to drive, warning me to be careful with the steering because it was easy to tip the whole thing over. I asked him about himself, and he explained that he’d been a wrestler who hadn’t quite made the grade. Apparently wrestlers have a high social standing in Iran and this guy had narrowly missed out on his dream. He had a wife and a little boy of five and had been out of work before he started doing this. He’d forked out the $2,000 to buy the rig and now he carried goods back and forth across the little stretch of river.
‘Do you like the job, Ahmed?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘It’s my job,’ he said. ‘It’s what I do. I have to like it, don’t I?’
The countryside was damp and very green; not at all what I had expected. After saying goodbye to Ahmed we left Astara on a rice-grower’s tractor and made our way south towards Bandar-e Anzali through paddies interlinked by raised walkways. I’m embarrassed to say I had no idea Iran grew rice or that this part of the country was quite so green and beautiful. It contradicted everything I’d thought about the place, a sea of rice fields set against grey, almost misty, mountains.
This was our twenty-first night on the road. I desperately wanted to call my family, but the phones were playing up and I hadn’t really been able to speak to them properly for a long time. Instead we headed into Bandar-e Anzali where we found a hotel, dumped the bags and ate dinner. We talked about preconceptions based on selective news bulletins. Our news was governed by commercialism, Mahmood’s by the state. It’s so easy to judge a nation by what we see on the news; it’s only when you go there yourself and meet people that you can even start to make sense of it all.
Mahmood agreed. ‘Take the fighting in Iraq,’ he said. ‘I would think that how we see it is not how it’s reported in your country. We believe the British and the Americans will never leave. Always there will be a battlefield and it will always be close to us.’
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Russ.
‘Because it’s better for them to fight here. They know that if they leave, the fight will only follow them. They will be chased home and nothing will alter except the battlefield. They would rather it was Iraq than Britain or America.’
The town of Bandar-e Anzali is a busy port on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Several interested countries have been caught up for years in an international dispute over the Caspian, and Iran and Azerbaijan have both claimed ownership of certain oilfields there. Perhaps even more confusingly, Iranians call the Caspian a lake, whereas the Azerbaijanis think it should be defined as a sea - which has further implications in terms of fishing rights and general shipping access. I got the impression that this was one problem that was not going to be solved overnight. It’s borders again, isn’t it? Never my favourite subject.
Anyway - forget the Caspian, I couldn’t even really get my head around the fact we were in Iran at all. Just crossing the border you can tell it is very much its own place. It has its own calendar, and there’s even a half-hour time difference with Azerbaijan. It’s a massive country, with a population of over seventy million people - about fifteen million of whom live in Tehran. The Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, has been in a slanging match with George Bush over the possibility of Iran going nuclear. But the ultimate power in Iran is the Supreme Leader, currently Ali Khamenei - he rules the country, and is what Mahmood called a ‘clergy’.
I was very conscious that we were travelling through a religious dictatorship, but my first impressions of Iran were of an upbeat - and in some ways surprisingly modern - country.
It felt like a huge milestone to even be here; especially after all our trouble with the visas. So many people had told me it was not a good idea to come here, but then they’d said the same thing about Libya and other parts of Africa. My personal experience has been that people are just people the world over and their main ambition is to have a happy life; it’s the politicians who make it difficult.
Outside the hotel the next morning Russ and I spread out the map, which had become something of a ritual each day. Today we were heading south to Tehran.
‘I had the biggest cockroach you’ve ever seen in my room last night,’ Russ said. ‘It was as big as my palm. I’m not kidding.’ Squatting down, he looked at the map. ‘We’re doing all right, aren’t we?’
I had to agree. We were travelling at a good pace, but still seeing a lot of each country. And amazingly we were still on course to arrive in Dubai as planned.
We set off as early as we could in Mahmood’s van - though we were hoping to flag down a truck further along the route. Our first stop was a village that looked as if it had been carved straight from the mountain. It was very steep and shrouded in trees and the buildings were linked by steps and stairways, and old stonework bridges that criss-crossed a mass of streams and waterfalls. The stone was a sandy-grey colour, the same as the mountain, and from a distance the buildings were almost camouflaged.
Long ago Ewan and I worked out that the best places to eat when you’re on the move are the places where the truck drivers stop, and today we were looking for a truck anyway. Heading south again and feeling hungry, we came upon a couple of old Mercedes trucks parked outside an open-fronted cafe in the town of Rasht. Inside, two guys were squatting on a piece of carpet, eating their lunch. No table, no chairs, just a bit of Persian rug laid with plates and bottles of soft drink.
Lunch looked great - a combination of meat and rice cooked in lots of rich spices. Sitting down on our own bit of carpet, we ordered the same. Mahmood introduced us to the two men, explaining that we were from England. The young man seemed a bit shy, but the older guy - who was slightly built and wiry, with black hair and a thick, black moustache - was more than happy to chat. His name was Asadollah and he’d been driving a truck for seventeen years. I asked him if we could hitch a lift to Tehran, not sure how he would respond. He just grinned and said he’d be happy to have us aboard.
It was a fabulous old truck, a bull-nosed 1973 Mercedes with a white cab and the Iranian flag painted on each wing. It was carrying cement today but Asadollah said he’d haul pretty much anything and he’d haul it anywhere. Recently he’d been to Turkey and Syria: sometimes he was away for three weeks at a time, he and his buddy taking it in turns to drive. The cab was very personally decorated, done out in a blue button fascia with pictures of Asadollah’s family dotted here and there and prayer beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. He told me he loved the old Mercedes and that he had covered almost a million kilometres in it.
Sitting high up in the cab, trundling through the mountains, I felt like a little boy in a candy shop. Asadollah seemed a kind, relaxed man, perfectly in tune with his vehicle and where he was going. Driving half on the highway and half on the hard shoulder so other people could pass, he told me about his family, his life on the road and how much he enjoyed it. I began to fancy the job myself. Maybe if my career as an Irish scallop diver didn’t work out . . .
Heading further south, we moved from the dirt road to the motorway, the terrain becoming drier and the valleys less green. We entered a long tunnel that led through the mountains and when we came out the other side it was like driving into another country altogether.
I was gobsmacked. Gone was the grass, the damp feel, the richness of the land; now we were in a harsh desert with sand edging the road, stark hills in the distance and no foliage or greenery whatsoever. Asadollah explained that Iran is split into three very separate areas: the northern climes where it’s wet and cold and they grow rice, then this area where the desert begins and it starts to get warmer. South of Tehran it really was the Iran you think about and could become blisteringly hot.
We stayed that night in the capital: a crazy place with fifteen million people and at least fifteen million cars. We’d thought Azerbaijan was busy but this was ridiculous. We weren’t allowed to film anywhere official, including petrol stations. I worked out there was some kind of smart-card system in operation and the government was effectively rationing fuel. No wonder; any more vehicles on the road and this city would grind to a standstill.
There was a different feel here; we all sensed it. We were still made welcome, and nobody gave us any grief, but this was the capital and the sense of repression was much more evident. There were far fewer women out on the streets, and when we went out to dinner we saw only men in the cafes. The women we did see were covered head to toe in traditional clothes, their hair tied up in scarves. There were even special police cars with women officers who made sure women were covered up. Perhaps most shocking for me was to see how women had to sit at the back on buses. I suppose this was more like the Iran I had been expecting, and it was not a comfortable experience. Mahmood explained that very few women had jobs. They weren’t allowed to touch any man other than their husband; not even to shake hands.