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Saturday, November 30th – Esfahan to Zahedan - 14,559 km
I have a breakfast of yogurt and a banana as soon as the café opens. The busboy avoids eye contact with me completely, but as I ride my bike away I see him watching me from a second floor window. He is obviously talking about me to another busboy who staring at me trying to process what he has been told. I don’t know what the first busboy is saying about me, but I am fairly sure he is not telling anything about what he did. It feels like the right time to be leaving the city. I shouldn’t take anymore chances like last night.
I hurry to the bus station and arrive fifteen minutes before departure. The bus has just started to load. The driver slides my bike in the last of the rear compartments before packing other suitcases and boxes around it so it cannot move. It doesn’t matter if it is buried as Zahedan is the last stop when everything left will be unloaded. I take the seat behind the driver so I can see out both the front and side windows. For most of the trip I am sitting alone with no one beside me although the bus is mostly full.
Like in Turkey, the highways in Iran are mostly used by buses, trucks, government and military vehicles as most people here cannot afford a car. The grey brown, barren landscapes and low rocky hills slide by my window hour after hour. It all looks so empty, devoid of life and civilization even though modern Iran has been the central hub of many great empires over the past three thousand years. We town in several towns and the bigger cities of Yazd and Kerman, but we see nothing over them but the highways in and out of each depot and the frequent exchange of passengers. Shortly after Kerman it grows dark with four more hours to go.
There are military checkpoints along the highways. They are like holiday road blocks for drunk drivers in North America, but here people are don’t drink. They and their vehicles are being pulled frisked for minor infractions, like not having a photography of the Ayatollah on the dashboard, and such. Any reason to hold someone overnight in jail, I suppose, so they can practice their cattle prods on them. At each stop our bus is held up for an additional five minutes while everyone working at the stop has a chance to peruse my passport, not because there is anything suspicious about it, but because no one has ever seen a Canadian passport before. They seem mildly apologetic, almost ready to ask for my permission before showing it around.
I am beginning to understand how modest and humble Iranians are by nature. They are very considerate, courteous, and shy too. Men never bare more than their forearms and heads in public and women only their hands and faces. When the driver stops at one point to take a piss, not only does he walk a couple minutes away from the bus and behind a sand dune out of sight, but he does it kneeling. I see him brushing the sand off his knees before he re-enters the bus. If I had witnessed this in Toronto, I would know he was not alone behind he dune, but here it’s out of the question.
I struggle to stay awake after it grows dark. There is only one small town deserving of a stop in the desert between Kerman and Zahedan and the time drags horribly. I am fortunate that my bowels have behaved the whole trip, outside of a few farts when no one was beside me, but the boredom made the trip a chore. I lean the side of my head on the window so that the vibrations would keep me awake but after half an hour I have a kink in my neck and a bruise on my head.
We roll into Zahedan around 9 pm. Zahedan, which is supposed to have half a million residents, is a sprawling low rise town with businesses set back far from a wide main street. It has no street lights. The only light comes from lit rooms in buildings we pass and the flash of approaching head lights. Divers here leave their headlights off except to flash them at on-coming cars that they see approaching – dark shapes on a dark road that occasionally catch the reflections of lights from the buildings.
I feel it is too dangerous not being able to see approaching cars or holes and debris in the road, so I push my loaded bike when there are not enough lights around. My own feeble bike light only lights the ground two metres in front of me, which is suitable only for walking speed. I walk a full kilometre along the main drag before finding a two-floor hotel in the less-than-obvious city centre. I am tired and hungry, and not willing to go out again and the air is icy and threatening to freeze. For dinner, I make do with an incongruous mixture of leftovers and snack foods I have been carrying in my bags.
I have almost made it to the border of Pakistan, but before I can go on I have to find Coen and Vincent. I am quite anxious about finding them. I will not be able to find a Western bank until we reach Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, the south-west province of Pakistan, and that is still at least a week away, and I will only be able to access the money with their help, through their banks, until my charge card and Visa card are replaced. I am so screwed if they have moved on without me.
PHOTO 1: dusk from the bus window
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