“Iran? Are you insane?” I’d received similar melodramatic responses from other friends, one of whom said he didn’t want to switch on his television set and see me paraded around in an orange jumpsuit as the latest al Qaeda hostage about to receive “the chop.” He wasn’t talking about a vasectomy.
Hardly anyone I talked to had any notion that Iran was anything other than an Axis of Evil terrorist hotbed. In fact, no one seemed to have any idea what the place was like at all. “They’re all desert nomads, right?” asked a colleague of mine. Hardly. But I confess that I was almost as ignorant when I first applied for my Iranian visa, and as a result intended to spend as little time as possible in the country.
My plan was to travel overland all the way from England to China, following, as best I could, the famed “Silk Route” of renowned thirteenth-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo. To do this, I would have to venture through the Islamic Republic of Iran. Initially assuming it to be far too dangerous for a Westerner to dawdle through, I planned to skip quickly across the top of the country en route to its northeastern border, where I would then travel at a more leisurely pace through such mysterious lands as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and finally China itself.
I chose China as my destination because my brother had lived in Shanghai for the last five years but I had yet to make the trip out there to visit. For transport, I had made up my mind to hitchhike. I’d done plenty of hitching before, most notably from Normandy, France, to the tiny British colony of Gibraltar. I’d also hitched all the way across Australia, but this trip would far exceed that in length.
A myriad of reasons motivated me to make this trip; not least was the fact that to my mind it was an epic journey, and up until that point my journeys had been far from epic, and I had yet to travel anywhere truly exotic, different, or challenging. I had spent a good few years backpacking abroad, but on the whole I had only really visited English-speaking former British colonies where the only discernible differences from my native Britain were the warmer weather and the colder beer. It had been great fun and a worthy experience, but hardly a different and fascinating new world. I hoped this trip would redress the balance.
The travels of my former girlfriend, Ashley, were the antithesis of mine. She had spent eight years as a humanitarian aid worker for Doctors Without Borders, during which time she visited some of the most war-torn countries on the planet. This included two years in Sierra Leone, two in Lebanon, and two in southern Sudan. I had immense respect for her work and had always loved to hear of her many adventures. Some of her tales were exciting, some poignant and moving, others downright funny—all were an inspiration and made me want to visit a more enigmatic part of the world.
All I needed to see my plan come to fruition was enough money to fund it—quickly, so I didn’t have to travel through Central Asia in the depths of winter. Winters in that part of the world could be brutal, and, since my accommodation would predominately be my flimsy little tent, it made travel at that time of year unappealing if not unfeasible.
For the last few months, I had been religiously saving every penny earned from my boring and underpaid temporary office job, but this was only a secondary source of funding. The main slice of traveling cash would come from something I’d done on three previous occasions when in dire need of money—taking part in medical research in a voluntary clinical trial.
For clinical or medical trials, healthy people volunteer to take an experimental medicine that is in the final stages of development with a pharmaceutical company, such as a new headache pill or asthma inhaler. They’re then monitored on a hospital ward for a designated period of time before receiving a handsome, tax-free check for their troubles, normally in the order of one or two thousand British pounds for just a couple weeks of their time. Two grand (roughly four thousand U.S. dollars) was just what I needed to add to the eight hundred pounds I’d saved. That would enable me to stick around in China for a while, and, more importantly, get me back again.
Clinical trials aren’t such a bad way of spending a week or two. You get free food and accommodation, a common room with satellite TV, free Internet access, loads of DVDs, game consoles, books, board games, and best of all there are lots of pretty nurses to chat to—when they’re not siphoning your blood or demanding a periodic urine sample, that is.
The downside to the trials is that the medicines, thus far, have been untested on humans. I’d felt no side effects during the three previous trials I’d taken part in, but whether I’d been lucky and got one of the placebos, which make up 25 percent of the doses given, I don’t know.
I phoned the hospital and secured my place on a trial for a new flu drug. The pretrial screening seemed but a formality, since I had passed all the previous screenings and was of average height, average weight, and a nonsmoker. After several tests, however, the doctor gave me the bad news that I had been rejected from the study because my heartbeat was twobeats-a-minute too fast for this particular trial. I was gutted. The next available trial, if I passed the screening, was months away, meaning I’d have to travel in the depths of winter. My failing the trial had put an end to my epic overland journey to China before it had even begun.
So what was I to do? I had about fourteen hundred dollars to my name and two brand-new, unused visas in my passport, one for Uzbekistan, the other for the Islamic Republic of Iran. The first had been a piece of cake to acquire but the second had been very difficult. It had taken over two months to secure, despite the fact that I’d used a Tehran-based visa agency which had promised speedy service and liaised on my behalf with the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It had been so difficult to come by that it now seemed a terrible waste not to use it, especially as I had read that if I didn’t use it, it would effectively guarantee the embassy’s turning down any subsequent applications.
With this in mind I decided, somewhat apprehensively, to hitchhike to Tehran instead of Shanghai, and to travel the country from north to south and east to west. It was apparently dirt cheap, so I figured my funds would just about stretch this far. Plus, it was over halfway to China—over three thousand miles away—a more than respectable hitchhiking destination, although perhaps not quite the monumental overland marathon I’d hoped for with China.
My only concern was Iran’s ominous reputation as an “Axis of Evil” breeding ground for angry Islamic fundamentalists. And since two of its bordering neighbors, Iraq and Afghanistan, were in total chaos, I wondered if Iran might not be the smartest of holiday destinations. Most of my friends thought likewise and encouraged me to go elsewhere for my vacation—somewhere “safer.”
I could well understand their concerns, for I had similar fears myself, most of which had been formed after watching a TV documentary showing graphic footage of human rights abuses in Iran. It had made a powerful and lasting impression on me. In the program, a man was shown having his hand cut off, another was shown screaming in utter agony as his eyeball was sliced out with a scalpel—punishment for looking at something immoral—and worst of all was footage of women being stoned to death. The women were wrapped up like mummies in thick white sheeting and buried in the ground up to their chests to prevent any movement as the blows rained in. Gradually, the sheets turned from white to red. It was horrific and scared the hell out of me.
But any fear of hitching to and traveling around the Islamic Republic was superseded by my fear of staying in England in a dead-end job I hated. I thus made up my mind to hitchhike to Iran come-what-may.
The more I thought about it, the more I became curious as to whether the country’s ominous reputation was well-founded, or if much of it was just media propaganda. I couldn’t remember having ever seen a positive or heartwarming news story from Iran, and it seemed to me that whenever it featured on the nightly news, either crazed, head-banging mobs or grim, blackcloaked women were shown. Even the famous Iranian embassy siege in London seemed to indicate a country that was trouble. Did normal people live there at all, I wondered? Whatever the truth, I wanted to see and experience the real Iran for myself and to spend as much time as I could with the people of the country whilst immersing myself in their culture.
My planning, or lack of planning, for this new adventure of mine consisted simply of photocopying the relevant pages from both a European and Turkish road atlas, on which I plotted my intended hitchhiking route with a thick red marker, then buying a trusty Lonely Planet Iran, and getting myself packed.
I was desperate to get moving.
Arriving at the train station, I headed toward the seaside town of Dover, where I would catch the ferry to France and begin my long hard hitch to the Middle East.