The Hole in the Fence - a Note from Mirjaveh, Iran 1979

I was recently sorting through some old papers when I came across a Christmas card I had sent to my parents in New Zealand. It was dated 26 November 1979 and written in Mirjaveh, Iran. I had added a short note saying that: “I’m writing this at a desert border post between Iran and Pakistan. It’s 7.45pm here but 200 yards down the road, when we cross the railway line and go through the hole in the fence it’s 9.15pm in Pakistan. The Iranians won’t let us out until tomorrow morning!” I also went on to mention that: “I’ll be well away from here when I post this, probably in Delhi.” The envelope hasn’t survived, but as I had to visit the GPO in Quetta a couple of days later to send telegrams to book the group’s onward accommodation in India, I would have posted the card there. We had left the city of Kerman early the previous day, driving into the Dasht-e Lut Desert towards Zahedan. About 90 minutes later the silhouette of the Arg-e Bam appeared out of the desert. This was the ancient citadel of the interesting desert city of Bam, described in Fodor’s Guide to Iran as the ‘loveliest oasis in Iran.’ The modern town was dominated by the mud-brick ‘Arg-e Bam’, a massive citadel which Fodors described as the largest adobe structure in the world, with sections dating back to around 500BC. The entire old city, mainly in ruins, was completely surrounded by massive mud walls which were then still largely intact. We paid the entry fee and spent an hour scrambling through the deserted ruins and up to the highest point of the citadel with sweeping views over the crenelated ramparts and the abandoned crumbling mudbrick dwellings. Bam, once famous for its textiles and clothes, had also been an important stop on one of the Silk Roads linking China and Central Asia to the Iranian cities of Isfahan and Shiraz and, ultimately, the ports of the Persian Gulf. The city and its caravanserai would be a welcome break on the journey towards the coast.

The mudbrick wall of the great fortress at Bam

I have used the past tense in my description of Bam as at 5.26am on the 26 December 2003 a massive earthquake of a magnitude of 6.6 on the Richter scale reduced this amazing centuries-old city to rubble. Over 26,000 people perished and more than 30,000 were injured. With assistance from UNESCO, Bam was on the World Heritage List, and the World Bank, certain features of the Arg-e Bam are to be restored. From Bam we continued across the Dasht-e Lut Desert towards Zahedan, stopping at about the halfway mark at what was known as the Mil-e Naderi. This mud-brick tower was a desert marker dating from the 12th century and was an effective guide to the caravans that made their way across these featureless wastes. At night a beacon was lit at the top turning the tower into a sort of land lighthouse. The condition of the road to Bam had been reasonably good but as we approached the desert marker it began to deteriorate badly. A British firm, Marples-Ridgway, was reconstructing the road and our coach was intercepted by one of the Company’s Landrovers. The English driver insisted we follow him back to their rather lonely road camp as he had noted we had a number of young English and Australian ladies on the coach. These isolated English roadworkers felt the need for a party, so they offered to put us up for the night, an offer we readily accepted. A good English feed was followed by a riotous session on their homebrew, an illicit enhancement of the local malt beverage. Since Iran was now an Islamic State under the tutelage of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, alcohol was forbidden, but Camp C, as this isolated ex-pat camp was known, was far enough away from civilisation to be able to flout these laws. Three weeks before, just a few days before we left London, Iranian students and Revolutionary Guards had stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and taken 52 diplomats and other US citizens hostage. The hostage crisis was ongoing, in fact it lasted for 444 days, and the future of the Marples-Ridgway contract was up in the air. As it turned out, on my return journey a few months later I heard that the camp had closed and the British workers had returned home.

The Mil-e Naderi, the 11th century marker in the Dasht-e Lut Desert

Next morning, still feeling the effects of the ‘home brew’, we set off for Zahedan, a largely Baluchi town and I noted in my diary that the people did seem to be different from the other cities we had visited in Iran. We had been advised to stock up with food in Zahedan for a few days as the roads to the border and onwards into Pakistan were bad and the next large town was Quetta, some distance away. It was slow going to the border post of Mirjaveh which we reached around 2pm. In 1979 Mirjaveh was still a secondary border town. We had hoped to complete formalities and enter Pakistan that evening, but we found than the Iranians had closed their side of the border; it would open at 4pm we were initially told. There was no one else waiting at the border post and as 4pm approached we were told that the border would not now open until the next morning. A lone customs official was on site and after Colin, our driver, and I had tea with him he said they would put us through first thing in the morning. As there were no eating establishments in Mirjaveh, our Customs friend told us that if we followed the railway line there was a fence-gate on the border with a hole in it and a hundred yards or so further on was the small Pakistani village of Taftan where there was a basic restaurant, but we should keep in mind that the time in Pakistan was one and half hours ahead of Iran. The restaurant would also accept Iranian currency. As dusk fell we made our way along the railway line and through the hole in the fence. In the distance we could see the snows of the 4000 metre high volcano Kuh-i Taftan reddening in the setting sun.

The 4000 metre high Kuh-i Taftan volcano at sunset

The little restaurant had goats running around the tables and the food was Baluchi cuisine, more akin to spicier Indian and Pakistani foods than the blander chelo kebab we had been eating since we had been in Iran. After a satisfying meal we crept back along the railway, losing the hour and a half we had gained, to sleep on our air-mattresses in the Iranian Quarantine Centre. Next morning, true to his word, our Iranian customs friend made sure our group was first through the border and after clearing Pakistani formalities and changing money in Taftan we were on our way over equally atrocious roads towards Quetta, still another 20 hours away. We bumped and lurched through potholes and over deep corrugations until just after dark we stopped for a meal in the small town of Nokkundi, a ‘grubby little town’, as I noted in my diary. On entering a restaurant we were greeted in a loud voice, much to our amusement, by the maître d’ with a “No gentlemen here – only Baluchi”. I noted that the meal of vegetables, rice and naan bread was ‘quite good’. We then we set off to drive through the night to reach Quetta, largest city in the Pakistan state of Baluchistan, just after daybreak.

A street in the Pakistani town of Quetta

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

For the full Overland story see my book: One Foot in Front of the Other - Full Stride

A Panegyric to an Overland Journey from KATHMANDU to LONDON 1979

On my first assignment as an Overland tour leader for Sundowners in July 1979, I was literally thrown in at the deep end. I was sent, along with a Kiwi driver, Merv, in a Capricorn Overland Seddon coach, to Istanbul to meet a group of mainly New Zealanders and Australians who were flying in from Kabul. The group had left Kathmandu several weeks earlier in a Sundowner's coach with another driver and courier, as tour leaders then tended to be called, and after travelling across India and Pakistan had driven up the Khyber Pass to Kabul in Afghanistan. Politically there was much unrest in Afghanistan with Soviet Russia asserting its influence, positioning itself for the invasion of Christmas Eve the same year. Iran was also in turmoil, the Shah had fled in February, anti-American political rhetoric was at its height and it was unknown how the ‘Revolutionary Guard’ would react to Western tourists. Sundowners felt it would be far safer to fly the group to Istanbul where they would be met by Merv and myself. I had been in Istanbul twice before, the first being in 1970 on my first Overland as a passenger, the second just a couple of months earlier on the Sundowners training trip. I had also been to Ankara and Cappadocia in central Turkey in 1970, but that was it, the rest of the journey through Syria, Jordan, Jerusalem, Iraq and back around coastal Turkey to Greece was new territory, as was the side trip to Egypt. The trip was successful and memorable and at the end of the tour I wrote a somewhat verbose panegyric of the Overland which, on looking back across the years, does really epitomise these fantastic journeys. I have quoted it here in full:

Capricorn Overland coach at the Ziggurat at Ur, Iraq

And now as Albion’s fair shores draw nearer, we come to the end of our journey, a journey that began in the snowy peaks of Nepal and ended ninety days later in the cool mellow lands of Old England. We have rubbed shoulders with the Sherpas of the Himalayas, the Pathans of the Khyber Pass, the Marsh Arabs of the Tigris-Euphrates swamps and the proud Bedouin of the sandy wastes of the Middle East. We have travelled the roads of conquerors; Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the Persians Darius and Xerxes, Rameses II of ancient Egypt, Assurbhanipal the Assyrian, Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame and their Mongols; all passed this way. We have explored the crumbling remnants of once glorious civilisations – Nineveh and Babylon of the Assyrians, Memphis and Thebes of the ancient Egyptians, Aphrodisias and Side of the Greeks, Jerash and Pergamum of the Romans, Hatra of the Parthians and Petra of the Nabateans. We have visited some of the world’s greatest buildings – the incomparable white marble Taj Mahal, eternal testament of Moghul Emperor Shah Jehan’s love for his dead wife Mumtaz; the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, shimmering in the Pool of Immortality at Amritsar; the great Byzantine cathedral of Haghia Sofia in the centre of Istanbul whose great dome is a thousand years older than St Peter’s in Rome; the mighty Pyramids of Giza, still as solid as the day they were completed four and a half thousand years ago, and the now pathetic remains of the once magnificent Temple of Artemis near Ephesus, once a wonder of the Ancient World.

Overland group cooling in the waters of the Euphrates, Birecik, Turkey

We have stood upon the great Ziggurat at Ur of the Chaldees, city of Abraham; explored the rock churches and dwellings of Cappadocia and scrambled through the narrow passages of the amazing underground city of Kaymakli. We have slept in the tomb-caves of Petra, the ‘rose-red city half as old as time’ and camped beneath the crazily perched monasteries of Thessalian Meteora. We passed by now silent battlefields where heroes once fought and died: Troy where once Achilles and Hector clashed in mortal combat; Thermopylae where Leonidas and the 300 Spartans died defending Athens from the invading Persians; Aleppo and Kerak, around whose walls Saracens and Crusaders battled furiously for control of the Holy Land; Gallipoli where Anzacs ‘from the uttermost ends of the earth’ stormed ashore on a fateful April morning in 1915; and Dunkirk with its lingering memories of the little ships rescuing a beleaguered British army from its beaches in 1940. We have walked the path Christ took as he bore his heavy cross to Golgotha, visited the spot in Bethlehem where the three wise men found the infant Jesus, and have swum in the Sea of Galilee upon whose waters Christ once walked. Along the river Meander, in Anatolia, we passed the spot where the talkative nymph Echo pined away through the love of the beautiful youth Narcissus; crossed the Hellespont into which the unfortunate maiden Helle fell from the back of the ram with the golden fleece as it flew through the air to Colchis where it was sought in later years by Jason and his Argonauts. We camped in the shadow of Mount Olympus from which lightning bolt-wielding Zeus sallied forth on his amorous escapades into the neighbouring valleys, and crossed the Tempe River where the unfortunate Daphne was changed into a laurel tree to escape the unwelcome advances of the god Apollo. We have stood in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi where once the ancient Pythia uttered ambiguous predictions that directed the destinies of the ancient Greeks. We have sat in the precincts of magnificent Karnak where the Egyptians of old cowered in the presence of the great god Amun-Re. In museums we have seen the solid gold coffin of the boy-king Tutankamun and gazed into the desiccated mummified face of the great Pharoah Rameses II. We marvelled at the bejewelled Topkapi dagger and the radiant Spoonmaker diamond in Istanbul, the bronze charioteer of Delphi, the Gandaran Fasting Buddha in Lahore, the lifelike rock crystal, onyx and malachite eyes of the Egyptian funerary statues in Cairo, and the little fertility god, Priapus, with his giant phallus at Ephesus. We have haggled with street vendors in many-templed Kathmandu and at the cremations ghats by the Ganges in Varanasi. After the teeming bazaars of Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul the clean sterile streets of northern Europe came as a relief to the flies and dirt of the Orient, and as the White Cliffs of Dover come into view from the misty waters of the English Channel we know that the journey is now at an end and we are left with amazing memories of this great Overland journey across the heart of Asia.

            © Neil Rawlins  text & photography

The full story of my Overland days are embodied in my 'One Foot in Front of the Other' books

Isfahan - a City on the Silk Road

There is a Persian proverb which says "Esfahān nesf-e- jahān ast" (Isfahan is half of the world). Without a doubt Isfahan is one of the most architecturally beautiful cities in Asia. The central feature of the city is the Naqsh-e Jahan, which roughly translates as ‘Image of the World Square’ which was commonly known as Shah Square until Shah Reza Pahlavi was deposed in 1979, since then it has become Imam Square. This is one of the largest city squares in the world and was laid out by the architect Shaykh Bahai, on the instructions of Shah Abbas, towards the end of the 16th century and by the early 17th century work had begun on the beautiful blue-domed Masjed-e Shah, or Imam Mosque, the smaller but equally beautifully ornate Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque as well as the Ali Qapu, the grand palace of Shah Abbas. In 1598 Shah Abbas I the Great, who ruled Persia from 1588 until 1629, moved his capital from Qazvin in the north to the more central Isfahan which was further from the threats and encroachments being made by the Ottoman Empire into the border regions of the Caucasus and Zagros Mountains. As a result many Georgians, Circassians, Daghistanis and, particularly, Armenians, fleeing the Ottoman Turks, moved into what was then the Persian heartland. This ushered in the city’s golden age which flourished under Safavid rule until the third decade of the 18th century.

The Imam Mosque in Isfahan

Elsewhere in the city construction had begun on the Madrasa Chahar Bagh, the Royal Theological College, and the picturesque Seeyosepol, or Bridge of 33 Arches, over the Zayandeh River giving easy access to New Julfa, the Armenian quarter. Shah Abbas had recognised that Armenian traders had an in depth knowledge of the silk trade and consequently New Julfa became the hub of "one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern era," with outposts as far east as Canton, Surabaya, and Manila, and as far west as Cadiz, London, and Amsterdam, with a few merchants traveling across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans to Acapulco or Mexico City, this making Isfahan an important trading city on the Silk Road. The Holy Saviour Cathedral was constructed about this time in New Julfa and today is known as the Vank Cathedral – Vank, incidentally, means cathedral in Armenian. I first visited Isfahan in March 1970 and was immediately struck by the beauty of the city when I saw it in the early morning spring sunlight. Outside the Grand Bazaar stood exquisite pieces of brassware for which the city is also well known and I could see the blue-domed Shah Mosque and the more muted Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque towards the opposite end of the Square as I slowly strolled towards them. Horse-carriages outside the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque gave the scene an old world ambiance. The intricate tilework in these two mosques and also in the Madrasa is truly amazing. A kaleidoscope of colours – blues, greens, yellows, oranges, pinks, reds – swirl upwards, across the both exterior and interior walls, and up into the interior domes. They cover what is known as the ‘stalactite’ formations over the entrance to the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque. The detail and variety of patterns is truly amazing.

Brassware outside the Isfahan Bazaar

Horse carriage in Naqsh e-Jahan, opposite the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

From the mosques I walked across the early 17th century Seeyosepol, the Bridge of 33 Arches, over the Zayandeh River to the Armenian Quarter of New Julfa. Here I visited the Vank Cathedral, and was fascinated by the graphic Armenian wall murals, painted in vivid colour, of the martyrdom of early Christian saints such as Boniface, Sebastian, John, George, Stephen and many more. Many of the murals are higher up and in semi-darkness but somehow this seems to add to the horror of the scenes depicted of these unfortunates being dragged over nails, beaten with sticks, castrated or having boiling oil poured over them for their Christian beliefs and it was probably very effective in keeping a simple, uneducated congregation on the straight and narrow. To further remind them of the correct righteous ways as decreed by the orthodox Armenian clergy there was a large mural depicting the horrors of Hell painted immediately above the door through which all had to pass!

The amazing tilework on the monuments of Isfahan

I again visited Isfahan almost ten years later and it was still as beautiful. The Islamic Revolution had occurred between my visits and the great square, Naqsh e-Jahan, was now called Imam Square after Ayatollah Khomeini, the great mosque was now the Imam Mosque. It was a Friday and more and more people were gathering outside the mosque. Due to the tense political climate at the time – the U.S. had frozen all Iran’s assets in retaliation for the ongoing American hostage impasse – I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and surreptitiously moved away. Unfortunately the famous Isfahan bazaar was closed but, surprisingly, the splendid Ali Qapu Palace built for Shah Abbas the Great was open and I was able to enjoy the amazing wall murals painted by Reza Abbassi, the court painter of Shah Abbas, and his pupils. In the last couple of years the relationship between Iran and the West has eased considerably and tourists are once again beginning to visit this historic and fascinating country.

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

One Foot in Front of the Other - Books by the author

The Overland - London to Kathmandu in the '70s & '80s

The Overland - London to Kathmandu in the '70s & '80s In the grey light of an early London morning, the coach park next to the Gloucester St tube station in South Kensington is buzzing with activity. Engines are revving, filling the air with acrid fumes. There has been some rain overnight and travellers weave, dragging their suitcases and bags, around the scattered puddles. Couriers and conductors with clip-boards tick off names; point to specific buses; answer the anxious questions of flustered passengers. A flustered overweight woman dragging a huge suitcase, fortunately with wheels, approaches a bearded young man dressed in a well-worn anorak with an old baseball cap perched on the back of his head, who obviously knew what was happening,. She looks at him hesitantly, and in a distinct American drawls asks: “Is this the bus to Luton Airport.” With an impish grin, the bearded man replies: “No, love, this bus is going to Kathmandu. The Luton Airport bus is over there,” waving his arm nonchalantly towards the opposite side of the coach park. “Kathmandu!” The American woman’s mouth drops open and she backs away, her case toppling over. She picks it up and drags it away, glancing nervously back over her shoulder as she moves in the direction indicated, no doubt still digesting the seemingly facetious answer of this rather impudent young man – Kathmandu, indeed!. A tousled-haired young man with a giant rucksack looks at the bearded man, grins and says: ‘Well, I guess I’ve got the right bus!” Scenarios such as this were not uncommon at the Gloucester Road coach park, in the late 1970s - early 1980s from where, besides service-coaches, many Overland and European tour coaches departed. It was always a scene of bustle and seemingly chaotic confusion with many vehicles leaving around the same time. There were outbursts of bad-temper, particularly with the service-coach personnel who issued tickets on the spot on a first come – first served basis, but eventually order was always restored in the mayhem as the time for departure drew near. Inside the coach to Kathmandu, excited passengers are finding their seats, introducing themselves to each other, stowing hand luggage in the limited capacity overhead racks or under the seats. The last few people climb aboard and I check off the last names on the clipboard. I officially introduce myself as the tour leader and the bearded young man in the anorak as the driver, and finally the coach to Kathmandu is ready to depart. Slowly we crawl out of the Gloucester Road coach park into the busy early morning traffic on this typically grey London day. It will be slow going until we reach the open highway to Kent. We must reach Dover by midday to catch the Channel ferry to Zeebrugge and then the long road journey to India and Nepal will begin in earnest.

An Overland coach on the Red Sea at Aqaba, Jordan

The Overland was a journey which had its commercial genesis in the mid-1960s, with the opening up and the accessibility to a number of Asian countries. After the Second World War there was a period of instability with Civil War in Greece, the emergence of Israel and the subsequent disruption in the Middle East. The Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan led to further tension which still periodically rears its ugly head. Nepal had been a secretive Country high in the Himalayas and when the borders opened in the mid-1960s, the Overland, the road to Kathmandu was complete and as safe as it would ever be. Earlier travellers such as Peter Pinney who recorded his journey in Dust on My Shoes travelled by local buses, by train, and or hitch-hiked across the lands of the Orient. In Pinney’s case his journey ended tragically with the loss of his travelling companion in the swollen river Chindwin in Burma. Tim Slessor and his Expedition from Oxford/Cambridge Universities completed the journey by Landrover – all the way to Singapore & back - in the mid-1950s. By the mid to late 1960s the journey was becoming common-place with the route to Kathmandu becoming known as the ‘Hippy Trail’. Many commercial operators were offering overland tours at various prices and of various standards, all of which were far more adventurous compared with other forms of travel, particularly for Australians and New Zealanders who found it was a much more exciting way of getting to Europe than by sea or by air. Politically the first half of the 1970s, although India and Pakistan did fight the war that saw the creation of Bangladesh in late 1971, was a period of relative stability across Asia. The commercial overland tour operations boomed but towards the end of the decade things turned to custard once again. In Afghanistan King Zahir had been deposed in 1973 after a reign of almost 40 years. The political situation gradually deteriorated through the late ‘70s leading to the Soviet invasion on Christmas Eve 1979, the bitter war that followed and the rise of the Taliban. In Iran, after years of unrest the Shah of Iran was forced into exile and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established an Islamic Republic. In late 1979 Iranian students and Republican guards stormed the US Embassy in Tehran holding American diplomats hostage for 444 days and in 1980 the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran precipitating a war that lasted for 8 years leading to instability, the American intervention and the ongoing conflict that has racked that region ever since. Due to this uncertainty many of the remaining Overland companies flew their clients from Karachi to Athens or Istanbul, or just operated on the Indian sub-continent, but one by one they shut down and by 1985 it was pretty well all over, the Overland era had ended and the world had changed forever.

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

 I have written two books on these halcyon days on the Overland. Both available on Amazon ebooks: