Toudeshk

I find internet in the evening at Ardakan, and email to the homestay I'm heading for tomorrow. I might make it there tomorrow. Or I might only make it to Nain. Nain is 110km along the edge of the desert. Then I turn west and go over the mountains to Toudeshk. Maybe 50km. That will take me from green to yellow to light brown to dark brown contours on the map.

I'm just finishing eating bread and watermelon for dinner when the phone rings. It's the man from Toudeshk. He is in Ardakan. At my hotel. I go down and talk to him. He won't be there, but I will stay with his brother's family. His brother doesn't speak much English but if there is any problem I can call him.

I'm away at 5:30 and the desert drifts by. I'm in my own world. I don't notice anything for six hours. Not even the milestones that are usually big excitement. Distance signs, and towns that are actually on the map are minor ones. Crossing between provinces is big. There is a dashed black line with yellow highlighting, and there's normally some big green signs, all Farsi. I've crossed from Yazd into Esfahan without seeing it. Turning a page on the map is big. One day I crossed a corner of a page and had to refold the map twice. That was a good day. Today I cross from the southern half into the northern half. I cut the map in two so the north wasn't completely worn out before I even got there. Round numbers on the odometer are the best. When I rolled over 1000 kilometres I didn't even look at the road for 800 metres. Today I pass 1500 and 1600km without realising.

It takes Nain to bring my head back to the bike. I curve around west of the town on the bypass flyovers. Third exit to Esfahan. Stopping in Nain never enters my mind. I loop 270 degrees under the flyover and there's nothing beyond, just heat and haze all the way to the mountains. I turn back and go into a petrol station, but they don't sell anything except petrol. I refill my empty water bottles. It's before midday but it's scorching. I need to eat. There's trucks stopped in the shade under the flyover. I don't want to stop with them. Beyond there's nothing. After a few kilometres I find a scrap of shade. An overhead sign across the highway. I put my back against the steel girder, and stretch my legs out in the just wide enough shadow. Lunch is bread with jam and butter. The butter is liquid. So is the jam. I try not to pour them all over myself. I enjoy the relative cool for half an hour. But it's only getting hotter. I have to go.

I have uphill for 30 km, then down for 15. I should be able to do the climb in 3 hours and the downhill will be nothing.

It's hot now. It must be 40 degrees in the shade. If there was any shade. The real mountains lurk ahead but I'm climbing. Straight road. Steadily up. I can't tell what the slope is. I know it's up from the speed and the pain. No matter how much I drink, my mouth is always dry. A momentary tail wind negates my self-generated breeze. I feel my body dessicate.

In a parking area beside the road is a white van with tinted windows. Unusual to see a van here. As I approach two European gentlemen walk around the back and watch me. They would look like paedophiles if this was Cambodia. One of them gives me a slow clap as I pass.

Did I mention it's hot? Salt has collected at the wrinkles of my squinting eyes. White crusts. I've tried to wipe it. I only succeeded in creating a searing blindness. My eyeball on a George Foreman grill. So I settle for blinking the occasional grain into a burning trace across my cornea.

I'm not squinting from the sun. I have dark glasses. I'm squinting to see the light. I should be able to see the light and go to it. There's no light. Last time I was dying there was no light either.

The road changes colour up ahead. Darker. There's one big woolen cloud. Please still be there when I get there. It is. And at the same time there's a parking area with a polished stone bench. I lie my back to it. Close my eyes. Don't twitch until the shade is gone. A beautiful half hour. But now it's cooler on the bike, generating breeze.

The proper climb starts. Somehow it feels better. At the top there's a truck to the side changing a tyre. I look at my front tyre and it wobbles. Now it's a pancake. Four weeks. 1600km. First flat tyre in Iran. That's a milestone. There's a curved piece of steel swarf through the rubber. It would have gone through anything. I take my time. Give all the tyres some air. Exchange glances of commiseration with the truck driver. He'll be there a while. I start rolling to Toudeshk.

I drift into the petrol station to ask where the Jalali house is. My rubbery legs can't kick out of the peddles. I have to jam my shin inelegantly into the high curb to avoid falling broadside onto the concrete. The petrol attendant calls a teen on a motorbike from the street and I follow him through the village to a steel gate in a mud wall.

Inside, the Jalali house is two sides of a courtyard, the other two sides are high mudbrick. Reza and wife Fatameh are very welcoming. Their kids Nasim (8) and Nima (6) are a lot of fun.

After tea, I go with Reza to the bathhouse on the other side of the village. There is only water to the house in the evening. I leave my things in the first room. It has a bench and hooks around the edge, and an empty footbath in the middle. I have a hot and very wet shower in one of the stalls in the next room. I'm not really sure what the protocol is now. My clean clothes are in the other room. My towel is too small to cover anything anyway. I walk out in my shower sandals. The three other men all turn away. I think one of them is trying not to laugh. Maybe that wasn't right. Or maybe it's just me.

I spend the evening and the next day visiting with family and friends, motorbike tours all over the village and the desert, sitting on the roadside talking politics (I only understood the names Ahmadenijad, Moussavi, Reza'i; and that there were some different opinions). It feels strange to pay when I leave. It was like staying with friends.

Orchards and wheat fields are fed by these channels, from a system of underground tunnels bringing water from the desert.

Skimming through dirt lanes and between fruit trees on the back of Reza's motorbike.

Wheat fields and the mudbrick village, Toudeshk.

Old caravanserai, with an unusual stone tower.

Water reservoir. The wind towers keep it cool through the heat of summer. There's a stone stairway two storeys down to the tap.

His and hers door knockers (men's on right), so you can tell who's at the gate.

Reza and Nasim. Heading into the desert, to wind through village lanes and see more ruins

Me with Nima

Nima, Reza and Nasim.

Politics and icecream in the evening.

Kharanaq and Chak Chak

I wake at 5 and again at 5:30. I haven't packed anything. By the time I'm leaving Yazd it's almost 6:30. There's already traffic. At 7:30 I turn off the main road and stop to eat the breakfast the hotel packed me last night. I take my time. It should be only 75k today and I've done 20 already.

More desert

It should be flat but it's not. It heats up. The road melts into the sky and I ride until the crest emerges from the liquid horizon. Then there's a short downhill and another long climb back into the liquid. I feel like Peter O'Toole. It helps. Except he just had to sit there and let the camel do all the work.

Coming the other way it would probably be the same. A long up and a short down. I hope I don't have to find out. There's nothing on my map out here.

There's not a lot of fire ants today. But when they bite I know it. There's definitely some rawness. The cycle shorts have a pad sewn into the crotch. This pair has a two-piece pad. Every so often the seam joining the two pieces rips me open. Tomorrow I'm wearing the other pair. Two days off the bike helped. But I need that week in Esfahan.

I've found the guest house at Kharanak by 11. Kharanak is a mudbrick ghost town on the edge of a desert plateau, at the border of Iran's two great deserts. To the east, the land falls away to the Dasht e Kavir (northern salt desert) and Dasht e Lut (southern sand desert), with nothing much else between here and the Afghan and Pakistani borders.

The guest house is one of the mud brick buildings. Simple and traditional. I get a room and sit out the heat of the day in the shaded courtyard. There's a young German couple here with a car. They've driven from Germany. They're the first non-Iranians I've spoken to in four weeks.

Guest house bedroom

Guesthouse courtyard

In the late afternoon I explore the old town. It's a maze of interconnected and crumbling mudbrick buildings. I climb eroded staircases onto the upper floors and roofs. Looking for vantage points. Careful not to fall through.


At the guest house there's no-one around. Ana and Andreas have gone out into the desert for sunset pictures. The guesthouse man went home after lunch. I write in the courtyard until it's too dark to see. Something tickles my ear. I turn. There's something big there. I jump. A camel has snuck up on me. I don't know how.

There's not much else to do so I pack for tomorrow and get ready for bed, waiting for the guest house man to come back for dinner. He doesn't. I go to bed hungry and pissed off. There's only the occasional clatter of crockery from outside as the camel nuzzles another cube from the sugar bowl. At least I'm going to get a long sleep.

I'm awake early and leave quickly. Out of the gate there's enough light to see a postcard stuck to the bike. The guesthouse man has asked the Germans to write it to me. It's asking me to leave money in the kitchen. A thousand tomans for the room and five hundred tomans for lunch. I've already left a thousand tomans in the kitchen. It was supposed to be a thousand for room and breakfast. Five hundred for lunch and dinner. No dinner. No breakfast. A thousand seems more than fair. I ride back into the desert.

The sun rises behind me and I feel fresh after a good sleep. The different shorts are working wonders. Imagining an irate guesthouse man on a motorbike gives me more impetus. I turn down a small side road with no sign. I think it will take me to Chak Chak. I don't have any of the hesitant pedalling that comes with uncertain direction. I go up past a couple of villages, then tip gently forward through the downhill side. The seal disappears, and the dirt road winds down through sand and gravel hills. I fly through it without regard for skinny road tyres.

Stoked on dirt road

The seal returns and I find a sign to Chak Chak. No English, but it's Chak Chak for sure. Side road, 4km. For the last kilometre I weave through groups of soldiers walking the road. These are the stragglers.

Chak Chak translates as Drip Drip. It's a Zoroastrian pilgrimage site. Sassanian princess Nikbanuh fled the Islamic invasion of 637 AD into the desert. Short of water she threw her staff at the cliff and water began to drip out.

The cliffside cluster of buildings and stairways looks like it was built in the sixties, and not cared for since. The Fire Temple is locked.

I drink tea with the two bus loads of soldiers while we wait for the grumpy stooped old caretaker to finish his breakfast. Everyone has to do 18 months of military service. Not women obviously. These are mostly 18 year old kids, a few are in their early 20's having finished university first. They seem to be joking and having a good time. Presumably happy that they're not the ones getting shot by drug smugglers and Baluchi seperatists in the eastern border regions. The leaders aren't in uniform and don't seem very soldierish. I don't like them. I can't put my finger on why. One of them wants me to stay at his house in Yazd. No thanks. He asks the others if I'm making taroff (refusing out of politeness). I tell him in Farsi that it's not taroff, I am going to Esfahan today. It shuts him up.

The temple opens, and I let the soldiers go in first. Once they're gone I have it to myself for a while. There's a tree growing out of the cliff, and nicely embossed brass doors. Other than that it's basically a drip coming out of a cliff.


The waiting around has left me with the heat to ride in, but it's not far, another 45k to Ardakan. It's bigger than I expect and I can't find the hotel. I ask two old guys sitting under a tree and they seem to have differing opinions on which direction it is. They call another guy riding past on a motorbike to show me the way.

Cleaned up, I head out to do some shopping. At one store they pass watermelons around the six shopkeepers and customers. Everyone has a tap and gives an opinion on which one I should buy.
When there's more or less a consensus, I go and line up at the bakery. The group at the window gets bigger and bigger, and occasionally a batch of flat loaves is passed out. I find out why everyone queues for bread. As soon as it's cool it's stale.

To Yazd

During the three days of sitting around ruins I've come up with a new plan. I have 10 days to get to Esfahan to renew my visa. Instead of turning west and having a leisurely 300km through the mountains to Esfahan, I might just be able to make it via Yazd, if I have some big kilometer days. Otherwise, to go to Yazd would have meant doubling back. Nobody wants to double back.

I wake up at 5. It's dark in the tent. I'm not awake as I pack the trailer. I tried to have an early night but it didn't work. On the corner of the highway and turn off to Pasargadae, there's a restaurant. They didn't open until 8pm but they let me in early. From 8pm, buses stopped and everyone came in to eat. I ordered but nothing came. I just wanted to eat and sleep. I ordered again and still nothing happened. Bus loads of people ate. I didn't. I went to the kitchen. Finally I ate at 10:30. I'd arranged to camp here. There's a large canvas tent in the front corner of the grounds, and I set up my tent inside. The buses kept coming all night. I didn't get much sleep.

I'm slow to pack. When I finish there's no one around. The gates are padlocked. I walk around the grounds, crunching on gravel paths but nobody comes. I can't wait. I use a bench and lift the bike over the steel fence. The trailer is heavier, but it goes over too. Then I'm on the road.

It's cool before the sun, but it doesn't last long. Neither does the river valley. I start to climb up and out of the Zagros. The hill slopes are spring green. There are nomads grazing sheep.

Spring green in the mountains

Nomad camp

The different directions of the highway are usually seperated by 100 meters. Now they follow different sides of gulleys, around different sides of hills. The other direction has lower grades, is less winding, has deeper cuttings. My legs are in flames trying to keep in double digits. And there are fire ants. I noticed them a little bit yesterday, but today they are serious. Every nerve of the skin of my arse bones is being attacked by an aggravated fire ant. There's nowhere I can sit on the saddle that helps. These must be saddle sores. I was warned about saddle sores. The extent of the warning was that I would get them. Not what they are or what to do about them. I can't tell if there is a physical sore, or it's just the nerves going berserk. Not without special equipment. Or a very close friend. I have neither. I wonder if waxing would help? I don't have the equipment or the friend to find out. Walking into a beauty parlour and trying to explain it would probably get me arrested.

There's a town. I should be near the top. I stop and chew icecream, biscuits, toffees. Drink lemon beer. There's a big range of alcohol free beers here. Mostly they're pretty bad, but it keeps the breweries in business. The best ones are fruit flavoured. It's better if you think of them as a carbonated fruit beverage. They just happen to be brewed with malt and hops, and that adds some depth of flavour. Of course lemon is the best, but every now and then pomegranate, apple, pineapple are a good change.

Back on I keep grinding upwards. It gets steeper, and I see a summit. On one side there's an ambulance station, the other side a towtruck yard. It's a roller coaster, slowly clicking four hours up, up, up. Now I'm tipping over the edge. Into the drop. I lose my stomach. The speed limit is 60. I burst through it. Trucks are in low gears and I go wide to eat them up. One truck decides to pass another. I touch the brake lightly, trying to judge it. Lose as little speed as possible. Then I'm in behind the truck and sucked forward by it's draft. I make hard fists around the brake levers, and lean back in the seat to avoid a mouth full of tailgate. The truck drifts back right and I shoot past back up to full speed. 70. 75. I sit up in the seat, catching all the wind. The surface was perfect, but now i'm getting vibrated to hell. The surface has a pattern cut into it. For grip in the ice. There's a corner coming. It's fast, but I need to take some speed off. The trailer goes everywhere. The surface and braking it doesn't like. I wrestle it. The fishtails get bigger. I'm not going to hang on to it into the corner. I'm ready to be abraided into oblivion. I stick it through the corner and the grade shallows. At the top of a small rise I stop to check the trailer. I've lost my flag. I've just done 30km in 30 minutes. I won't be going back for it.

It's flat now. Slightly downhill. I stay in 30's and 40's. Devouring the kilometers. I turn right. Put my back to the mountains. It's quieter off the main road. Out into the desert.

It's been 160 km, 8 hours when I roll into Arbakuh. There's a hotel on the outskirts, but it looks expensive, so I keep going into town. The signs are confusing at a roundabout. I'm stopped. A guy on a motorbike wants me to come and eat at a restaurant across the road. I ask about a hotel. There's one in the restaurant. It doesn't look like it. I ride up the road, but I don't see anything so I go back to the restaurant and stop. The guy comes out. He's big with a rectangular head and thin mustache. His friend comes out too. He's also big and rectangular, with a rectangular head, rectangular glasses and rectangular gap between his front teeth. When they talk to me they're not trying to communicate. They don't simplify. They're idiots. They touch the bike. Fingerprint the mirror. One squeezes my arm. He thinks it's skinny. They're harmless. But buffoons. I can't be bothered with this. A couple of older guys come out of the restaurant and we all go inside. I sit with the older guys. I can't tell who works here to ask about a room. The older guys order me a kebab. The buffoons are at another table. We eat. One of the men reminds me of Manuel from Fawlty Towers. He is from Yazd. He is going back there now. I can put the bike in his ute and come with him. Thanks, I'll ride there tomorrow. Tomorrow he comes back to Arbakuh. He will see me on the road and I can stay at his house. One of his children speaks English. Okay. The hotel I saw is the only hotel.

I check in and sleep. On dusk I wake up and walk into town. I take pictures of a caravanserai. I walk for an hour but don't find internet. My legs feel fine. Nothing.

Arbakuh caravanserai

I leave early again, but the town is long. I was out of Shiraz in 15 minutes, but this town just keeps going. Out on the flat I hurt already. It's slow. In the teens. It's flat but turning the pedals is hard. There's a head wind. I turn ninety degrees and it's still a head wind. It's going to be a long day. The fire ants don't let up. Yesterday they came and went, but today they're non stop. This is only the flat. I still have to cross mountains to Yazd. It hurts. I have to keep moving here or I'll never make it. I've been going three hours when the green ute toots it's horn and comes to a stop. I stop, and Mahmood comes across the sandy median to me. I have his address, but the map is too coarse. I have no cell phone. What time will I get there. I don't know. Two o'clock. I'm an optimist. We will meet at Imam Hossein square at Three. Three and Four, to be safe.

Desert architecture

I reach Deh Shir. It's only 55 flat kilometres but it's taken three and a half hours. Now I go up. I've got nothing to keep the speed up with. I do 8. 7. This is walking speed. I can see the whole climb in front of me. It's better when you just have to get to this corner. Just have to get to this corner. It's not as long as I thought, but it's not over at the top. On top it undulates. I coast every down without changing gears. When I'm back to walking speed I start pedalling again. When there's a down with no more up I feel like I'm going to cry. From here it's down all the way to Yazd. I don't pedal unless I have to. I'm in a hard tuck. Aerodynamic. But there's instability in the trailer at 55. I experiment. Weight forward causes instability. Weight back is stable. Now my legs aren't on fire, just my bum.

Knackered already, and now I have to cross this

Looking back towards Arbakuh when I think I'm almost at the top. So wrong.

I reach Imam Hossein Square just before three. 160km, 9 hours. I put trousers over my cycle shorts, swap shirts and lie in the grass almost sleeping. At four I'm just starting to wonder how long I should wait when the green ute screeches to a stop. He was running late. He just did the 160 km in an hour and ten minutes so he wouldn't miss me. We fit the bike on the ute and go to his house.

I shower. I'm served cold drinks, lunch, tea, more food, more tea, by wife and daughters. Then Mahmood, eldest daughter Atefeh, who speaks English, and I go into Yazd to see some sights. We go to one of the historic homes, that is now a public garden and restaurant. Yazd is a desert city. Many of the old buildings have a badgir, a wind tower. It collects the breeze and directs it down into the house, usually over a pond for further cooling. It works incredibly well. It almost feels like air conditioning.

Atefeh, Fakhri, Mahmood and me

Badgir (wind tower) on the Governor's old residence

Now a public park and restaurant

Back at home for more tea, then we go out again, this time with mother Fakhri as well. We go to the edge of town and there are some low hills. The sun is going. The hills have round stone towers on them. The Towers of Silence. Such a good name. Yazd is where the biggest population of Zoroastrians still lives. Up until the 1960's these towers where where the bodies of the dead were laid out for the vultures. Half way up the steep path a wind comes. It's fierce. On a spur it's difficult to stand up. It's blowing sand off the desert. Stones blow off the path. And there are big rain drops. It's fantastic. Mahmood and I continue to the top in the desert windstorm, then skip back down the path to the car. I'm elated.

Towers of silence


In the morning there's a long breakfast. Cell phones go constantly. Mahmood goes to work, but the rest of the family sit and talk. There's two girls and two boys, The oldest three are in their twenties and at university. The youngest just finished school. I like them. They joke with each other. There's a lot of laughing. They're very kind.

I spend the next two days in Yazd. Getting lost in the mudbrick lanes of the old city. Seeing how the underground water channels and reservoirs feed the city. Visit the mosques. I visit the Ateshkadeh, an eternal flame supposedly kept burning by the Zoroastrians since around 470AD.

I sleep and eat in the old houses, built around courtyards, that are now converted to hotels and restaurants. I even manage a vegetarian day, dolmeh bodemjun (stuffed eggplant) for lunch and eggplant with dried kurds (like a baba ganoush) for dinner.

Jameh mosque

Tomb of the 12 Imams


Atashkadeh, eternal flame, burning continuously for over 1500 years they say

Restaurant/hotel courtyard in one of the traditional homes

Eggplant and dried kurds. Probably sounds better using the Farsi name. It's good. And, well, it's not meat on a stick.

Pasargadae

75 km, 4 hours riding up a steep sided river valley brought me to Pasargadae. It was a city built by Cyrus, the first Achaemenid king, but was later superseded by Persepolis. There's not a lot here, except the tomb of Cyrus, a few stone column bases, stone building footings, tumbling walls, and the foundation wall of what was a hilltop palace. I guess that explains why the bike and I were subject of as much interest and as many photographs as the ruins.