“You need not worry, have sex with anyone you want and do not get the marriage. It is not a necessary!”
We were in stitches again. We continued down the road chatting and laughing with him all the way to Ricardo’s hotel. Ricardo went inside to get things organized; I stayed outside with Mr. Enthusiastic. I suggested we sit on the sidewalk whilst waiting, but on looking at it he said, “It is dusty we will lean against car instead.”
I queried the wisdom of this as I was wearing my backpack and didn’t want to scratch a car.
“In England, do people mind you leaning on or scratching their cars?”
“Yes,” I told him.
He laughed and said that no one minded in Iran, and to prove the point he started hitting a car parked next to us. I half-expected some burly Iranian car owner to come out and administer a swift serving of on-the-spot justice with a golf club. Luckily, none was forthcoming. It was all completely and utterly insane but I loved it. Iran was my kind of crazy place.
Ricardo took forever getting ready, and after a while, Mr. Enthusiastic said with a laugh, “Maybe they kill him inside!” Whilst waiting, he told me his dream in life was to one day visit neighboring Turkey and to be a tourist there. It made me feel very lucky to be able to live my dreams and go more or less where I wanted. I told him I hoped that one day he would get to visit Turkey. When Ricardo appeared again, he was told by Mr. Enthusiastic, in a matter-of-fact, manly way, “You have very beautiful eyes.” Mr. Enthusiastic turned to me for an endorsement. “Doesn’t he have beautiful eyes?”
“Um, yes, very beautiful,” I said.
Our new friend walked us to a spot where we could get a shared cab to the bus station. On the way, he had a business proposition for me—it went something like this: if I bought things in London and he bought things in Iran, could we swap and make lots of money? I didn’t quite grasp the subtleties of how we made all the money and asked for clarification. He replied, “But I want to be rich; how can you help me?!”
Before we parted company, I asked him his views on the government. He didn’t like it. “The people now think maybe they make mistake.”
He also was of the opinion that the people were scared of the government and that the government used religion to “control the people.”
He offered to hail a shared taxi for us and speak to the driver personally to make sure he charged us the correct price and didn’t rip us off. “It is better. Maybe driver try hanky panky!”
We laughed again. He waved down a cab for us, had a brief chat to the driver, and said goodbye. Both Ricardo and I were sad to see this cheerful and just plain nutty guy go. Inside the cab, we were greeted by a suited Iranian man who warmly welcomed us to Iran and told us how much he hoped we’d enjoy his country.
Iran and the words “road safety” don’t sit well together. The country has some 200,000 reported road accidents a year, and no doubt many more unreported ones, and roughly 28,000 road deaths per annum. This appalling figure crowns Iran with the unfortunate title of country with the highest rate of fatal road accidents in the world. My
We got to experience the full nightmare that is Iranian road travel on our bus to the Caspian. We were given seats at the front of the bus near the driver who drove like a psychotic, suicidal IndyCar racer on crack.
He pulled out without looking, overtook on blind corners next to jagged cliffs with no crash barriers, tailgated whatever vehicle was in front of him, and at one stage sped around a massive row of cars stuck behind a slow- moving farm truck by using a sort of imaginary middle lane—the type of thing you would only consider doing on a computer driving game, and even then you wouldn’t be so reckless, unless you wanted to end your go. To the oncoming cars, he just honked his horn aggressively.
But most of all what scared me was the speed. He drove so fast it really was suicidal, and we missed oncoming cars by the narrowest of margins on several occasions. As a result, I found myself slamming my right foot down involuntarily onto an imaginary brake pedal. At the speed we went, it would have been game over permanently, no doubt about it.
Things got worse when the driver added his cell phone into the equation. He drove with his right hand, holding the phone with his left but to his right ear, and even started gesticulating at one stage with his steering arm. I watched in horror just waiting for the bump in the road that would turn the wheel and send us headfirst into the approaching vehicles. My late grandfather used to say, “It’s better to be twenty minutes late in this world, than twenty years early in the next.” Well, I was getting ready to meet up with him in the next, and prayed like the condemned man I knew I was.
At one stage, we approached some traffic cops by the side of the road, but somehow the driver managed to hit the brakes and avoided being pulled over. He glanced across at me as if to say, “We showed them, didn’t we?” I gave a nervous half grin back. They say that monkeys smile when they’re scared to indicate non-aggression. Whether that’s true or just a load of monkey piss, I don’t know, but the smile I gave him was of the primate “scared and defenseless” kind.
Whilst he was still in view of the law it was a cautious, “Mirror, signal, turn—okay, slowly into first gear and ease on the accelerator… Now check your mirror, that’s it and slowly into second.”
He drove as cautiously as an eighty-year-old grandma with eyesight problems and bad nerves at the wheel of an economy Sunrise Mobility Scooter. If I thought this brush with the law would have a lasting effect on his driving then I was about to be sorely disappointed. As soon as we rounded the corner, he dropped the clutch—we were back at the Indianapolis 500 and now he was playing catch up. I gave in, held on tight, and just closed my eyes like a kid on a scary roller coaster.
I awoke from this prolonged nightmare when we finally arrived at our destination. We got to the city of Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, at sunrise. Before getting on another bus, Ricardo and I both needed a good stiff caffeine injection, so we scouted out a little
The Russians didn’t agree, though; they’d occupied the place on several occasions, most notably in 1668 when the forces of Cossack brigand chief Stenka Razin rather unfairly massacred the entire population. They’d also popped over for a visit in 1920 when the Bolsheviks gleefully smashed up most of the bazaar, leading the majority of the locals to flee as refugees. Perhaps more interestingly, though, I learned that when the poor Rashtis weren’t on the receiving end of a dose of Russian rape and pillage, they were suffering the indignity of being made fun of by the rest of the country as the butt of national jokes. Much comedic value is derived from the lisping Rashti accent, but the real focus of the gags is on the popular perception that Rashti wives are unfaithful—the shameless Jezebels!
We didn’t stick around in Rasht long and made our way to a small minibus station that, despite the time of day, was thriving. We caught a ridiculously cramped minibus to the town of Fuman, where we hoped to get a shared taxi all the way to Masuleh. Fuman, which is known as the “city of statues,” was a cheerful-looking spot. The brightly colored plaster cast statues dotted around town depicted things like bow hunters or people handing out biscuits and, although they were of a tacky nature, I kind of liked them. The statues all looked really cheerful, and along with the multicolored traffic islands and leafy tree-lined boulevards, gave the place a sort of storybook appearance, which was so very unlike the pictures of Iran on Western TV.
Finding a shared cab going to Masuleh was no drama but the drive there was, especially for some poor chap we saw riding toward us on a motorbike. He made the understandable mistake of trying to ride one-handed along a potholed road whilst carrying a tray of bread and wearing no crash helmet—as I’m sure we’ve all done from time to time.
The predictable happened when he hit a bump and went flying. We all watched in horror as over the handlebars he went, sending the tray of crusty bread rolls spiraling helplessly into the air. As he hurtled toward the road, it looked for sure like he was going to smash his face and hard. But miraculously, at the last minute, he managed to arch his back and adopt a belly flop pose, landing instead with a bounce on his protruding chest. The rolls rained down around him and sadly didn’t fare so well, getting squashed cruelly by our taxi’s tires, creating a cloud of breadcrumbs all over the road.
