By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong (15 page)

The girls were from Esfahan and were on their way to Bandar-e Abbas for a week’s holiday. They wanted to know if we were married. Mahmood immediately told them we were single, but we explained that I was married and Russ was in a relationship: it was only Mungo who was actually available. That didn’t bother them: they wanted to know if we were happy to have second wives. Marry us, they said mischievously, and take us out of here. They were vivacious, attractive and the way they were dressed was pretty rebellious for Iran - so much so that every now and again someone would pass in the corridor and scold them about it.

After dinner we chatted for a while with other people who joined us from the corridor, but in the end even the energetic Mahmood really couldn’t do any more translating and descended into silence.

I got my bunk ready for bed, using the sheets and pillow cases the steward had provided. Then I unrolled my sleeping bag liner.

‘You’ve got sheets, Charley,’ Mungo said.

‘I know, but it’s what’s
under
the sheets, isn’t it?’

‘Under the sheets, right . . . Give me a nod later and I’ll come and give you a cuddle.’

Tugging a three-day-old sock from my foot I shoved it into his face.

10

Smugglers and Submarines

Russ was looking bleary-eyed when I slid down from my bunk and folded it away.

‘Morning, Russ. Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes, I think I did, actually. This train’s pretty comfortable. Not like the one from Tbilisi, eh?’ He yawned and looked out of the window. ‘We’re in the desert,’ he said. ‘In fact we’ve been in the desert all night.’

I shook my head sadly. ‘Russ, we’ve been in the desert since we left Tehran.’

We wandered down to the dining car and ate a breakfast of tea and crispy naan bread with a sticky sort of grey peanut butter. It was OK, but nothing like the dinner we’d had the night before. I was thinking wistfully of a creamy latte and a bacon roll when an old guy came in with a meal he’d brought from home. Sitting down, he unwrapped a cloth containing walnuts and without hesitation offered some to us. It was a typical, generous gesture: he didn’t know us from Adam and seemed to have very little, but what he did have he was more than happy to share.

Back in the cabin Russ and I laid out the plastic-coated map and I hunted down the felt-tip to go through our plans. Once we arrived in Bandar-e Abbas we would find the docks and try to get a dhow to sail across to Dubai.

Russ nodded. ‘As soon as we get settled I’m going to check with Lucy about the container ship we want to take on from there. And we really need to keep abreast of the news now. The situation with China and Tibet could change at any time.’

Outside, we’d passed beyond the sand dunes and it was mountainous again, the peaks white as if they had been coated in salt. Below them mud-coloured settlements were springing up all over the place. Iran was a vast country and the seventy million people seemed thinly spread. Russ pointed out that no matter what the religious leaders said, no matter the political disputes between our government and theirs, the welcome that soldier had given us in Astara had been pretty much echoed all the way south.

Russ spread his fingers to measure distance across the map. ‘You know, when you look at the map we’ve actually done a third of the trip already.’

I checked the GPS. Russ had suggested that if we couldn’t get a dhow, we could sail a dinghy across the Strait. I wasn’t sure about that. ‘OK. A direct line to Dubai is a hundred and fifty miles. I reckon we’re maybe forty or so out of Bandar, which makes the straits at least a hundred miles of sailing.’

Russ had moved on. ‘Our nemesis is still China,’ he mused. ‘Somebody said we can actually go in to Burma and then get a plane to fly us to Laos.’

‘What kind of plane?’

‘Cessna.’

‘Great. I can take off and land then.’ I demonstrated how to ease back on the stick. ‘The Thailand Cessna club said they’d pick us up if we wanted; they’d fly us across Burma to Laos. We could do that if it comes to it because a Cessna doesn’t count: it’s a small plane, not a commercial airliner. We’ll just have to see how the land lies when we get there but if we end up in a Cessna, that’s fine with me.’

It was only nine in the morning when arrived at Bandar-e Abbas, but it was already stiflingly hot. We said goodbye to the four girls from the next carriage and went outside where the sun was beating down on the pavement and the sky was a shimmering blue with not a hint of cloud. The street was wide and dusty; a commercial district with a line of yellow taxis. I was looking forward to a shower. Sleeping on the train is fine and that particular train had been pretty fabulous but there were no showers. I realised then that this would be our final day in Iran - we had walked into the country from the north and now we’d be sailing out from the south.

In the hotel I washed my socks and undies; my wife would have been proud of me. It was already past ten, and we needed to do something about finding a dhow. Mahmood said it was so hot down here that everything closed between twelve and four p.m.

Mungo came in looking agitated. ‘Have you seen the news? There’s been a cyclone in Burma. They think something like fifteen thousand people have been killed.’

I switched on the TV and we sat down and watched pictures sent by a BBC reporter based in Thailand. Burma has to be one of the most secretive regimes in the world: a British colony until 1948; after independence democracy only lasted till 1962. That was when General Ne Win led a military coup and since then the army has been in control. The journalist said that most of the casualties reported so far seemed to have been from one town in the south. Houses had been blown down, trees uprooted and roads blocked. There were fears for the rice crop - the cyclone had created a huge wave which swept across the Irrawaddy Delta.

Russ had seen the news too and we were all a little quiet when we met outside to grab a taxi.

‘I hope to God the military let foreign aid in,’ he said. ‘And fast. They’re really going to need it.’

I nodded. It was horrendous, and it sounded as though the number of casualties could go even higher. It was strange to think that just earlier that morning we had been talking of travelling through Burma, and now just a few short hours later there was this terrible tragedy. It was an unsettled region but we could never have predicted this. I couldn’t stop thinking about all those people suffering so badly. Of course it could have a big impact on our plans - and along with the crisis building between China and Tibet, our road to Laos was gradually being cut off. But that seemed like a very tiny, insignificant problem in the face of such a tragedy.

As we approached the docks our confidence was flagging: it all looked much more organised than we’d envisaged: large white buildings, lots of construction work going on and lots of security.

Russ shook his head. ‘I was hoping for an old quay with boats tied up but it’s all quite official-looking, isn’t it?’

Mahmood took us into the shipping office and immediately struck up a conversation with one of the officials. It was cool inside after the heat-blasted pavement. Breaking off from the conversation Mahmood turned to us.

‘There is only one desk, one shipping company that goes to Dubai.’ He pointed to a glass booth with no one behind the counter. ‘One ship that goes every other day. They don’t carry passengers. He is very sorry but those are the rules.’

Quite a few people had gathered now, officials from the port and from various shipping companies, their chatter echoing across the empty room. Mahmood deliberated with them for a bit longer but finally he turned to us. ‘They are sorry,’ he said, ‘but they are really restricted and not allowed to take any passengers. I’ve asked them again, but there is nothing they can do.’

We decided to take a walk and see if we could make a private deal with one of the captains. Mungo wiped the camera lens and Mahmood lifted a finger. ‘If they see the camera they will take it,’ he said. ‘It is best to put it away.’

We wandered down towards the water where massive berths were cut in concrete to accommodate the big ships like the glimmering cruise liner we could see moored in the distance. Crossing some cleared ground we saw a wire fence and a gate; beyond it, tied up to the dock, was just the sort of battered old wooden dhow we were looking for. It was flat-hulled and painted a dirty blue with an open foredeck, the stern covered by an upper deck with a chipped balustrade like an old pirate ship.

We got Mahmood to ask the crew if they’d take us to Dubai.

They laughed.

‘They don’t take passengers,’ I muttered.

Mahmood shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there is no way they can do it.’

The next thing we knew a security guy had appeared in a white shirt with epaulettes and a baseball cap. He looked pretty pissed off.

‘What’re you doing?’ he demanded. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

I apologised, and Mahmood explained quickly who we were, where we were from and what we were trying to do. The security man chilled out then: he explained that two years ago a law had been passed forbidding not just the dhows, but any cargo boat from taking passengers. It was all to do with smuggling - not only contraband, but people - and the Iranian government had cracked down hard. He told us to go to the government office and speak to the head of security; see if he could help us.

The head of security was in his office by the shipping company and he was as helpful as he could be under the circumstances. He looked almost apologetically at us. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but there is no way: there is no place on a dhow to sleep.’

‘We don’t need a bed,’ I told him.

‘It doesn’t matter. They do not take passengers.’

We asked if there were any other more traditional vessels we could take, rather than the regular ferry.

He shook his head. ‘No, nothing. It is impossible. Only the ferry will take passengers because of the people-smuggling. Dhows don’t come in to the customs area. They have no passport stamp; they come to a different place than where the customs is. They just unload their goods and reload. Even if one would take you, you might not get your passport stamped and they would take you to a different place in Dubai other than where the customs office is and then you might not be allowed in.’

We realised it was hopeless. It was a pity because it would have been very cool to cross the Strait of Hormuz on a dhow. Instead we had to rush to the ferry’s booking office, hoping desperately there were still places free. We were in luck - we managed to get four tickets for the next ferry, which sailed on Thursday morning - the day after tomorrow.

That night I was up and down like a jackrabbit: like an idiot I’d left the balcony door open in my room and I’d been fighting mosquitoes ever since. I’d been bitten on my fingers and on my back; I’d killed one so engorged with my blood it spattered all over the pillow.

 

The following morning - our last day in Iran - Mungo and I headed for the docks and a boat to Qeshm, a small island just south of Bandar where Iranians like to go on holiday, just for a look around. Mungo was complaining about the badger strapped to his chin. He likes his stubble; he’s never clean-shaven but he never lets the full beard grow either. The girls in the office had made him promise he would let it grow, however, and see how long it was by the time we got to Sydney. But we were in thirty-eight-degree heat now and it was only going to get hotter: he’d picked up a shaver and tonight the badger was coming off.

We took a speed boat to the island; a big old cheap tub with a canvas roof to keep the sun off. This was one of the most controversial stretches of water in the world: with what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were here as well as the Americans. The nature of the place was clear, with tankers and oil rigs and warships all clearly in evidence - and not all of the warships were Iranian. Sitting there with the breeze in my face I saw a periscope break the surface of the water. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Mungo look,’ I said, ‘a fucking periscope.’

We watched as it lifted, like three metal struts sticking out of the water. It clearly wasn’t a buoy because it was moving. Then it just disappeared again. ‘Jesus - that was a submarine,’ I said. ‘It makes you realise just where you are. It’s probably American. Or maybe one of ours, even.’

‘It could’ve been Russian,’ Mungo said. ‘Mahmood told me he thought the Russians were here as well.’

To be honest, neither Mungo or I were very impressed by the holiday island. There wasn’t much there save for a rather dirty-looking beach with a few pagoda-style huts on the promenade. It felt very downbeat and we’d been told that smugglers in speedboats picked contraband up from here and tried to get it back to the mainland.

Mahmood had gone a little quiet and neither of us thought much about it. But later he said how much he liked Qeshm and he planned to bring his family here for a holiday. Mungo and I felt terrible for voicing our opinions earlier - we couldn’t believe we’d been so insensitive. We felt terrible and it really brought home the differences between our cultures. We were used to such a high standard of living, had such high expectations. The reality is that Iranians have little choice as to what they do or where they can go and to a man like Mahmood, Qeshm was pretty cool. Sometimes I forgot we were in a religious dictatorship and that choice is pretty limited. There are loads of young people in Iran - something like 70 per cent of the population is under thirty
-
and there’s nowhere for them to go. Apparently people would often just jump in their cars and drive around because there is nothing else to do. Mungo and I agreed we should be much more careful about voicing our feelings from now on, not just in Iran but in any country. It was bloody rude, and if we’d heard anyone slagging off our country we’d pretty quickly tell them where to get off.