Isfahan, Shiraz, Bam

Chapter 12 - Hand to Mouth to India

I came in to Isfahan pretty early and predictably, the first person I saw in the Square was Ijaz; his crooked gait and shifty demeanour distinctive at 100 yards distance. In a typically good-hearted gesture of welcome he took me off to eat an Irani delicacy for breakfast-head of sheep. I'm willing to give most things a try and my earliest recorded ancestor was hung for thieving sheep in 1329-but a mouthful of mucousy mutton later, I gave my piece to Ijaz who seemed mystified that this was not my ideal breakfast.

I hung around in the shade for a few hours, then some off-duty soldiers took me to lunch and I learnt a little more of the mentality of a country living in the shadow of war. All young men must spend two years in the army, regardless of their education or vocation, unless they be a mullah-the bearded Islamic scholars to be seen stepping piously about the place. The soldiers had been physics students but now their expertise lay stagnant as they spent their days learning how to hoist a rifle around and march in strict step.

In the evening I met up with the professor who had sent me to Sonedad and he invited me into his home for the night, and we had to catch no less than four crowded taxis to his home in the outskirts of the city. We spent the kind of evening of straight intellectual conversation that results when there's neither any dope nor alcohol to be had-Not that this guy needed anything! One look in his eyes was enough to convince you of his brilliant insanity, containing a cool air of danger somewhere within. This was combined with a sharp foxish cunning and he bounced around all over the place with the maniacal oscillating expression of an actor in sped-up film.

He spoke an Oxbridge English and I struggled to match his outlandish vicabulary. A patriot, he seemed to feel that the strength of his nation and religion were synonymous with his own sense of self worth. In his company you could not help but feel the formidable potential of this man and I soon had the explanation: When I asked him about the Iran-Iraq war that raged for eight long and terrible years, he disappeared into a bedroom and returned with an album full of photos from his years as a soldier. As he turned the pages, I saw the image of a brave and frightened young commando, armed with all he could carry.

"I had simply everything. Rifles, grenades, pistols, poison-you see, Tom, I was a commando-that means I was a footloose maveick, working alone-killing Iraqis! Because they were trying to kill me, you see!"

And so on, in an engaging and charming voice that never tired of its own tone and that held something close to the tone of a genius. He told me quite casually that he had personally killed 57 Iraqi soldiers.

"How did it feel to kill someone?" I asked him.

"Well, of course, I had all manner of terrible hallucinations-I was seeing things, Tom, as truly as you are here at this moment."

For two years, he had been unable to sleep comfortably, tormented by dreams of his own seemingly-imminent death. He kept patrol in the Kurdish mountains, through which Iraq had launched a surprise land invasion. I had no doubt that the eyes of my friend had seen a lot of death, witnessing many ugly sights hidden from the everyday view of the rest of society. But as a talented mystic in his own right, he seemed to deal with it now on the same conceptual plate as the complexities of a game of chess.

He dropped me back in the square the next day with a book of Omar Khayyam poetry and an arrangement whereby I could enter the fabulous blue mosque for free. I didn't see him again but was thankful for the relief of his unorthodox company in a country that is strong in uniformity of thought.

I was never short of conversation in Iran and people sometimes exhibited less surprise that I was travelling without money, than by the fact that I was on the road all alone at the tender age of 20. I was always asked if I had my parent's permission to travel and it was assumed more than once that I must be a runaway.

Irani family structures generally entail that sons and daughters often live with their parents well into their 20's. It's seen as heartless and incomprehensible that teenagers are often expected to leave home at 18 or 19 in the West-or that they should want to. The close and somewhat sticky family relationship works both ways, of course and most Muslims will feel a strong responsibility to look after their parents when they become old and feeble, to repay the debt of their upbringing. Old folks homes are spoken of with real horror in Iran and are seen as a vivid symbol of the callousness of Western society-where we'd surely turn pensioners into tinned sausages if they tasted good.

In these are modern times the young men sensed that they were somehow missing out on the action. They were obliged to wait until marriage before having any relations with girls and many couldn't afford the expense that a wedding and setting up house would entail-carpets are not cheap. Consequently, there were a lot of youths jerking around in small boisterous groups with frustrated testosterone flowing through their tense veins.

After an evening of walking around the Square, with my hopes of an invite into someone's house frequently being raised and then falling flat as a nan bread, I was eventually given some food by a family on the lawns. I retired to sleep on the tiles but within minutes a crowd of gawky onlookers came to stare and hover about. Finally I jumped out of my sleeping-bag in my undershorts and screamed in rage:

"Pool nadaram! Pool nadaram!" ('No money! No money!) At which terrible visage, they finally understood and withdrew in shame.

The next morning, I was woken by the guys with hoses as usual and went to wash in the public toilets, leaving my bag out for a moment. On this occasion my trust in the goodness of the common folk was betrayed because when I returned it was gone. In one bleary lapse, I'd lost all of my sleeping stuff, clothes and my harmonica. After a minute of cussing, I was overcome by waves of laughter and I figured that at least I'd have less to carry.

When Ijaz heard what had happened, he was more upset about my loss than I'd initially been. He held his head in his hands and exclaimed:

"How could this happen to you in my country? Please accept my apologies!" and he bought me my bus ticket to Yazd in consolation.

Much lightened in load and in spirit, I strolled into the Blue Mosque with my paper of special permission and saw a collage of artistic inspiration that I can't effectively describe in words. My mind was taken to an architectural astral plane where many miracles were done and I wandered through the mosque in a dream.

This was an oasis of the spirit for thirsty desert travellers. Not a single hot colour could be seen and instead it was all folds and soft yieldings of blue, purple and green fell like flower blossom from heaven, eternally drifting, spiralling and folding in upon themselves within the casing of blue tiles.

The minarets loomed above in a turquoise that i felt i had known before in dreams and I left the sunshine to walk beneath the fat main dome. It's underside glittered in a song of the night sky and by standing on the centre tiles,I shouted "Allah hu Akbar!" My voice echoed back seven times within a second and it seemed as though i was no longer alone.

Such are the wonders of Islamic constructions and the mad professor had told about a building (no longer surviving) which contained a room whose walls were contoured with Divine cunning; musicians could come and play and when the Sultan and his subjects would come in two hours later, the music would echo back at them. But i wasn't sure if i believed him.

Now without anything to keep me warm at night, I hoped that the hospitality of the Iranis was consistent across the land and I took the bus to Yazd in a general effort to move East while I still had the energy.

In an hour or two, the desert began to silently swallow the horizons on either side. We thundered forward, powered by sheer resolve, bus tickets and a full tank of diesel, undaunted by the mocking expanse that made our motorised carriage seem very small indeed. This was not a desert of the swirling sand dune variety but rather a plane where nothing seemed to have the will to live or grow; flat, fey ground that stretched north and south like an enormous potential grave.

To the East some hills began to grow and we focused on these for all we were worth. I was filled with a euphoria at the prospect of new territory but also a strange reluctance to leave the simplicity of the desert. Still, it wa not exactly a great place to hitchhike. Standing by the side of the road I would have been an incongruous island of life in an Earthy void that hosts the heat of day and the cold of night with equal passivity. I'd soon have crumbled into dust for the sake of good manners, if nothing else.

When we arrived in Yazd I teamed up with a serious Slovenian, named Peter and a funny French guy, called Jaurice, who had both been on the same bus as me. Peter stared around at everything with an intense gaze as though he was expecting it all to dematerialize and hide the moment he looked away. Jaurice made impressive attempts to offer pieces of fruit to the guys at the bus stand who were staring at us:

"Why is it," he asked, shaking his head in bewilderment, "That the Iranis will never allow us to decline when they offer us something but will never except anything that we try to give them!"

We marched into town like three bold wanderers from the West, travel-hardened vagabonds with our eyes full of the horizon and desperately looking for somewhere discreet to piss. I left them at their hotel and began to stroll around town, employing my usual tactic of attempting to look as lost as possible, in the hope that someone might come to my aid. In the general bustle of a town or a city, no one stands out more than someone who looks like they don't quite know what they should be doing.

Within minutes, a large fat man approached me in loud and simple English and asked me where I was from, where I was going and the usual stuff about occupation, marital status and the preferred cut of tobacco of my father. Once done with the obligatory preliminaries, he began to expound on his knowledge of Western culture; music in particular:

"Ah yes! I know music of Europe very well! George Michael! Michael Jackson! Yes! Ha! Ha! No, Please wait. Mariah Carey, yes? And Dire Straits-very good!" With the approach of night and lacking a bed of any description, I began to feel that this conversation wasn't exactly going anywhere nor furthering my chances of survival that night and I said as much. He did pay for me to get cleaned up at the local hamam, which was a good start but I soon realised that he was yet another mindfucker from some warped and weary hell, sent to prise open the cracks in my sanity. (Re-reading this it sounds a bit harsh but you ahd to be there)

He took me to the fruit shop and continued:

"Kerrot! Yes? Ha! Ha! Potatoo! Please wait! Ah! Onyon-yes? Please wait-Melon! Yes! very good!" And so on, until my reason eventually overtook my irritable fatigue and I realised that he was just a bit simple in the head. It transpired that he still lived with his parents, who probably gave him a little pocket money each day so that he could stroll about and enjoy himself naming agricultural products in English.

He didn't want to let me go and I eventually had to use an arm twist to remove his huge hand from mine. I hustled off to find some other help in the now dark streets. He stood there waving for minutes after I left him and I cursed that I didn't have the money to take a hotel room too.

The only grassy areas that I could see were coated with an evening dew and I no longer had any bedding. The nights in Isfahan had been sharp with the approach of autumn. Yazd was in the middle of a desert and so was even cooler in the evening.

I remembered the new postcard in Farsi that I'd gotten the professor in Isfahan to write out for me, explaining my pilgrimage and I showed it to a group of students I met on the street. They at once adopted me and took me back to their flat, apologizing all the while that they couldn't offer me much comfort.

They lived in a one-room apartment and slept on a floor that lacked the usual carpets. As a special celebration, they rented out some movies and we watched some hilarious Jackie Chan acrobatic action whilst we munched from a meal of a a foot high pile of nan bread and some pieces of meat. Most welcome of all, though, were the surprise joints of hashish that their Arabian friend produced from his jacket pocket-evidence that there existed more than one set of moral standards in Iran.

The next day I was passed on to another Yazd student, who buzzed me around town on his motorbike and sorted me out with some new clothes to replace my shirt and trousers that had deteriorated to rags. On the way round the red stone walls of the city we ran into Peter and Jaurice who were delighted to see me still alive.

"Merci, for our friend!" They told my driver and we parted with the wish that we might meet again in the later stages of the overland trail.

A contact was set up for me in my destination of Shiraz to the South and I spent the rest of the day and evening with the students, who practiced their ineffective English on my poor temper until it was ready to split. Once my survival was assured, it was amazing how ungrateful and irritable I became when I felt the peace of my personal sphere was invaded.

This kind of reaction was like biting the hand that was pulling me up the cliff face and is an indication of the exasperation that can come with hand-to-mouth travelling. I sometimes went for days and days without any space to myself, so dependent was I upon the help of others. This made me go fucking crazy. I was almost always in the company of others and I had to adjust myself to the routine of the kind folk who fed me-even if that did mean dinner at one in the morning.

My bad spirits were utterly shamed by the generosity of the students when they put me on the bus to Shiraz. Not only did they buy me the ticket but they all gave me more money than they could have afforded and became offended when I tried to refuse. In addition, it was all I could do to prevent them from giving me any of the valuable items that were in the room. They tried to bestow upon me digital clocks and vacuum flasks that would have doubled the weight of my luggage. They loaded me up with food, shaving equipment and promises to write or phone, embraced me with tearful farewells and kisses on each cheek and then stood around to wave as my bus pulled out. I said a silent prayer for the blessing of the sweet people in the world, resolved not to be such an asshole in future.

Then I breathed a sigh of relief at finally being alone again.

Well, alone in a sense, for as soon as the other passengers on the bus heard that I was English, they poured handfuls of seed and nuts into my hands that were beyond my dexterity to open. As it was impossible to refuse on these occasions, my pockets were always crammed with bits of muesli throughout my time in Iran.

We arrived in Shiraz at 4am. I was taken back to the house of a young guy I had met on the bus, to sleep until a more reasonable hour. Thereupon, the contact of my friends in Yazd came to collect me and soon I was stepping into a huge three-storied house, owned by my new friend, Mehrdad who, after 14 years of living in America, had returned to try and get his land back from 'those thieving bastards in the government'.

Mehrdad was well-off, with American tastes and high blood pressure; he laughed at his own jokes and swore without restraint-yet at the same time retained the considerate nobility of his Irani upbringing. He had a beautiful wife at whom I couldn't help staring; and a nauseating little boy to whom I never gave a glance. Mehrdad was perhaps a little suspicious of my aims and it was important for him to establish some kind of hierarchy between us. But when I yielded to his whims and didn't take offence at his vibes, he reciprocated with friendly generosity.

There was a large convertible in the yard but Mehrdad liked to leave it draped and unused as a tribute to his late father, who had owned the car. So he showed me the sights of Shiraz by motorbike, with his excitable little brat on the front doing his best to glue his lips to the handles with candyfloss. We visited the tombs of a couple of Sufi poets and saw a few other crumbling relics but it was all something of a let-down after the magnificence of Isfahan. It didn't really matter for it was simply pleasant to be in interesting company and a warmer climate again. We ate a wonderful dinner of succulent beef, that I judged to be of the same texture as the breasts of Mehrdad's wife who served it. We spent the evening with a selection of Hollywood videos which let in some welcome air on the austerity of Irani culture.

At night, Mehrdad and I sneaked out to break the law and we slipped through the midnight streets, slicing the cold air on his bike. Half an hour later, we were puffing on a joint in an alleyway with a friend of his, glancing nervously up and down every few seconds in case of detection.

We then joined his other friends upstairs who, though rebels themselves (by virtue of playing cards and watching the prohibited satellite television), would have been outraged by our dope habits. Suddenly it seemed like I was a teenager again, doing my utmost to hold back my stoned giggles before a sober audience who quizzed me on every aspect of Western life. I hope my answers made some kind of sense.

Mehrdad had the strange capacity for seeming as uncouth as only an LA salesman could be one moment and then pull me up the next minute for not following the proper protocol for entering a house-one should wait for the other person before entering and it's respectful to yell 'ya Allah' as you go in, to warn the females inside; in case they want to don their headcloths or whatever. Likewise, in the middle of a blood-and-guts Hollywood excuse-for-a-movie, he would sigh wistfully:

" There's no love like that you have for your mama and papa!"

There was no doubt about how he felt about the Islamic regime in Iran:

"Those fascist sons of bitches!" He would snarl,"Man, you can't even go for a walk in those mountains without the fuckers trying to make out you're a spy or something-just to get baksheesh!* You know what that means? Yeah, that's right-money!"And he seemed almost pleased about the corruption-it gave him the chance to screw his pudgy, bald-headed features into one of the bad-ass expressions he'd picked up from his movies.

"And I tell you, man, if you walk down the street with a girl, one of the secret police-you can recognize them because their shirts are always hanging out-will come up to you and ask to see your ID-and man, if you're not her husband or brother or something, then you're in deep shit!" he cackled with satisfaction.

Once Mehrdad no longer felt threatened by my eccentric presence and realised that I didn't want his money, he assumed a gracious and patronizing air of a teacher to a mixed-up pupil and suggested I should stay and make some money instructing English in Shiraz.

"I'm worried about you, man!" He said, the day before he and his family got ready to leave town on holiday.

"What you gonna do?"

"Well, I guess I'll just have to turn the next page of the story!"

"Oh yeah?" he cried with a cheery grin, "What happens next?"

"Dunno-I haven't got there yet!" It was nice that two such utterly different people could get along so well and I enjoyed firmly declining his offer of money when I left.

I did accept some blankets and a warm jumper from his mother. She was a lonely, handsome woman who, to my surprise, proudly declared herself to be a Christian. She showed me her silver crucifix worn on a chain about her neck. She told me in her pidgin English how on a number of occasions she had brought back to life babies that had been dead for seven or eight hours. She demonstrated her secret technique, which was to rub downwards with both hands on the stomachs of the babes, who then suddenly gurgled with smiling life before their parents' very eyes. I believed her-as since reading Peter Pan as a kid, I've always been afraid to say that 'I don't believe in fairies', in case one dies at my words.

Mehrdad put me in a shared taxi out to some famous ruins in the desert 50km away. I had my new sleeping stuff all wrapped up in a large sheet, peasant knapsack style.

The Persepolis. Legendary stone structures of a ruined great city of long-forgotten times. They looked more like crumbling pillars of clay from the outside but I figured they'd be more impressive on the inside. As with every cultural site in Iran, there was a ticket booth to fleece the growing number of tourists come to see the hidden wonders of Persia and I gave my postcard to the man at the booth, in the hopes of getting in for free. He bade me come in and play my clarinet. One Ray Charles "Hit The Road Jack" boogie later, he loaded me up with chai and let me share his lunch of rice and chickpeas, before giving me leave to go among the ruins as I pleased.

The inside wasn't all that impressive either and I can only guess that it was something special before Alexander the Great smashed it to pieces in a drunken frenzy. Visiting ruins always makes me feel a bit dim. I'm always reading passages in travel books about spectacular remains of palaces and castles but all i ever see are a bunch of old stones. Maybe i just miss the point. Maybe you're supposed to climb them or carve your name in the rocks or something.

I met a couple of Czech girls (what were all these Eastern Europeans doing on the road?) who were travelling in the other direction, back to Europe.

"Weren't the ruins amazing?" They said.

"Oh yeah - blew me away." I told them, hoping they wouldn't ask me to elaborate.

We made use of the sourcebook where 'real' travellers get their information-word-of-mouth. They reckoned I'd get fed well enough in Pakistan which was a relief to hear and it was good to get a lot of the thoughts off our chest that we couldn't really express to the Iranis.

We decided to make the most of Nature and sleep out in the rocky hills that lay a few hundred metres away. The notion was all but incomprehensible to the kind man in the ticket booth and it took a great deal of persuasion and explanation to convince him that we wanted to be alone. On our walk up the trail, we were twice stopped by soldiers and as the male of the group I was obliged to be the humouring spokesman. Because of these delays it was almost dark by the time we found somewhere flat enough to put down our beds.

As soon as we put our bags down in our spot in the gorge of large rocks and boulders that probably once held a stream. We fell instinctively silent. Something was wrong. A minute later, we heard some approaching sounds come from down the trail. Then a few grunting and sniffling noises produced a short man stumbling through the bushes in the fading light, murmuring to himself as he found his step. I really hoped he might be a lost shepherd.

"Salaam Aleikum!" I shouted in the age-old Muslim greeting of 'peace be upon you', just to advertise our lack of hostility. He staggered forwards to clasp my hand and the stench of alcohol rose from his bleary features. He mumbled something and then lurched over to the girls on my left who flinched with instinctive foreboding. I interposed myself, still attempting to be of calming good cheer. He clutched my forearm and snarled with eyes aflame.

My heart began to race and I felt slightly weak and dizzy. I realised that the kind of violent situation I had always hoped to avoid was now on my hands and there was no way of avoiding it. I had trained in Kung Fu for three years in England under the guidance of a blind Irishman-but I'd never had to put it to use and I discovered that there's a distinct gap between practice and the real thing.

The drunk began to lean across me, forgetting my presence in his greedy focus on the girls and one of them screamed out:

"Don't touch me!" It was now or never and so for the first time since the age of 10 I got ready for a fight. I let fly at him with a couple of palm strikes and a kick at his sideways figure and he suddenly transformed into a scrambling pair of heels. A real warrior would have given immediate pursuit and reduced his head to halwah on the rocks, before he could say 'Allah hu Akbar'. But a real warrior, I was not, despite my martial arts training. I suppose I'd always focused on the 'art' aspect more than the 'martial'. Before the drunk had run more than twenty yards, he turned and picked up two large stones. He reapproached with his arms in a throwing position that threatened the integrity of my skull.

This I did not need. The nearest hospital was over an hour away and if I was taken out, the girls would have to fend for themselves in a very ugly scene. The violent tack having failed, I tried a more subtle method beginning with appeasement.

"I'm sorry!" I cried, with my hands open to either side, "I'm sorry! It was my mistake! I'm sorry!" He caught my meaning in the tone, if not in the words and lowered his arms cautiously, reaching out his hand in armistice. I began to shake a little less.

The Czech girls had gotten on the case in the meantime and had gathered up all of our bags. Already they had begun to move back on down the path. The crazed Irani became more desperate as he sensed the situation slipping away from him and he couldn't quite decide if he wanted to fuck the girls or me-he kept on making a smooching sound with his lips and pointing towards the bushes. Naturally, it would have been indecent to have forced sex in the open.

There followed an almost comic descent. He would remember the more desirable Czech girls and hurry down after them, jumping through bushes in his frantic chase. The sound of his approach elicited shrieks from the girls and I hastened down by a safer route to once again intercept his path.

The situation came to a standstill again. He became more and more forceful with his grappling and I wondered if I could summon the focus and the calm to floor this lecher with the vital injuries he deserved. I was too scared of what might happen if i fucked up again and so i tried a different tactic.

"SALAAM! SALAAM!" I yelled with elephant lungs, causing him to hesitate as we all listened for a response. "TOURIST! DANGER! HELP! DANGER!"

I was saved from feeling stupid by an almost immediate response of torchlights and an answering call from far below. Whatever wits the guy possessed shook themselves aware. He turned and fled up the rocks with an aptitude that stemmed from unmitigated fear at the consequences of being caught-had he been apprehended, I'm sure he wouldn't be walking today.

Pretty shaken, we drifted back to the ticket office and made our beds nearby under the watchful eye of the soldier on guard duty there. I felt shitty for having been so feeble against what was not a challenging opponent. I realised that all the combat training in the world wouldn't make much difference if I didn't possess the 100% intent and mental capacity to go through with the task. This is the superiority of the street thug over the peaceful passer-by-that he is prepared to land a punch because he's done it so many times that it causes him no more conceptual difficulty than buttering a slice of bread.

I seemed to be a lot more disturbed about the whole thing than the Czech girls, however and I was impressed with the calm with which they handled the event. For the first time, I fully appreciated the ever-present fear that all women have to a greater or lesser degree-especially in the case of the travelling female who is so more vulnerable than the local women on account of the language barrier and because she is not within the protective folds of the community.

The nature of this kind of incident throws light upon Islamic customs regarding women which, in its purest form, is a paternal and protective dimension.The fundamental feeling is that no woman should never have to feel threatened.

I thought of all the nervous fathers i've seen, watching their daughters grow and flower into young women who will attract the attention of every guy on the block. It only takes a few minutes for one screwed-up asshole to poison an innocence for a lifetime.

As well as being a Prophet, Muhammad was a war-lord and many of the guys were being wiped out in the endless wars to defend/impose the Faith, thus there was a surplus of unmarried and widowed women. The rule allowing a man to have four wives meant that he could offer security to the women unspoken-for.

One of the girls told me of a similar close call she'd had whilst travelling in Turkey the year before. She had been invited into the home of a Turkish guy, whom she presumed lived with his family. His wife and children were in fact away at the time and she spent much of the night running around the house and garden, trying to hide from her host, who had turned sultry and leering as the evening wore on.

"Why are you doing this to me?" She had cried, "Aren't you supposed to be a Muslim? The Qur'an doesn't tell you to do this!"

"Oh, it's night-time-Allah is sleeping!" came the smug reply.

And yet she continued with this grassroots travelling and planned to hitch all the way back to Prague once they reached Turkey. These girls were cool.

As we got ready to sleep, the kind guy from the office turned up with a huge cauldron of stew and some corn-on-the-cobs. It took him some time to realise that we weren't declining out of shyness but because it was way too late to think about eating. It was nice to have the girls there to share the humour of the Iranis practically forcing food in your mouth as you snored.

My new blankets were almost up to protecting me from the cold of the desert night but not quite. I was shivering long before the dawn came. The morning erased the vulgar feelings of the previous evening and we were still rubbing the dust from our eyes in dreamy appreciation of the new day when a whole coachload of American tourists pulled up. They poured out with the accompanying baseball caps, sunglasses and video cameras. All of the women were decked out in full-length chadors which they assumed they had to wear beyond the confines of the bus at all times (The Czech girls just wore thin headscarves and never received any flak for it).

"We 'de-chador' inside the bus!" They told us happily.Trust a coach-full of Americans to miss the cultural subtleties. I pictured them back in the US where they'd probably had chador workshops for weeks before coming. I suspect they enjoyed the theatre of blending into their grand adventure of vacations in the enemy heartland.

We were polite but it was a relief when the ruins opened for the day and they disappeared inside. We munched on a melon that Mehrdad had given me and the girls paid for a taxi for us back to Shiraz bus station, where they also invited me to share a kebab lunch in the cafeteria. All of their talk about India and Pakistan was getting me in the mood to return. I decided to get moving and bought a bus ticket to Bam. They left me with a parting gift of 7 and a half Indian rupees (enough for a few chais) that they had remaining and a shell from an Indian beach to act as my homing signal. I hope they got back to Prague safely.

As my bus crossed the middle of Iran the road wound about a climbing canyon ridge and every time we hit a bend, the view of the expansive, flat basin below was revealed in all of its vast glory; rolling on and on until the horizon where the mauve sands merged with the soft blue shadow of a lake.

I got chatting to an Irani guy who had spent 14 years living in America and he filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of Iran's turbulent history, making it slightly easier to get a perspective on things. He told me about the time of the Shah who, in the 70's, had tried to Europeanise Iran in much the same way that Turkey had been partially dragged into the twentieth century.

The Shah had declared war upon the chador and had sent soldiers on horseback down the streets to rip off the black cloth from any women who dared maintain the custom. In the schools and on TV, the young were encouraged to be as Western as possible; whilst in their homes, they faced the contrary influence of their parents and grandparents who were against everything that the Shah stood for.

In addition to this cultural conflict, Iran was used as a playground by men from the neighbouring Arab states, come to flaunt their wealth in the pursuit of alcohol, prostitution and general thrills denied to them in their home countries. When you're wondering how many fingers are left to your brother in some government torture chamber, the sight of lecherous, drunken Arabs with a girl on each arm doesn't exactly brighten your day.

When the economy began to fail, people speaking out against the Shah were 'disappeared' and support began to grow for the exiled Ayatollah Khomeni, who with the help of the Western media's hype, came to be a focal embodiment for a return to Islamic tradition-a yearning that had grown in response to the failing attempts at modernisation. As my friend related the story it all sounded very epic but history has shown that people in a shaky economy will put anyone in power who can give them a bit of hope-Heil Khomeni! His pictures were still everywhere-in mosques, restaurants and street corners and the sight of his stern, rectangular face made me feel like i had something to hide. However I was assured that Khomeni was quite a mystic in his own right and wrote beautiful poetry. A man with God on his side.

Of course, Saddam Hussein probably thought the same thing and the immediate eight-year war really fucked up the finances of the new Republic. Iran was forced to pay exorbitant prices for supplies from Turkey-the only state willing to help them-and so Turkey became rich whilst Iran became poor. My friend insisted that consequent economy problems were the main reason that Iran hasn't fully evolved into a fluid and perfectly-functioning Islamic state-whatever that was supposed to be.

The bus let me off at a small garage outside the town of Bam and I made a bed behind a wall that kept just a little of the wind off my huddled frame. I clutched onto my clarinet with both arms as I slept.

I got up early because it's somehow less acceptable to be sleeping rough when daylight comes. I dusted myself off and took out a small mirror; a couple of nights sleeping outside without a shower ensured that i wasn't going to be winning any beauty contest. I hate to think what i smelled like. I strolled down the road to the date Mecca of the world, this remarkable oasis being particularly famed for the succulence of the dark fruits of its palms clustered in thick orchards to either side of the road.

An old man in faded clothing was sitting on the pavement with a few rolls of nan and a bag of dates before him. He made a simple wide-armed gesture as if to say 'look how little I have!' and I immediately responded with out-turned pockets to say 'me too, mate!' At which, he beckoned me to share his breakfast with him. I demurred but at his insistence, put silence to my complaining stomach with the most luscious of fruit to bless the trees of this planet.

Few Western people are aware of the delicacy of fresh dates, used to the squidgy, semi-dried variety that are sold in most places. No teeth are needed for the fresh kind and when mine all fall out, I'll move to Bam rightaway to end my days squeezing this juicy black nectar off the stone with my tongue.

I held back after each mouthful but the old guy would pressure me to take more until I really was full. He smiled and pointed to the sky to indicate the source of our fare. If the lines on our palm contain the secerts of our Fate, then the wrinkles on the face surely tell of our history and I wished I could deciphor the stories etched in wending grooves across this old man's face.

I gave him the Indian shell that the Czech girls had left me with, telling him it was from Hindustan. He examined it with eyes of sunshine and was still holding it to his ear as I departed, which was probably about as close as he'd ever come to the sea again. I parted with all the appropriate hand-on-heart 'salaams' and then realised that we'd communicated so much in five minutes with hardly a word in common. Short like a haiku it remained one of the richest encounters I had on the whole trip.

"Hey Mister!" came a hundred friendly shouts from grinning locals, happy to break the monotony of the day with a few words of English. One cry came from above and as I looked up, a young guy harvesting dates dropped me a handful to munch as I walked along. Produce of an agricultural area can always be obtained without much effort and Bam proved this to be especially true. A little further on, some men were loading trays of dates onto a pick-up truck and I hung around conspicuously for a minute or two, until one of them rolled his eyes to the sky and came over with a sample to move me on my way.

Bam was dead and its only beauty lies in the wealth of palm trees and the ruined city that drew its tourism. My mate Nik, had told me that the locals completely ignored the area when he was there but now, as everywhere, the ticket booths were up. I pulled out my usual postcard trick and was asked to play some clarinet. He bade me go in without delay after one recital. Whether out of appreciation or relief that my music had come to an end, I'm not sure.

Now this place was far out. A real, deserted old city with stout stone perimeter walls 30foot high around which the ghosts of sentries still walked A citadel stood regally at the far end and in the intervening distance was a labyrinth of crumbling walls, paths, domes and sidestreets, all of them carved of the same grey stone. This must once have been an amazing place to live, with all the life of the city concentrated within the 500 metre long walls on each side, robbing the dawn and the sunset from all save the sentry guards and the royalty in the elevated citadel. Protected from the outside or imprisoned within, it would depend on your perspective and every man, woman and child must have known the finite dimensions of the settlement with their eyes closed.

Taking random turns, I came across the old mosque area and I joined some workmen for a second breakfast of nan, dates and melon. I played minstrel yet again but the dates were beginning to lose their appeal.

I spent a couple of hours hanging about in the heights of the citadel towers, from where the entire lay-out of Bam could be seen. The forests of palms surprisingly fertile, adjacent to the dusty terrain of the desert that crawled up to the edge of the orchards.

I returned to the street and bumped into the less open-minded temperament, characteristic of small towns and villages throughout the world. First of all, a fruit seller gave me a pomegranate and warned me that I was surely bound for hell as a non-believer. Then a surly grouch walking beside me ended up by saying that I had no business in Iran, as the playing of music was unIslamic. His bigotry didn't merit a reply, though I think I might have told him to go and swallow a pomegranate.

The bad impressions were made good by an invitation of a local guy to stay the night in his house. He took me back to his family home with an inner courtyard where five or six date palms grew. He scaled the thick ridges of his tree barefoot and brought me down a good bunch to eat before supper.

I sometimes got the impression that such hospitality was done more for the benefit of Allah than me. But hey, it kept me fed and warm. Maybe we all do our good deeds to add a little holy glow to our egos. But this attitude swallows itself somewhere in an abyss of Reductionism. A hungry man can't sneer at a hot meal.