The Real Jounrey to the East, Turkey

Chapter 8- Hand to Mouth to India

"Herman Hesse never did this." (Old Freak of Anjuna)

I woke from my bed beneath some trees in the early morning and discovered with delight that Selchuk had packed some halwah for me. With the first bite of this honeyed sesame nectar, I drifted off to the dreamscape lands of 1001 Arabian Nights. I clutched onto the swaying hump of my camel, the finest silks of Baghdad draped around my head to fend off the noontime brilliance and yea, I did perspire with great perspiration and did find myself coming by chance upon the declining banks of a great river, that did flow with unhasty majesty.

Young Caliph Tom of the Aching Thumb did there bid his kinsmen depart forthwith and grant him the solitude for which his soul did yearn for with great yearning.

"Now," said he, "Shall I forsake all nourishment except such as may be granted me by the All-Merciful One! Bismillah!" And there he did sit in contemplative solitude for the duration of the day and night, steadfastly ignoring the clamours of his gluttony.

But the next morning, as he stared forlornly into the myriad deceptions of the current, a sealed package did wend its way through the high reeds and come to rest within the reach of his arm. Upon opening the vessel, the young Caliph did discover it to contain the sweetest of halwah and he did marvel with exceeding marvel.

"By Allah!"He cried, "Surely this is a boon from the Heavens, as such divine delicacy as this could only have come from the banquet tables of the angels!" Thus he did break his fast upon the halwah and was sated. But then he did once again sit with pious and steadfast austerity, immersed in prayer and devout worship of the Almighty.

But the next morning, another package of the same sweet stuff did arrive at his place of repose upon the bank and he did consume it with as much fervour as the day before, indebted to the generosity of the Lord. This pattern continued for three days, before Caliph Tom's curiousity could be contained no more and the songbirds heard him to exclaim:

"By Allah! I shall discover the source of my subsistence, or perish in the attempt!" And then he did follow a trail that led up-river, until he suddenly came upon a great stone castle, with a single tower that overlooked the course of the river. Gazing up, the young Caliph almost lost his balance as he beheld the turret window where a young maiden whose beauty put the sun to shame; her eyes gleamed as pools of cool lapiz and her smile was stolen from the third night of the moon. Espying Caliph Tom, the maiden did call down to him with sweet and slender voice:

"Oh, my Lord! May the mercy of thy heart bid to rescue me from my imprisonment in this dreadful high place-My captor is an evil hunchback lord who has locked me here until I succumb to his lascivious desires!"

"Most surely will I come to thy assistance, O Pearl of Pearls-but first mayhap thou willt be able to solve my perplexity of whence cometh the salvation of halwah that has saved me from starvation these last three days?"

And he did hold aloft the cloth that had bound the dessert. The princess (for such she surely was) did then emit a laugh like sparkling water as she cried:

"Oh my noble hero! That which you call halwah is merely the leftovers of my daily cosmetic applications, which I then let fall into the currents below!"

Caliph Tom knew a good thing when he saw it and scaled the tower vineage, rescued the princess and her vast stores of sesame sweet and settled down to a joyful future of nuptial bliss and early tooth loss.

The roar of the first truck of the day shook me out of these strange dreams. The overdose of sugar had put me to sleep again. I got on the road and caught a lift into the dawn in no time. A young family man at the wheel, he took me a long way through the landscape of central Turkey that would suddenly rip open into ferocious mountain passes, smouldering beneath a bleak coat of dust.I dreamt of the odd cougar, purring in the shade of a rocky shelf, its merciless eyes lazily scanning the sparse and hazy land for its next meal. But then we'd turn a corner and be smacked in the face by the brilliant blue visage of a lake that would put the land to shame. A splash of colour and relief amid the court of cliff faces, barren and stark.

We drove for six hours to Ankara, coming to the heart of Turkey and I hoped to see some really original culture. I didn't feel like entering another metropolis though and so I decided to skirt Turkey's second largest city and hit some lesser-known ways. Practically every lift that stopped for me, warned me of the perils of the Kurdish 'terrorists' that lay a few hundred kilometres ahead. But when I failed to be duly impressed by their cautions, they wrote me off as another Englishman who'd seen too much of the sun and just helped me along my way as they could.

The terrain began to open out and become more bare and picturesque, with lumpy hills like frowning foreheads. They carried an imposing silence that only the bustle of the modern age could ignore. After a short ride from the outskirts of the city, I jumped out at a crossroads and my first sight was of a dead wolf lying in the dust, with flies fighting over a small wound in its temple and blood-stained mouth. Okay, it might just have been a big dog but i couoldn't picture it on a leash. As the wind rustled its fur it bore a tragic majesty, cutting its own raw poetry on an unseen page.

A quarry driver took me out to a gravel pit where I played jazz for him and his friends, all queuing up to fill their trucks with the loose rubble. Then I moved along a short way and had some afternoon chai with some guys in a small village. Everyone that I met made some effort to communicate with me. The people seemed slower and calmer and the atmosphere of content tradition was a relief in tempo after the frenzy of the other Turkish cities, which all aspired to be as Western as possible.

I was a little nervous that I seemed to be crossing Turkey at too fast a rate and thought that I might be missing out somehow on the kind of cultural experience that is the motivation for hard-core travellers. I hadn't stopped anywhere for more than a night in 11 days and I was hoping to find some niche along the way where I might rest and consolidate. In any event, I resolved from now on to stick to the small roads and thus deliberately sabotage my progress.

The next driver almost completely sabotaged the progress of both of our lives completely, as whilst searching through the pages of my English-Turkish dictionary, he failed to notice the approaching bend in the road. As the cliff drew closer I desperately searched for the appropriate warning in Turkish.

"Bak! (Look!)" I shouted, my instinctive language cortex kicking in and he hit the brakes of the twenty-ton truck just in time. We crashed into a stop sign, sending it tumbling over the edge. I wished that being a man in this country didn't preclude the use of seat belts. But if you're not dead, you're alive and what could I do except shrug it off with a laugh and resolve never to lend reading material to my drivers.

He let me off by a lovely small village with attractive shamanic looking hills. I decided straight away to make my camp in a cave somewhere. Before I could go anywhere though, I was hailed by a plump man in shorts working in a near-by melon field. He handed me three juicy Galia melons and then stuck his knife in the largest of them as he went off to rejoin his labours. This spontaneous generosity was typical of all that I met in this country and the memory of these encounters remains warm and vibrant.

I clambered up the rocky hillside and found a promising-looking cave. I tried not to be too put off by the large animal dropping that lay there. They seemed pretty fresh and I imagined the three wolves returning home to discover that I'd eaten all their porridge.

The sun sank softly behind a long curved ridge, that cast its glorious brooch-like image upon the turquoise lake lounging wide and flat beneath it. I sighed in peace and lay back to count the blossoming stars in the moonless night. This was my trip and, despite occasional twinges of the heart, I was making it just as I had hoped: happy and free with each day's agenda mine to set.

I awoke the next day to find that I hadn't been eaten alive by angry carnivores and I hung around until the sun had climbed high enough to warm the lake a little. I stumbled down to a quiet spot by the water, to wash myself and my clothes. Dirty-faced pilgrims are more usually identified as good-for-nothing bums. The lake was still freezing. I shivered in the sun, waiting to dry off and saw a couple of tortoises snuffling through the grass. As I stared and wondered at this meeting with these timeless creatures, I heard a distant tinkling of bells come drifting through the air, growing in volume by the moment.

Within a few minutes, a whole herd of goats came down to the water's edge for a drink, each wearing a bell around its neck of varying lilts of tone and pitch. The effect was that they approached like one huge, moving orchestra of tings and tongs, dings and gongs.

I looked over my shoulder for the BBC audio team that ought to have been there to record this miracle. The goats wandered and flocked like an aural manifestation of the perfection of Chaos. Woven with random melodies, the collage of sound told the age-old tale of wandering the hills and lakes; enduring the relentless hot days of summer and the icy winds of winter that cut to the scrawny bone; treading the land for all their days under the steady guidance of a shepherd whose life followed a pattern scarcely different than that of his predecessors thousands of years before him. He himself came at the rear of the herd and added his own gravelly cries to the music as he shouted:

"Brrrrrrrr! Brrrrrrrrrr! Hai! Hai! Ishca! Brrrrrrrr! Yoae! Ishaca Hai!"

On and on, which all I assumed made perfect sense to the goats and added to my romantic fascination with the life of a shepherd. I imagined the peace and magic of a solitary working life, learning from the animals that I would herd. Eating pieces of goat's cheese and lulling the hearts of my beasts with mystical clarinet melodies from remote tors and valleys. But as a friend of mine in the Himilayas once told me:

"If you want to walk around the mountains, fine - but why take a bunch of animals with you?"

While I waited for my clothes to dry another shepherd invited me for lunch and before long, we were munching locally-grown grapes in yoghourt, scooped up in salty pieces of a pancakey bread which, for the second course, we filled with pieces of tomato and onion. We didn't share many words and I had the feeling that his shepherd's mind belonged to a vale of its own, where none save the walkers of many years could follow.

It was not the easiest of days on the road and I had to reaccustom myself to long waits-something that was pretty uncommon in Turkey, one of the best countries I've found for thumbing one's way around.

But on this day I was obliged to resort to my Zen-hitching practice. I try to make the mind wait in perfect contentment and equanimity to its fate and in appreciation of the beauty of every car that drives by without stopping for me. Everything becomes of equal significance and time itself loses its reinhold on events. The mind spaces out into the grand meditative, hitchhiker's waiting room, free to go places that the body currently cannot.

I evolved this practice in Perpignan, in France, near the Spanish border. I waited unsuccessfully for a day and a half for a lift going South and during this time it may be that various French police took my passport details and read them out over their radios into a central computer-or it may have just been an interesting illusion for all that I was really conscious of it. If it did happen, then they certainly kept better track and record of my orientation and progress than I did.

The trouble with waiting in Turkey, in August, is that it's hot. Very hot. And standing around in the mid day sun is the kind of thing that makes you become ill. I started to feel quite ill. My forehead prickled with fever and the landscape began to lurch around me. This was one of the more feared eventualities: that I might find myself poor and sick in a foreign land. It was a contingency that my friends liked to present as a reason for not embarking on the trip. I was pleased they were not here to say 'I told you so!'

I eventually reached the next small town, with a couple of hours of daylight left and I set about finding some rest and shelter. My stomach churned in discomfort and my forehead burned in such a way that suggested another night of sleeping outside would not be a good idea. After some attempts at speaking Turkish I showed my little card around and an old German-speaking guy turned up, taking me to sit outside his kebab shop. He was one of the little helpers of the Devil who just wait on the blind corners of your path and there's no easier nor more rewarding target than a disorientated foreigner.

He was a grey-haired guy with a stupid mustache that twirled each time he spoke. His eyes flashed like a madman and he made great theatre in translating our conversation to the crowd that had begun to gather. I had little choice except to suffer through his stage performance until he got bored with it all.

He offered me a night's hospitality for free which I accepted graciously-and then he asked for some payment. I maintained my position of poverty; knowing from past experiences that with this kind of person, once the purse is opened-it is soon emptied.

I had no choice except to endure while he dillied and dallied, all the time making jokes at my expense to the audience and I had no means of communication to appeal to their good hearts to save me from this mental torture.

Then he began to rummage around in my bags and when I asked him what the fuck he was doing, he explained that he was looking for my wife that he was sure I had hidden away somewhere. That was the breaking-point and I started cussing him out in I don't know what language, with tears in my voice from the strain of illness. Only then did he surmise that he'd gone so far that he'd have to help me, if only to bully me again on another occasion. He arranged for me to go to his son's house on the ition that I return the next day to discuss my future-he wanted me to work in his kebab shop and marry me off to a local girl. He promised me she would be very beautiful. A cold day in hell, I thought but smiled and gave thanks for his charity in the present.

I was given a bunk to lie on in a house where six or seven young men lived, students of the Qur'an. After many hand-shakes I was left alone in a room where on the floor was an open bucket of acid with wires from it going straight to the mains. I became absorbed with the dread of a horrific explosion, with a acidic face-spray ruining my good looks. My chances of sleep were further hindered by the door flinging wide-open every five minutes, as each new arrival wanted to witness their unusual guest with their own eyes before believing it.

They enjoined me to share their chicken and bread though and were very good sports, if a little boisterous in the way of virginal males in their early twenties. Later they woke me whilst it was still dark outside and I figured it must be time for the pre-dawn prayers. It was Friday, the holy day of congregational worship for Muslims. I dutifully rose and followed them into the next room, where a small pornographic magazine was thrust under my nose depicting a couple caught in cunnilingus.

The guy holding the picture giggled hysterically as I shoved it away and turned to my right, where another student held the king of clubs in true hustler style between his thumb and first finger.

"Cards?" He asked, with a Las Vegas smile. The clock behind him told me it was only 1am. Cards? But of course! What man with a fever would rather sleep through the night-time hours when there are mean sessions of gin rummy to be played, with devilish 3-of-a-kinds and sneaky all-out straights. Giggling at the absurdity of adventure, I staggered back to bed.

In the morning, I was sorted out with a thick sandwich and I got on the road again, without going to see the greasy kebab man. By noon, I was down at a crossroads,where the competition of hitching was quite intense, with whole families clambering into the cabins of trucks that stopped. I never worked out if these people paid for their rides and if I was made an exception of. Or maybe it was just a custom of general goodwill, part of helping each other along.

Getting by in a foreign language when you need to ask something other than directions to the beach, is something that relies more upon a willingness to communicate, than a technical expertise in linguistics. It put a different flavour on hitching too as I was inevitably required to work that much harder to win the friendship of the drivers who often tried harder than I might have liked to bridge the communications gap.

In France that year, people who picked me up often chose to pursue me relentlessly through my minimal French vocabulary, to elicit my opinions on the threat of fascism or my existential belief in a collective unconscious! It would always start off simply enough but once the usual exchange of pleasantries was done, my command of the language would be stretched like cellophane.

Generally, the smallest attempt to speak the local language will bring favour but my next ride illustrated the pits to which the language barrier can descend. I was picked up by a truck driven by a man with a hard-set jaw and who left finger-indentations in the steering wheel. It took him around ten minutes to understand that I couldn't follow fluent Turkish, no matter how slowly he talked or how often he repeated the same word with growing irritation.

He scowled and cussed me for not comprehending. I retorted in abusive English, just to return the volleys of aggressive energy he flung at me. Unless you can really let that kind of antagonism fall off you like water off a leaf, you've got to give as good as you get.

I wondered what he lived for, this angry, tense man in tight jeans and high blood pressure-did he have any appreciation of beauty or love? Did he have small children that came running towards him as he returned home each day, crying 'daddy'? Was there who could prise open his soft centre? A few moments later though, I was hoping that his house would burn down and that all his kids be of a mood to dose his coffee with arsenic, when he began to wind me up again.

But I was in his vehicle and so I had to refrain from actually spitting on him, contenting myself to count the decreasing kilometre signs that indicated the distance to the next town. He confirmed the issue of having home territory by demanding:

"Passport! Passport!"

"Fuck you!" I told him and looked out of my window. He pulled the truck to a sudden halt and threatened to throw me out. I had to take off my left shoe where the document was hidden and wait until it dawned on him that the details were unlikely to be in Turkish before we could move on again.

The sun was still at killer heights outside but it was only mildly more favourable to stay in his truck and hang tight till the next oasis, rather than jump out into the outdoor oven. Meanwhile, as we climbed a winding road, he sensed that time was running out and tried to find other ways to get at me. He mimed the same enquiry that all Turkish truck guys made by making the motion of cupping his hands on his chest to indicate the weight of breasts and asking:

"Madame?"

"Yeah, yeah, pal, I'm not losing any sleep about it."

We pulled into the town of Kaman, a few minutes before the actual onset of bloodshed and I jumped out without bothering to close the door behind me. I disappeared into the backstreets without a word.

I sat down on a bench outside a mosque and started to make a few notes while things were still fresh in my mind. It was the time for the Friday afternoon prayers and there was such an overflow in the small village, that men spilled out of the mosque and laid their mats down upon the pavement in lines facing towards the mosque. They prayed side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, as Muhammad had advised, to 'prevent the devil from slipping in between the ranks'.

On a Friday, the community is pulled out of their individual hubby-holes and all islands of personal introspection (except the women, of course) are thrown together. Communal prayer is said to be ten times more worthy in Islam than solitary prayer and the Friday is when all believers are reminded that they exist as part of a Brotherhood. All are then equal before God, regardless of whatever issues may have cropped up in the intervening six days.

But I'm an infidel and so when the mats started to line up facing me, I shunted out of the way. A Muslim will always pray in the direction of the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, regardless of what else lies in the path but I thought it polite to move.

My gesture was detected by a young guy from Istanbul who invited me to a cafe and placed doner kebab, rice and a yoghourt drink before me. That dispelled the unpleasantness of my last ride and he at once gained my esteem and trust. He nearly lost it when he proposed that we visit the police. As I believe I mentioned before, my instinctive reaction to that 'p' word, is to slink back to the shadows in horror. But he insisted, explaining that the policemen were good friends of his. I didn't really see how any good could come from this but felt that after the good lunch, I owed it to him to go along with any strong plan of action he might have.

The resulting scene at the police station was confusing. My passport was taken from me and various conferences were held whilst I watched from my wooden bench seat. After some time, the police chief came down from his upstairs office to discover what all the fuss was about and he invited me up for some chai.

He was an outsider in the area and was in temporary charge of the village policing, in a break from his usual big city job in Yozgat to the North. He was totally bored in this small place where he did little other than sign his name a hundred times a day to the reports. The only trouble was the firing of guns in the air at weddings on the weekend. The bullets have to land somewhere. As such, he was delighted to meet someone from the outside world and chat for a couple of hours. Then, totally out of the blue, he asked me:

"So, you say that you want to go to Iran?"

I had mentioned that I was a bit nervous about the much-hyped dangers of E.Turkey and so now he arranged there and then to send me out to the highway with a couple of his officers-they stopped a coach and put me on board. They instructed the driver that I was travelling as a guest of the police and was to ride as far as I liked, free of charge.

So suddenly, I was hurtling through the night across the whole of Eastern Turkey where my murder had been so gleefully prophesized so many times by the Turish I'd met. Mother Fate had stepped in with a large sandal flop in the middle of the world and scooped me up and over the trouble zone and safely down 30km away from the Irani border.

The Irani border. Most people will never cross this frontier and most would never want to. Mention Iran and most will think of the stern and foreboding countenance of Ayatollah Khomeni, staring with the burning eyes of Islamic fundamentalism, ordering you to accept the True Faith or face the Fire!

"Salman Rushdie must die!" We hear and imagine the mindless fanaticism of the Persian proleteriat, prepared to run onto landmines in a yeehahing jihad to secure their place in paradise. The ruthless dictatorship of oil-funded cult leaders prepared to let fly nuclear weapons at the touch of a button if someone should but cast the slightest aspersion about the cut of Muhammad's beard.

I had an idea that things might be a little different to this, having always been friends with the local Irani delicatessen in England. I went every week for the strange and rich filo pastry sweets and for the rowdy conversation.

"So what will you do with no money?" The more surly of the Irani brothers had demanded.

"Oh, you know; everything comes in its own time and I'll have my clarinet to play."

"Ha! You think you can play your clarinet in the streets of Teheran?" He sneered in nothing more than a habitually rough tone. But then his brother interrupted impatiently with a sweep of the arm:

"In Iran, they will throw food at him!" And told me in a confidential tone, "You'll have no problem for eating in Iran- but in Turkey, you should save a hundred pounds for yourself!"

Every country in the world seems to have a centuries-hardened distrust of the character of its neighbouring states. Often when I was helped on my journey, my benefactors would shake their heads doubtfully and tell me:

"Well, we can help you here but you'll be in trouble further on down the road..."

But they were all Muslims and the lavish hospitality of this people is famous. The Qur'an actually commands its followers to feed a hungry person-it being well-known that 'a hungry stomach has no faith'. This custom undoubtedly saved me from starvation a number of times. I was pretty sure that the folk of Iran would feed me also.

But I wasn't so sure about the friendly character of the border cops and police-not a small part due to the stories I'd heard from my mate, Nik, who had hitched this same route four years before. He'd had some money with him but then the route was much more hazardous and untrod.

He'd been watching a spectacular sunrise that morning and had turned around to witness Turkish planes dropping bombs on a Kurdish village in the middle of nowhere. Nik had approached the Irani border and was taken into a private interrogation room so that he could explain just why exactly, he wanted to travel through Iran.

After taking his luggage to pieces, he was finally let in to the country and he caught a lift on the back of a truck up into the mountains by mistake. It snowed* and he ended up being stuck in the remote valley for ten anxious days, worrying his head off about his transit visa that had expired whilst he was trapped behind the blocked roads. When he finally managed to come down to Teheran, he was thrown in jail for two days on suspicion of espionage. They finally let him out with a new transit visa but for those 48 hours behind bars he didn't know what was going on.

I reckoned that if I could get past this point, then I was pretty well home clear to India. The focus of my personal future lay on this particular checkpoint. If I failed to get through, I'd have to turn back to Greece and make massage on the beach or maybe become a roaming shepherd. I much preferred the idea of sitting on my reputation as a hitchhiking celebrity on a beach in Goa.

The trouble was that I feared one look at the state of me, my finances and luggage would bring nothing but harsh laughter and a refusal for entry on the grounds that no one could possibly travel like that.

Customs and border stations often take an immediate dislike to me if the last time I flew back to England was anything to go by. I was returning from three months in Goa and was pulled instantly as I shuffled through the green channel. The officer found my bag to be full of packets of beedies (Indian tobacco wrapped up in tree leaves leaves that sell for seven times the price in London's head shops) and informed me that I'd either have to give them up, or pay £1000 duty tax.

"Take them!" I said. Then they found a spoon in my bag and came to the clear-cut conclusion that I must be a junky-why else would someone be carrying a spoon in their bags, for crying out loud?

"What's the spoon used for?" "Eating." I replied, trying not to sound mocking or ironic-for customs are God. They have more legal power than any policeman and can lock you up for days without so much as a phone call.

"Have you been heating anything up in this?" They enquired. That's the way - Hit me with the sneaky direct question.

"In addition to attempting to smuggle illegal quantities of tobacco items into the country, I strongly suspect that you've been in contact with illegal substances whilst abroad. I must therefore ask you to come into the back room." Possibly he'd seen the poetry and odes to LSD in my notebook. Either way, I had nothing else to hide-although you do put things in the strangest of places when stoned.

"I must ask you to take off your trousers, sir-Oh! I presumed you'd be wearing some kind of underwear!"

He exclaimed as I stood nude before him. He handed me back my trousers after the most peremptory of searches. They checked my ribcage from behind, maybe to see if I had swallowed half a kilo of hashish to shit out at huge profit in some London pad.

"Are you an addict of any kind?" He asked, checking my arms for syringe marks. No officer. I just throw heroin into my eyeballs from time to time like any normal person.

"So how much money do you have? How are you going to get home?" The customs guys asked me after the search, as though they wanted to arrest me for vagrancy.

"Oh, I've got some money and-"

"What! About 30p, from what I could see!" I had, in fact, returned to the country flat broke, having invested the last of my cash in the beedies. But I pretended that I had a friend who was going to buy me a train ticket home. They let me go.

It was very simple to beg my train fare in about five minutes, as people at airports always have lots of loose cash and are usually sympathetic to stranded cases. My mate Cal, had put me on to this, as he had done the same thing a few years before and had asked the conductor at the ticket office if he could travel free, given his exceptional situation.

"Certainly not!" He was rather primly told. He panhandled his fare and returned about ten minutes later. An astonished ticket-man asked him how he'd got the money.

"Well, I asked a few people." "You mean to say, you begged?" What was expected exactly? That he should find gainful employment at the airport and work his way home?

So customs, police and officials will always be against our anarchistic breed of people, whether we do anything wrong or not. We're clearly undesirables in a world-wide structure of power that gives 2000 television channels of dross to the connected public, whilst Shell liquidates the tribes of Nigeria by the thousands. In a world where most of the major countries sell weapons of pain and mass destruction to anyone with the money to pay for it.

"You'd better smarten yourself up for the Irani border, Tom." Nik had warned me, referring to my habitually sloppy appearance. Wherever I am in the world, I can usually be counted upon to be looking like a tramp without any conscious effort, regardless of my prosperity at the time. So it was with real focus that I got myself together to invest nearly all of my remaining money in a pair of new trousers, bought from a young guy selling clothes from a cart that he wheeled up and down the street of this tiny town on the edge of Turkey.

I got myself washed and shaved in the bathroom of a luxury hotel (what it was doing in this irrelevant little village i'll never know) and wore my trusty grey shirt, hoping that the holes under the armpits wouldn't show. I ditched the postcard explaining my spiritual poverty and hid my small rucksack at the bottom of my big black bag. It was adorned with esoteric symbols that Cal had scrawled on before giving it to me. I doubted the Irani authorities would find imagery of the Temple of Psychic Youth to be all that appealing.

I cleared my bags of all the bits of bread crumbs and burst packets of herbal remedies that had scattered themselves and in the end, I looked pretty good in shirt and trousers, clean shaven, carrying one black bag and a small clarinet case by the handle.

From the small town where I'd landed, I left behind all of the old men at the cafe tables who'd bought me chai that morning and caught a bus to the very last outpost of Turkishness before the border. The army patrols stopped the vehicle five times on the twenty-minute journey at the various checkpoints examined all of our documents. Tanks and other armoured cars could be seen here and there, ready to deal with the Kurdish militants.

The mountains began to dominate the forward area and the physical barrier appeared as daunting as the bureaucratic. Mount Ararat lurched sharply up and I said a small prayer requesting the blessing of Noah; this was the first point of land he saw after the floods subsided.

There was no choice but to take a taxi to the frontier itself and that cost half of what I had left but I was now 100% focused on the crossing and cared not. To my surprise and relief, I met two Czech guys who had just come through from the other direction and they informed me that it was a sinch to get in. They said that visas could even be extended without any trouble inside Iran. I gave them my Turkish dictionary and went on to the awaiting formalities, which took about an hour and then walked through a corridor to face a huge board proclaiming:

"WELCOME TO IRAN!" With enormous pictures of Ayatollah Khomeni and his successor, Khomini, to either side. I was there. In Iran. Far out. Mount Arafat looked far more kindly now and I strolled past long rows of trucks waiting to be allowed through. I stopped to have chai with a few drivers, then I changed waht was left of my money with one of the changers hanging around.

I bought a bus ticket to take me through the night to Teheran, getting me away from the edge of the country and into the heart of things. With three dollars in my pocket and not a care in the world, the bus started moving and I slept the whole way.