Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

The next day we set off in convoy, sat in the truck.  We opted for the rear of the truck and started in a buoyant mood, chatting rubbish and settling in on our drybags.  The Uruguayans followed us.  The German put up his hammock.  The Uruguayan boys jumped in with us, and we all had a party. A stop for tea in a little shack in the desert saw us taking more gun photos, at the escorts instigation.       We hopped back in, high on sugar and pleased with our adventures. Then the road deteriorated.  It wasn’t the best to start with, but now it really took the word ‘road’ to its limits.  We bounced over horizontal stripes across the metalled road, and were flung from side to side.  It became impossible to sit in the back of the truck, so we stood and ‘surfed’ the bouncing, balancing on the balls of our feet for hours.  The sun hit my face and turned me a pleasant shade of beetroot.  I wrapped my hijab all the way round my head and c...

We were at the Iran / Pakistan border.  We got ourselves out of the country promptly by sole virtue of our pallid skin.  I have little doubt it would have taken 2 hours longer at the very least, if we hadn’t been whisked out of the queue to the front of the line.  Adam met a scared Kiwi biker, crazily pleased to leave Pakistan.  He said it was ‘all going off’.  He managed to petrify Adam completely.  I never met him, and wish Adam hadn’t either.  The Pakistan side of the border was ramshackle and chaotic, but in an identifiable way which pleased me greatly.  We shuffled after old Pakistani officers in their excellent salwar-kameez denim cotton uniforms with badges on the arms.  We met some incredibly nice Quetta police men who sat us down and gave us real tea and biscuits, and talked to us about the difficulties in arranging weddings, and other nice conversations like that.  They laughed at us when we sat outside and ate our boiled eggs ...

We left Bam with a police escort, our first ever.  We also took the German with us.  Our aim was to get across the border to Taftan on the Pakistani side by nightfall. The police escorts consisted of a truck of pumped-up teenagers with automatic weapons, working for the Iranian government.  I tried not to worry. Our first hurdle happened worryingly early on, when the police swapped over, and the new police weren’t keen on the state of the German’s passport.  (They would have been even less keen if they’d discovered he carried two passports…) They examined it for about 25 minutes while we stood around looking innocent.  They decided he had overstayed his visa, and would be taken to the local police office.  They made handcuff mimes.  I had a brainwave. The lovely Mr Akbar at our guesthouse had given us his number in case we got into trouble.  Daniel (the German) rang him and asked him to translate the real situation over the phone to the police, wh...

This was it anyway, we were on our way to Pakistan now, well and truly.  I was somewhat nervous to say the least.  Pakistan has recently been statistically proven to be one of the top two most dangerous countries to be in at the moment.  However, I would like to say, I was definitely not as nervous as our German friend.  He was very worried.  I had met the Englishman from Nepal, and his cheerfulness was keeping me buoyant. Our next voyage was to Bam, the tourist spot that was sadly flattened in the 2003 quake.     The road was hot, dusty, never-ending:  the usual Iranian road-trip. And then a ridiculous side-wind blew across the flat desert, kicking up monstrous dust clouds and causing us to wobble horribly for hours.  The sand sort of whipped against my skin, and stung like crazy.    Then road-works started up, just to take away any pleasure we might have been squeezing from the experience.  We had to keep veerin...

A ride to Kerman was uneventful, excepting a very large, very dead camel that we saw on the way, which someone had graffitied on.  I wondered if it was one of the drug-smuggling ones you hear about.  Apparently, 80% of Europe’s heroin comes through Iran from Afghanistan, and one of the key ways to smuggle it through is in camel’s humps.  Camels have handy natural homing instincts, like pigeons (though presumably they aren’t as likely to crap on your head from a tree.)  Anyway, this one was very dead. I got bored on the road.  To keep myself amused I sang at the top of my voice.  Mostly Phil Collins, to my shame.   (Sometimes I fall asleep. This is particularly dangerous on motorways, which is irritating, because that’s exactly when it happens.) Somewhere en route to Kerman I saw a strange and inexplicable sight- there was a pick-up truck whizzing along, with sacks in the back, with what looked like feet poking out here and there, in a manner which...