Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

The next morning we found our German, and took him to the park for a chat.     We went back for another peek at the square in the day-time, and it was very peaceful and quiet (despite an overweight 8yr old dressed entirely in pink bouncing a football off the sides of the mosque, causing mindshattering echoes…) We watched a fight ensue between a street-junkie and a shopkeeper, and bought ourselves five flavours of icecream.   We found another, smaller mosque, even more stunning in gold tiling and stood in the corner and stared at the ceiling for a while.  An odd gate-keeper turned up, possibly slightly deranged but very friendly, and, using a scrubby note in English he kept in his pocket, asked for stamps or postcards from Britain.  He was really nice and I would have given him large numbers of them, but I sadly had none.   We wandered the bazaars and the spice-stalls, feeling like we had properly reached exotic climes.   Later that night we visited ...

We rode 380km from Tehran to Esfahan.  It was up to 65 degrees, and desert all the way.  It was amusing to stop to allow the sweat to accumulate, and then race off so the breeze cooled the sweat down and made you shiver.  There were no people anywhere.  Occasional mosques with tin rooves, little mud huts, other things which sort of suggested human habitation, but not one person.  What was it… mad dogs and… oh yes. There were barbed wire compounds with soldiers pointing anti-aircraft missiles into the sky- ancient dilapidated things, but fully loaded.  We saw automatic, unmanned ones too.  It was a little perturbing.  A police-man stopped us to check what we were up to.  We smiled innocently and tried to look as little like spies as possible.  (Try it.  It instantly makes you look really suspicious…) I saw a real-life tumbleweed.  It pleased me nearly as much as the tortoise. There were little dust-storm eddies blowing abo...

That afternoon we discovered 9 British Embassy workers were arrested for allegedly inciting riots.  Britain immediately chucked out some Iranian Embassy workers.   It was impossible to find out what was actually happening.    The average Iranian has this problem all their lives.  The rich families have illegal satellite discs and proxy-servers so they can access world news.    We tried for Indian visas again in Tehran.  Because of the worsening situation with Britain, all the phone lines had been cut.  The Indian official behind the counter was very nice, and tried his hardest for us. Sadly though, Indo-Anglian bureaucracy means that the only way to procure a visa for a Brit is to contact the Indian Embassy in London to request one. Obviously that was unlikely to happen.  The permission needed to be fax, and the E-mail system was aparently down anyway.  We were stuck, without an Indian visa, again.  This meant that on...

The counter official in the Pakistan embassy suggested we apply for a 30 day visa, so we could look around at his beautiful country.  We agreed, heartily, thereby eschewing all advice the British government offered on their travel websites.  If he was that keen for us to see his country, despite the fact that 3 weeks previously a Frenchman had been kidnapped on our exact route, who were we to know better?  And Pakistan sounded an amazing destination, once you got passed the whole Taliban and Baluchi Independence Party situation…  We applied for a 30 day visa, and left the office on a high.  We had prepared ourselves for a lengthy and difficult interview.  We had even written out our route and drawn a little map. We returned to pick up our Pakistani visa a few days later! While we waited for the visa we went to see the sights.  We photographed the ‘Down with USA’ paintings on the walls of the ‘US Den of Espionage’- the new name for the old US...

We rode into Tehran.  The atmosphere on the way in seemed charged, but not necessarily negative. There were families in cars, waving at us, and kids on scooters wooping.  The traffic was completely insane.  One of our exits had been blocked off with barricades.  We got very lost, and ended up in the centre of town.  The atmosphere got stronger, it felt like the air was buzzing.  Then we saw why- the main square was entirely filled with army and policemen of various different types, in varying uniforms, but all with alarmingly large weapons. There were huge black armoured trucks filled with militia-men dressed from head to toe in black, with enormous black beards, black turbans, holding gigantic black machine guns. They would have done a Finnish death metal band proud. I didn’t look them in the eyes, but Adam said later they were glowering at us.   We saw ‘Voluntary Militia’- civvies dressed up for the occasion in fluro-vests with POLICE written across...