Taftan (on the Iran/Pakistan border): 8 March 2008
With the desert sun well on it’s way towards the horizon we rolled to a stop just inside the border. Two young police officers with ill-fitting uniforms and awkwardly slung AK-47s eyed us up with what seemed like a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. After an uncomfortable pause, with us staring at them and them staring at us, one waved us forward while the other strolled over and slammed the heavy gate shut behind us.
We’d just crossed into the Islamic Republic of Iran, and with our single-entry Pakistani visas stamped out just a few minutes earlier there was no turning back. Iran is squeezed uncomfortably between Afghanistan and Iraq, so the only way out was thousands of kilometres to the north into Turkey. We had 28 days to drive the length of the country, and the nervous excitement was building between Simon, Pat and I.
Our first stop was the police checkpoint overlooking the border crossing. The cramped and messy office was all windows and the room was like a greenhouse. Three plain clothes officers sat sweltering in the heat, not willing to leave the sanctuary of their desktop fans as we entered. We were waved over and stood awkwardly as an officer took our passports in turn. He thumbed through the pages and looked us over in the same manner all border police do, a quiet prying look that we will soon become very used to. It was after 5pm and I’m sure they just wanted to get home so they handed back our passports without any grief. One of them begrudgingly wandered out with us and made a cursory inspection of the car – an unconvincing demonstration of the Islamic Republic’s front-line against the smuggling of illicit imports like alcohol, pornography, drugs and of course Christianity.
Back in the Hilux for the short drive across to the deserted immigration building. I don’t know how many people they process on a normal day, but one thing we’ve learnt about border crossings is that the size of immigration buildings is not so much a practical issue – more a blatant display of a country’s self-perception of wealth and status. A young immigration officer sat in the only occupied booth and he checked and stamped our visas without any fuss.
So we were legally in Iran, but our vehicle wasn’t. The Carnet we needed stamped at the Customs office would exempt us from paying import duty on the Hilux (otherwise we were effectively smuggling it into the country). We tried to ask the immigration officer where the Customs office was, but we were simply told to wait outside on the other side of the building. With us not speaking any Farsi we couldn’t explain our problem, so all we could do was wait. We didn’t even know what we were waiting for! Fifteen minutes later two police officers arrive on a motorbike and one gets off and signals to us to that it’s time to go. He jumps in the back seat of the Hilux, and points us towards the exit of the border compound. When we realise where we’re heading, we stop and try to explain that we can’t leave the border until we’ve been to the Customs office. After some arm waving and pointing to pages in our Farsi phrase book he eventually gets the idea. We drive to the far corner of the compound where the Customs office sits, with a handful of trucks still parked outside. With the Carnet in hand I make my way into the building and join a small but determined crowd of truck drivers swamping the only booth left open. The Customs officer is making a lacklustre show of stamping some of the final few sets of customs papers, but when our Carnet makes it to the top of the pile he decides it’s too hard for that late in the day. He unceremoniously bundles me and and the rest of the truck drivers out the door and locks it behind us. So without the Carnet stamped we can’t legally take the Hilux into the country which left us in limbo, stuck at the border!
After some more arm waving and pointing to the phrase book our police escort gets the gist of our problem. We drive across the border compound again to a forlorn building sitting on it’s own in the middle of a large dusty yard full of trucks parked up for the night. The building was a roadhouse for truckers and our initial disappointment at not quite making it through the border was replaced by a relief that the long day was over, and we could finally relax, have a meal and a bed, and finish the bureaucracy in the morning. But this feeling didn’t last. We found the manager in the kitchen and our escort explained to him we needed to stay. Unfortunately, for reasons we never quite worked out he decided he didn’t want us staying at his fine establishment. Confusion soon turned into frustration and our police escort was on the phone to his superior officer asking for advice. After much discussion in rapid-fire Farsi a crowd of truck drivers had gathered in the dining room to watch the spectacle, and luckily one of them spoke enough English to roughly translate. We were being told to drive to Zahedan, 90km up the road, and come back to the border in the morning. We weren’t too keen on this so we grabbed our map and pointed to the town of Mirjaveh a few kilometres away. The reply translated through the truck driver was something along the lines of “the police do not have so much power in that town. You might not be safe there”.
So, time for a bit of background… the border where we were at Taftan is in the heart of the Balochistan desert, which is a troubled area at the moment. The Balochi tribes are resentful that their homeland has been annexed by both Iran and Pakistan, and there’s a fairly active separatist movement in action. A more recent development is the rise in opium smuggling caused by two decades of war in nearby Afghanistan. For impoverished Afghan farmers growing opium is an attractive way to make a living in the otherwise devastated economy. According to the UNODC, most of the worlds supply of opiates is smuggled out of Afghanistan through the Balochistan desert and overland to Europe. When the Iranian government tried to crack down on the smuggling they faced a well equipped enemy – indirectly funded by heroin junkies on the streets of the western world, and armed with weapons dumped in Afghanistan by the Soviets and the Americans. Now the Iranian Police resemble an army, fighting a virtual civil war against a well equipped and determined enemy. The war has cost the Iranian people the lives of more than three thousand police officers in the last 30 years. Also, in the last few years drug smugglers have kidnapped tourists in the hope of later trading them for captured colleagues. At the time we were there a Japanese man was still being held by a group of bandits (he was later released unharmed in June 2008).
With this in mind we quite liked the idea of staying in the guarded border compound, so we persevered with our efforts to secure a bed. After a long and quite heated discussion which pitched our police officer and the truck drivers who had taken our side against the stubborn host, he finally gave in and conceded we could stay. After all this we realised we hadn’t had a chance to buy any Iranian money, so he begrudgingly accepted payment in Pakistani Rupees. We cooked dinner over our gas stove on the verandah then called it a night – technically our first in Iran.
Just after dawn the next morning we found ourselves locked inside the roadhouse so we clambered out of a window in the foyer, loaded up the Hilux, and our police escort arrived right on time for us to drive back across the compound to the Customs office. The office was deserted so we killed a bit of time playing cricket in the carpark. Playing back-yard cricket as a kid we’d always had a rule that if you hit the ball over the fence you’re out and you had to go fetch the ball. This time it wasn’t so simple -over the fence on the batter’s left was Pakistan. We might’ve had a bit of trouble getting the ball back!
As the group of stragglers outside the front door built into a mob, I left Pat and Simon playing cricket and joined in the scrum of truck drivers rolling towards the unattended booths when the doors opened at 8am. What followed still seems surreal and wouldn’t seem out of place in a Monty Python sketch. With the crowd of impatient truck drivers crowded around the glass booths, the dozen or so Customs officers treated us to a well-practiced and painfully comical display of ‘Pretending to be Busy’. Piles of important looking papers were picked up, carried across the room, put down, shuffled, picked up and moved back across the room to eventually end up on the same desk they started on. Lost items we searched for fruitlessly amongst drawers. Desks were tidied and rearranged, with books and papers aligned with millimetre accuracy. Important Things That Must Be Done were suddenly remembered which resulted in a stride across the office to a seemingly random pile of papers which was looked at, shuffled, and placed back in the same spot. The phalanx of important looking stamps on each officer’s desk was meticulously updated with today’s date, the ink pad was refreshed and the mechanism was checked. What was most impressive was that this whole charade was maintained for a full half an hour after the office opened, with absolutely no acknowledgement of the crowd of people it was intended to impress. Half a dozen arms grasping bundles of customs papers squeezed through each of the small windows, their owners quietly waiting for the performance to be over and the stamping to begin. Finally one of the officers must have inadvertently caught the eye of one of the truckies and the spell was broken. Knowing their game was over, one by one the officers resigned themselves to the fact their day had started, and the slow process of stamping and signing began.
With all of the signs in Farsi and no other clues to go on I had picked a booth at random. When our Carnet came to top of the pile the officer looked at me, handed me the Carnet and pointed somewhere generally on the other side of the room. So I picked another random booth on the other side of the room and eventually met the same response. I found a handful of car drivers also with Carnets huddled near an office door in an alcove off the main room. Encouraged, I joined them and waited some more. A couple of them walked away triumphantly with stamped Carnets, but mine was once again ignored. Sensing no impending progress I got our police escort to campaign on my behalf but that was no more fruitful. Eventually one of the Customs officers decided he could be bothered dealing with the foreigner, but unlike the Pakistani drivers who were simply stamped and sent off he wanted to come out and check the Hilux. So after what felt like an eternity stuck inside the crowded and dingy building we walk out to find Pat and Simon basking in the warm morning sun, reading their books with a cup of tea in hand. The bonnet was raised and the chassis number checked. He asked to look in the canopy, but like the police officer the previous evening he was content with a cursory glance and didn’t bother touching anything (which was a good thing, as we realised we still had a couple of bottles of Kingfisher beer which we’d smuggled across Pakistan and forgotten to get rid of!). Back inside, and with a stamp and a signature we were finally on our way. At just over 17 hours, that was by far our worst border crossing!
We were excited to finally get going and we pulled out of the carpark and headed straight to the exit, at which point the police officer in the front seat waved his arms excitedly and screamed something in Farsi which probably translated something like “Excuse me Sir, you appear to be travelling on the incorrect side of the road”. This was not a good start considering we had another 23,000km of driving on the wrong side ahead of us!
So we headed to the village of Mirjaveh just up the road where the escort directed us into the local police compound and he jumped out. Our escort was upgraded to a couple of dudes on a motorbike with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. We followed the motorbike across the featureless desert, and with the fuel light glowing ominously we reached the outpost town of Zahedan.
Once there we asked our escort to take us straight to the bank. The Iranian banking system is totally isolated from the rest of the world so you have to bring all of your spending money into the country with you in cash. We each exchanged a couple of hundred US Dollars for a couple of million Iranian Rials (the Iranian government may refer to the USA as “The Great Satan” but they sure love the Almighty Dollar!).
We still needed to get rid of some Pakistani rupees which the bank wouldn’t change for us, so our police dudes took us to the moneychanger at the bazaar. We’d stupidly forgotten to check the current exchange rate from Rupee to Rial so we went into the deal blind, and I’m sure he knew as well as we did that we had no option but to change the Rupees with him. I can’t remember what rate we got but I can safely say we made one Iranian happy that day!
We hadn’t had a chance to refuel during our dash across the desert from Quetta the previous day, so now that we were cashed up we explained to the motorbike dudes that we needed fuel. We were led to a service station back on the outskirts of town and that’s when our fun with Iranian diesel began. Even though Iran has vast oil reserves they have very limited refining capabilities. So they export their crude oil to other countries and buy it back as refined petrol and diesel at an inflated cost. With the troubled state of the economy (after the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and international sanctions) this has lead to fuel shortages and they’ve recently implemented a ration system (which admittedly wasn’t as bad as Nepal where they had virtually no fuel at all!). But our escorts lead us past the queue of cars waiting to take their ration and we pulled straight up to a pump. Armed with the Farsi phrasebook I find the word for diesel and question the young kid manning the pump (who was looking at us like we were from Mars already). “Gazoyl?”; I get a blank look. I try saying the word differently, sounding out the syllables “gaz-oy-l?” and the look turns to confusion. I point to the Farsi script in the book and he looks at me like I’m crazy. Having no faith in my pronunciation I get one of the police officers over and point to the word and point to the pump with a questioning look on my face. I’m met with the same look. This isn’t going well. A crowd gathers and I point to “gazoyl” and I point to the Hilux and eventually someone clicked. What we didn’t realise is that they’d probably never seen a diesel car before. Every single car, van, ute and 4×4 in Iran has a petrol engine. The only things that run on diesel are trucks and buses. Once they worked out we weren’t crazy we were taken over to the other side of the station where the semi-trailers were, and with a crowd of curious onlookers we finally filled up. The 60 litres came to just short of 10,000 Rials, so we peeled off a 10,000 Rial note (aka a green Khomeini), handed it to the pump attendant and we were on our way. With a minimal amount of mental arithmetic we worked out we’d just paid about $1.20 for the tank -not $1.20 a litre, $1.20 a tank! And that’s where my love of Iran began -in a dusty truckstop in the Balochistan desert.
Of course if something seems too good to be true it probably is. Not far out of Zahedan the Hilux started struggling to keep up with the ute full of armed police officers that was our latest escort. Our already dismal cruising speed of 115 dropped to 100, then to 90, and no amount of encouragement would help it along. Our only hypothesis was that we’d run the tank so low before Zahedan that we’d picked up some rubbish in the bottom of the tank and it had clogged up the fuel filter (the black-market diesel we’d bought in Kathmandu was full of crap). There wasn’t much we could do about it at the time so we persevered, slowly!
The Balochistan Desert was flat and featureless with hardly any settlement outside the odd dusty little towns that have somehow survived at the major crossroads. Every time we crossed into another police jurisdiction we’d stop and wait by the side of the road or in a fortified police compound and we’d eventually be handed over to an escort from the next jurisdiction. Sometimes the handover was quick and sometimes we’d kick around the yard for half an hour or more. There wasn’t much we could do about the waiting -they were providing an armed escort for free, and we figured they wouldn’t have bothered if they didn’t think it was necessary. But it was during these hours of waiting we had a chance to get to know our chaperones. Dog-eared photos of family, wives and girlfriends were bought out, phrasebooks and maps of Iran showing home towns were prodded excitedly, and we pieced together the stories of these young guys. Conscripted from all across the country, they knew they’d been bought to the most dangerous part of Iran to fight their fellow countrymen. Both sides just doing what they had to do to earn a living. You couldn’t help feeling that these guys were merely pawns in a game that stretched well beyond this lawless desert.
As the day dragged on and the kilometres were chewed up the desert was broken by the occasional range of low and barren hills which the Hilux was really starting to struggle up. In the late afternoon we pulled up behind our escort in a layby near the top of one of the ranges. Our escorts took positions in the high ground, obviously a bit wary of being surrounded by the hills. After a longer wait than usual the handover escort appeared over the crest with an old Land Rover behind. The Landy was driven by a Dutch couple who we had a brief chat to, sharing general observations about the roads just covered. But before we could get much useful information our unusually impatient escorts hurried us along and we were on our way, heartened by the fact that we weren’t the only people crazy enough to be driving across Iran!

Police officer standing guard while we wait at another handover
As dusk fell we were still well short of our planned destination of Bam but our progress was still hampered by our sick Hilux and the constant swapping of one ute full of dudes with guns with another ute full of dudes with guns. At one handover a bunch of energetic police officers got us into a game of football in the yard of their compound. Our ball skills were poor but they were slowed down by the assault rifles still slung over their shoulders. The game disintegrated into a slapstick comedy after a stocky little police officer took a liking to Simon and decided it would be more entertaining to chase him around with his gun and handcuffs. I don’t think Simon saw the funny side of it at the time!
After 11 hours on the road covering only 430 kilometres our escorts finally led us to Akbars Guest House in Bam. We sat drinking tea with Akbar in his lounge as his son went out and grabbed us some dinner from a nearby restaurant. Akbar was an English teacher in a past life but now he runs one of the only guest houses in Bam so he’s well known amongst those lucky enough to travel through the area. He explained the situation with the Japanese tourist who’d been kidnapped in Bam but assured us the police escorts weren’t necessary. He also explained a few basics about what to expect as a tourist in Iran, and although we were exhausted after our long drive we listened attentively as we knew it was valuable advice that’d make our next four weeks much easier.
Later in the evening three young Iranians turned up to stay, and not long after them a couple of plainclothes police officers arrived. Apologising for the interruption Akbar went off to talk to the officers. Our passports were scrutinised then the Iranians were roused out of their room and identity papers checked. The officers sat interrogating them for quite some time and eventually left. It turns out that they were most interested in why the girl was travelling with two guys and what her relationship to them was. It was an early lesson about life in an Islamic Republic.
We’d heard about how Muslims aren’t supposed to shave so Pat and I thought our assimilation into such a strong Islamic culture would be made easier if we grew a beard. It’d been about five weeks since our last shave just before our trek in Nepal, and we were both sporting mangy excuses for a beard with great pride. However to my bitter disappointment Akbar informed us that beards weren’t fashionable amongst the general population, and it was only devout Muslims that grew them. So early the next morning the clippers and razor came out and I got rid of the damn thing (with pleasure!). Pat wasn’t convinced and had become attached to his beard, so he decided he’d keep it on (his stubbornness would be vindicated later in Shiraz -but that’s a story for later!).
I was convinced that the problem we’d had the previous day with the Hilux losing power was due to a blocked fuel filter. So after breakfast I fished a new filter out of the spare parts box and found the right pages in the workshop manual. Armed with a 12mm socket and a rag I worked through the instructions and after far too long the new filter was installed and primed and we were ready to go again.
We weren’t allowed to leave the guest-house without a police escort so Akbar gave them a call and they arrived to take us for a bit of sightseeing. We wished Akbar farewell -his friendly advice would serve us well in the weeks to come. Bam was hit by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in 2003 that killed about 26,000 people. Freshly constructed buildings of varying states of completion were interspersed amongst the flattened buildings. I got the impression that the city was slowly but surely recovering. Bam is famous for it’s ancient citadel, but the earthquake had mostly flattened it. We wandered the citadel ruins with two police officers in tow, using a fair bit of imagination to picture it in it’s glory days. Restoration teams funded by various Iranian and foreign NGO’s were piecing the mud city back together wall by wall -a daunting task in the hot and sticky spring heat.
We left Bam about midday and continued our slow progress west, though the handovers between escorts were quicker than the previous day. Pat used sign language while we were driving to negotiate a trade of his sunglasses for a police officer’s cap and the next time we stopped the exchange was made. There were wide grins and high fives in both vehicles until the officer had second thoughts and decided that his commanding officer probably wouldn’t look to kindly on him giving away police uniform. So the deal was retracted via sign language, the officer pointing to his boss in the driver’s seat then to himself making the universal throat cutting sign! With spirits deflated the booty was returned at the next stop.
Our escorts had mostly been utes with two or three guys in the back but occasionally we’d get a black Peugot sedan with a couple of plain-clothed officers inside (very mafia-like). One point one of the plain clothes officers decided to jump in with us. His English was basic but we managed to get a passable conversation going with the help of the phrase book. He had his AK-47 with him next to me in the back seat so I asked him if I could feel how heavy it was. He kindly obliged and was happy to show how it all worked. Finished with the AK-47 he reached under his shirt and to my surprise pulled out a concealed pistol. He unclipped the magazine to show me it was loaded and handed it to me. I didn’t really know what to do with it, I would’ve loved to have wound down the window and let off a couple of rounds into the empty desert but I refrained myself! I passed it forward to Simon, who then handed it to Pat who was driving at the time. Once we’d all passed the pistol around like you’d pass around a bag of lollies, I begrudgingly handed it back to the police officer and he tucked it back into his trousers. Having this much firepower in the car was a little bit off-putting and I’ve since made a rule – no assault rifles in the car!
The highlight of the firepower stakes came later that afternoon when we were escorted by two pickups, one of which had a mounted machine gun on the back. Now I’m one of the lucky few people who know how invincible you feel when you’ve got a guy with a gun that big keeping an eye on you!
As the long afternoon faded into the early evening our escort led us through yet another police checkpoint, then pulled over in a dusty parking bay. A couple of phone calls were made and the officer in charge waved us on. For 2000km and four days of driving since the lowlands of Pakistan we’d had the police constantly keeping an eye on us, and now we were being set free to roam unescorted. Liberated but feeling strangely exposed we set off, winding our way down from the vast desert regions to the city of Bandar Abbas, and a body of water that has been synonymous with all that is wrong with the world since I was a teenager – the Persian Gulf.
More to come, hopefully soon!
Some links to interesting stuff about the region…
Poppy is a book by Australian Salmon Gregor, who spent almost a year in Afghanistan researching the poppy growing industry:
A short report from Al Jazeera on the Iranian Police’s struggle against smugglers.
A Scottish couple’s experiences doing the same stretch of road by bicycle (and people said we were mad!?)
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