Cruising Around Zahedan, The Road To Bam
My first night in Iran was spent sleeping off the day’s hair-raising activities in my very neat hotel room. It’s hard to describe how welcome a hot shower is after weeks under the cold tap, but rest-assured I gave myself a good scrubbing and came out looking like… a traveller.
The next morning broke with sunshine and the realisation that I’d have to get on my bike again and ride off into the desert towards Bam. I packed up and went for a walk into town, pretty much putting off the inevitable business of riding for as long as possible, until my checkout time came and I had to grab my bike and go. As I was leaving town, I decided to stop for lunch at a local kebab shop, and went in to make an attempt at ordering, to the amusement of the kid behind the counter. I ended up with about 5 pieces of bread and three kebab sticks, two whole tomatoes and a plate of onion. Sound. Just as I was about to pay, a young guy in a shalwar kameez came in and offered to pay for my food. I said no about ten times and eventually gave in. It turns out he was an army guy on a break from his duties.
He said it was stupid to try and ride to Bam at midday and that I should stay at his place tonight and he’d get some mates around for a party. We ended up cruising around town for a couple of hours, then went back to the flat and listened to music and chatted about the differences between what we see on the news in the west and the real Iran. It was a good night and his mates were all hilarious. They spoke about how many girlfriends they had and taught me a couple of pickup lines in Farsi, like “salaam kosh kele” means hey beautiful!
This fella was a crackup, I’m not sure where they learn these moves.
My friend ready for work and me looking worse for wear. Time to get riding!
Zahedan to Bam
Wow, did I underestimate the difficulty of this stretch of road or what? It cuts through a desert called the Dash-e Lut, a 480km by 320km expanse of nothing, pretty much abiotic (no life) and boasts record surface temperatures of up to 71 degrees celsius… That’s seriously hot! It’s sandy, full of massive ergs (huge, wind-blown dunes) and liable to swallow you up in a sinkhole or underground trench if you feel the need to explore it. Luckily enough they built a nice tar road all the way through to Bam…
The general feeling when riding through a desert like the Dasht-e Lut is that if anything goes wrong, and you get stuck there, you’ll last maybe a day in the sun without water (sorry, no shade provided). Riding seems to feel like you’re heading straight into a salon-grade hairdryer, sans diffuser, with no rest-stops or petrol stations along the way. I hit a couple of sandstorms, the shearing gusts dropping, hitting then dropping away again, making a nightmare out of trying to keep the bike up. I stopped twice, got off and crouched down behind it until the sand stopped stinging.
The first incident on this stretch occurred about 30km after the desert section. I came across an oasis across the road from an army base, the wildlife consisting of a few date palms and a French cyclist stretched out beneath, looking very overheated. He’d ridden from Bam early that morning and made it to the only piece of shade. I happily gave him most of the food my mates in Zahedan had packed for me and half of the water I was carrying, not so risky because I only had 100km further to get to shelter and a shop. He told me that someone from the army barracks had come out and given him a bottle of water when they saw him arrive, for which he was very grateful. He asked me what the conditions of the stretch I’d just ridden were like and I shook my head and looked at him. The only advice I had, and it was left-over from the UK cyclist, Craig Foster, who I traveled with in outback Australia, was to do it in two goes of 50km each, one starting at about 7pm and another at 4am. He wouldn’t want to have been stuck there during the day without any trees. I rode on hoping he’d make it through alive and suddenly wishing I’d given him more water.
The second incident was a very close call. I hit reserve without a town, or a sign to a town in sight. I had a vague hunch that it was about another 20km to the first village. I freaked out because my reserve-tap range is only 23km. For anyone who doesn’t know how it works, there’s a tap on the side of the bike that you turn to “on” when you fill the bike up with petrol. When you run out of petrol, you switch the tap to “reserve” and then you know there’s maybe about 4 litres left in the tank to get you to a petrol station, kind of like a very primitive fuel gauge that doesn’t really inspire much confidence when you hit the warning level in the Iranian desert. I stopped a couple of times in high head-wind conditions to ensure the bike didn’t labor and use up too much precious fuel. I kept my speed to an average of about 60km/h and kept my eyes peeled for a town on the horizon.
The thing with mirages is this: it doesn’t look like anything specific really, it just looks like it might be something, maybe a group of houses way off in the distance and to the left, then as you approach it you veer off to the right and realise it was nothing, or a rocky hill… You add your hope to the hills and your mind sees a Co-op!
24km later, nothing in sight, fearing the worst, wondering how far I could push it if it ran dry, I crested a bend and rode straight into a village. Yaaay for organisation 
I was so keen to get petrol I asked a man to take me to the station immediately, but he laughed and indicated that I needed to relax, so I went into the little shop, bought a drink and had a great chat with the young kid in there, who kept saying Mark Bosnich to me and laughing and then introduced me to his even younger apprentice, who he called a monkey and delegated the duties of monkey noises to. The younger child gladly obliged and ran around the shop like a monkey until they both collapsed with laughter. By that time I had cooled down so I went and filled up the tank, thanked the monkey boys with a “ah, but mark viduka…” and rode to Bam.
On to Bam!!
January 16th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
then what happened?