By Johno

[The previous blog saw Paul and Leigh stuck in Dubai leaving Johno to drive the car across Baluchistan with two new companions...]

Baluchistan is name given to the large expanse of barren desert that straddles the Pakistan-Iran border and is so notorious for drug-smuggling, banditry and kidnappings that all foreigners must be accompanied by compulsory armed escorts. The desolate area was used by Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons less than fifteen years ago and Baluch separatists and bandits have carried out a spate of kidnappings of Western tourists over the last five years.

Despite this the first few hours of our morning drive were much the same as rest of Southern Iran; smooth roads flanked by lots of sand and very, very hot. We encountered the first escorts a few hours outside of the city of Zahedan and reluctantly gave our passports over to the rag-tag bunch of men wrapped up in Lawrence of Arabia-type scarves and sporting AK47s with friendly but bored grins. We had been pre-warned by other overlanders that the Iranian escorts carried your passports for the duration of their escort but it was an extremely uncomfortable to see our whole identity ride off in a cloud of dust and a white pickup truck.

Every few miles, once we had caught up with the passport-wielding guards who had invariably raced far ahead in their 4x4s, we were passed over to the next group of soldiers as we desperately tried to keep our passports in sight. Each new escort seemed to bring with it more firepower, first the AKs, then American M60s then, as we got to the city, truck-mounted machineguns.

On the road

The city was where our frustrations began. Instead of going around the bypass and straight to the border a further 50km ahead the escort took us into bustling city and to a local police station. The next six hours were a nightmare of increasing tempers and incompetent police; each escort took us a few kilometres before we ended up sitting outside the next police station whilst they attempted to organise another ‘escort’ for us to essentially take us around the corner. What was most frustrating was that the escorts had now gone from heavily armed soldiers to a single unarmed skinny teenage police recruit sitting in the back seat of the car clutching our passports. Even worse, we were now sitting outside the police stations for hours on end, making ourselves much much larger targets than if we had just zoomed through to the border.

Before we had left on the trip we had debated a load of different ideas including running the car on vegetable oil and even using a fuel cell in an attempt to reduce the carbon emissions from the 7000 litres of fuel we estimated we would use. In the end all of these were discounted as logistically impossible and we settled that diesel was the most sensible choice, reasoning that, “Diesel is everywhere because all the trucks use it” and, "Where the hell are we going to find 40 litres of chip fat in the middle of the desert?"

In Iran, things weren’t so easy in practice; most fuel stations didn’t carry diesel and in those that did a fuel card was needed to purchase it. However, along with road tax and insurance, we hadn’t been given the opportunity to get one meaning that we were reduced to sweet-talking local truck drivers into lending us theirs to fill up our relatively small tank. The upside was that when we did manage to find diesel, it sold for the bargain price of 10p a litre.

Now, halfway through the city, I spotted a fuel station and told the young man in uniform in the back that we needed to stop and get Diesel or in Persian, “Gazolé!”. Apparently diesel was impossible to come across once over the border so I wanted to fill everything up before we entered the nothingness of the Baluchistan desert.
“No gazolé!” he insisted, motioning forward “straight! Straight!”

I reluctantly followed his directions, figuring that he knew a better fuel stop up ahead but was annoyed to find as we drove around the corner that we were pulling up to yet another police station and he jumped out with our passports in hand.
“Hey!” I shouted, “What about the gazolé?”
“Yes, yes. After lunch” he called back, disappearing through the guardroom into the station buildings.
“Wha, wait...” we started, exasperated, but he had already disappeared with our precious passports.

We tried in vain to talk to the young policemen manning the front desk but in reality they were bored, angry young men, probably forced into a role they didn’t want and who knew less about what was going on than we did. This translated into them winding us up for their own amusement by constantly mockingly telling us to wait a further five minutes and telling us that we could go after lunch. Understandably this didn’t go down with us too well and tempers frayed as we watched the clock ticking towards 5pm, the time we had been told the border shut for the night.

This is my pissed off face

After waiting around for hours with no sign of movement I finally decided enough was enough and that I needed to take matters into my own hands.
“Wait here with the passports,” I told Craig, “I’m going to get fuel”
And so, before the recruits could stop me I jumped in the car and set off unescorted to find the earlier petrol station.
I was soon flanked by an older, more smartly dressed police officer on a motorbike, furiously trying to catch my eye and motioning for me to turn around but after ignoring my better judgement and disregarding the Iranian police chief we arrived at the fuel station.

Of course, they had no gazolé.

I had seen another station, further up the road and after pleading with the officer on the forecourt and telling him it was only 2km away he reluctantly agreed to follow me.
6km later, after 4km of more angry signals to turn around, we got to the petrol station that evidently did have diesel, as shown by the huge line of trucks queued up.

After pushing in at the front, I encountered the next problem: as I was standing there, trying to negotiate the illegal use of a fuel card right next to a senior policeman I obviously wasn’t having much luck. But in the end the policeman actually ending up negotiating a deal with a huge truck driver, although he was asking for triple the normal price, an outrageous 30p a litre!
I lied that I only had 80,000 Rials left; nowhere near the amount they were asking and to my surprise the policeman took out his wallet and forced his own money into my hands, allowing us to make the deal and top up.

When we arrived back at the immensely relived Craig and Michael we all assumed that the chief would take us immediately on to the next checkpoint but my indiscretion was rewarded with another hour’s wait. When we finally left we were fuming when we found out the next stop was just around the corner and to learn that we needed to wait here, in full view of all the city traffic, until another escort could hitchhike from the next station, 40km away.

This was all almost too much for Craig who was shouting in pure rage at the rifle-wielding men demanding that they to get us an escort immediately. Imagine his annoyance then, when nearly an hour later the young man in a shoddy uniform and with no weapon climbed out of a truck, took our passports from his colleague and impatiently motioned for us to leave.

Now it really was a race for the border, we had about an hour to do about 40km, not an easy feat considering the heat, the hills and Hannah’s ailing engine, plus the numerous escort changes. So it was perhaps almost inevitable that my gunning of the car would cause another problem with the fan and sure enough the temperature started to creep back up. Before we knew it we were standing by the side of the road, 25 kilometres from the Afghanistan border waiting for the car to cool down with the escort frantically urging us to get back in the car and hurry up so he could get home for his dinner.

We limped to within sight of the Pakistan border and were barely a few kilometres away when there was a final police checkpoint and a final swapping of escorts. Our goal was now within sight and we might actually make it out of Iran without Craig strangling one of the escorts.

As the guard went inside to write our details down we stared wistfully to the East before noticing that the yard of the compound was full of dirt-covered men kneeling in a line with their hands on their heads. A young uniformed man standing on the steps of the building was searching the ground for stones to throw at them and an armed guard stood lazily watching what we assumed to be captured smugglers.  

Almost thirteen hours after we had set off we finally made it to the border itself and predictably it was shut down for the night and locked up tight. The poor young guard who had only been with us for the last five minutes took the brunt of Craig’s tirade of four-letter words and innocently told us that we would have to stay in the nearby infamous border town of Mirajaveh. Once our anger had calmed down enough for us to drive again we were escorted to the tiny Wild-West-like place and into a large hotel compound.

The place obviously had some kind of racket going on with the police and immediately tried to charge us an extortionate rate for rooms and to rip us off completely with exchanging Euros into Rials; with us having spent nearly all of our local money as we assumed we would be crossing the border that afternoon.

This was finally too much for the guys and Craig grabbed the opportunistic money changer by the lapels as Michael, the German biker travelling with us, shouted at the top of his voice that he was a thief and a robber. The stress of the long, scorching day had come to a head and things looked very ugly. Fortunately everything backed away from fisticuffs to the level of shouting and insults and I took the opportunity to jump in the car, ditch the police and hotel staff and try to find a mechanic to fix the car.

Take these, i've had enough

A little while later I was stood in the street outside a small garage with the car in pieces and the sun setting. I had pulled up to some white-robed locals, opened the bonnet and tried to explain the problem. They seemed to understand and I ended up nervously following one of them to the secluded side-street, full of apprehension that I was about to get robbed, sold on to the Taliban or maybe worse. Thankfully he took me to a mechanic who quickly jumped on the front of the car, started unbolting parts and sizing up a new fan.

I was standing there, being offered drinks, trying to chat to the smiling crowd of people and thinking, “So this is the place I need an armed escort?” when, almost on cue, the police from the hotel turned up and stood aside me shoulder to shoulder with me. At first I thought they were going to bundle me off to the hotel but they spoke to the mechanic in rapid-fire Persian and he quickly gathered up all the parts and put them in the back of the car, evidently having been told to stop doing whatever he was doing.
“No fix Mirajaveh,” the mechanic said, “you go Zahedan”

The policemen forcefully told me to come back to the hotel and leave the car, with no radiator or cooling fan, in a side street in a dodgy border town that is described by the Foreign Office as ‘particularly insecure’. It took all of my efforts to kick up enough of a fuss to get them to agree to tow the car back to the hotel.

I jumped in the driver’s seat and as I took the steering lock and handbrake off almost the entire crowd that had been watching the mechanic started to push me along the dusty road. For a moment I genuinely thought they were going to push me the whole way across town but they just positioned me behind a battered blue pickup that towed me to back our temporary jail.

Back at the hotel the staff had softened and allowed (or been forced by the police) us to camp in the car park for free. They had even brought us out some blankets and a watermelon; very welcome after a whole day of no food.

 As I pulled the tents down from the roof something in the back of the car caught my eye.
“What the hell is that?” I said, shocked.
Craig smiled for the first time all day, “It’s karma”
Hidden in the back of the car was a metal policeman’s helmet, stolen from the most obnoxious and slow checkpoint of the day back in Zahedan.
I laughed and started putting the car back together, ready to limp back into the city to try to find a mechanic the following day.

[The next blog sees the team attempt to return to Zahedan to get the car fixed but running into the owners of the helmet...]

Trip Stats

Days on the road: 136
Miles covered: 16,009
Tanks of fuel used: 82
Items of police uniform stolen: One