Part 4. Iran, warmth and hospitality

 It took us seemingly forever getting from the border to Tabriz, hardly any road traffic and nothing wanted to stop for us, we were about to bed down in the desert for the night when a family with a beaten up pick up truck pulled over and the teenage boy, who had enough English, asked where we were going . He said we shouldn't stay the night there but come with them to a house nearby. We jumped in with a few hay bales and the three children in the open back of the truck and travelled about 20 mins down a track to their home, where we were offered soup and bread and the teenage boy practised his English.

The father made jokes in Iranian which the family found funny and they moved the teenage boy into his brothers room so we could stay the night.

We were woken before first light and the father had already loaded the truck with Hay bales and drove us up back to the road with a packed lunch each that the mother had prepared.

We hitched for a while before a coach stopped a few hundred yards in front of us . Too far to be sure they had stopped for us, but near enough for us to hope. We walked fast towards it and the door opened , a smart looking guy got out and waved to us to hurry and we boarded the coach full of students.

Their lecturer was an American and he explained that this was one of the first student exchange visits between Iran and The UK.

There was much merriment among the students and some were shouting something about' Marco Polo Go Home' and we were given a short lesson in how the west had exploited and abused the area for centuries, Marco being emblematic of the start of the terrible history of the Colonial abuse of Persia. The delay to the stop to pick us up had been due to them debating, half wanting us to be left to rot in the desert, the other half saying it was a way to repay the hospitality they had had in Europe ( saying that, two of them had had their wallets stolen in London and one of them was beaten up in pub in Hackney). The moderates had won the argument but it didn't stop the debate.

They took us into Tehran , the American telling us a bit about the modernisation program that the Shah was implementing, bringing in western education and liberalising the opportunities for foreign travel.

We had an evening at the university with my Irish friend playing some music with some of the students,who dug out something that looked like a dulcimer and another instrument that they called a Setar , the musical styles were so at odds though, it tended to be more of a sharing than a collaboration.

The American had arranged for the coach driver to take us to the bus station where we could get a series of cheap local busses to the border with Afghanistan. He wrote us a note to give to each bus driver. We stopped at provincial towns and villages , drank at tea shops and ate food from the street cafe stalls. Once out of the city we encountered no more hostility, just friendly banter, signing and genuine interest, we were forced to play some music more than once, sometimes with penny whistle style accompaniment from local kids , but mostly just with wry smiles and fascination. The regular stops for prayers and ablutions were soon got used to, but we were looking forward now to getting into Afghanistan.

Go To part 5 . Beautiful Afghanistan.