289. Train Ride

Finding the train and the right car is easy and as the coach begins to move it is almost empty.


This is going to be a piece of cake, I think-- but stop-by-stop the coach fills until it is a crush.


The men coming aboard wear turbans, curled beards and mustaches-- the women wear colorful saris, heavy make-up and lots of glittery jewelry, all so very different from the dreary and repressed Moslem world I have just left!


Most of the men are chain-smoking, holding their thin leaf-wrapped cigarette protruding from between the fingers of their clenched fist and sucking the smoke out of a hole formed by their thumb and forefinger. I have never seen anyone smoke like this before.


Some youths, red mouthed from chewing beetle-nut talk to me (talk-spit, talk-spit!) Their glazed eyes stoned, they disjointedly discus their university exams. I eat the railway luncheon: three kinds of blazing hot spiced curry and rice. I like it, but I wonder if I can digest it. Well, it is all there is.


Out the window hazy fields and trees with plenty of perching birds slide past.


The hardwood plank seat gets harder by the mile. Peach-colored sunset and at ten p.m. we roll into Delhi.

...

288. Amritsar, India

Pandemonium! 

Good lord, as I climb off the bus near the railway depot, leaving the Frenchman to continue his earthprobe, a dozen people tug at me, blocking me with their peddle-cabs or begging for alms. The street is completely clogged by a mass of pedestrian humanity, animals and vehicles. I have never seen anything like it! Can I cope with this?


Of course!


I nonchalantly fend off everybody and notice a reasonable hotel nearby. In my small room with bath, I first bathe. (Damn! I have NEVER been so foul!) Then (cough! cough! cough!) collapse!


By early afternoon I am rested enough to go out walking. First, back to the railway station where I fill out a lengthy form (in British English, of course) and buy a ticket on tomorrow’s “noon mail” train to Delhi. Next I go looking for the famous “Golden temple”.


I never find it, but what a walk!


Honest-to-God Holy Cows, most so bleak, black and bony I don’t think I have ever seen any creatures more horrible-- and they all seem to leaking bright green shit. People! --thousands of people, all looking miserably poor and all trying to hustle a rupee by all ways known to man. Sidewalk dentists sit on mats displaying the tools of their trade, gouges, knives and pliers, surrounded by heaps of human teeth, which proves their competence. Unbelievable!

Like a frightened animal, I buy some fruit, hurry back to my more or less safe hotel room, look down from my fourth floor window at the pageant of India below and am appalled.


I don’t leave the room again until it is time to catch the train.

...

287. Bare Faces Again

After a short ride I transfer to the minibus that goes to the border—and here’s the Fruit-eating Frenchman again!


Another short ride and we are dropped in a field. It is the border. We are the only people crossing!


There is a nice, well-kept park on the Indian side of the border. There are manicured lawns, flowerbeds and great trees. Snappy soldiers wear green turbans, short beards and long mustaches.


The border formalities are minimal. Our passports are stamped and the Frenchman and I wait at a little teashop for another bus. Two pleasant English-speaking men, also waiting, casually ask if we happened to notice any Pakistani troop movements on the other side of the border. The Frenchman suggests they go look for themselves. Oh, my aching intelligence! Here’s our bus and, without the gentlemen, we are off for Amritsar!


Holy Mackerel! There are women aboard this bus with bare faces! It is a very pleasant shock! Beautiful even if the women are plain! The men are wearing turbans in pastel colors smartly turned up fore and aft.

...

286.Lahore, Pakistan

The bus is crowded. I am in a rear seat pressed against a filthy window. The pouring rain is leaking around the old window seams and stains my new coat. Everyone on the bus seems to be smoking and coughing. I cough along with the best of them but don’t smoke. It is quite enough just to inhale in the sealed bus. The roadway itself is rough as hell but I know the misery will end sometime if I can just endure it. That is one lesson of “earthprobing” I have learned very well.

Lahore, Pakistan

At dawn we pass a large city mosque and a monumental civic tower, then a confusion of shops and the bus reaches its terminus—a huge red brick railway station. I push through a throng of animal-drawn carts, bicycle rickshaws and people, thinking I might make a quick connection to India. But, alas, the trains do not go to India any more!


So I avoid the hustling cab drivers and find a local bus to the border of India at one thirtieth of the taxi’s price. The rattletrap little local buses are decorated with colorful painted scenes and dangling spangles and are crammed full of Pakistanis—the “degenerates” the Frenchman was talking about, I guess. The bus radio blaring sitar music, we’re off in a blue cloud of carbon monoxide!


The day is warm. The countryside is verdant. I feel much better!

...

285.Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar, Pakistan: The cemetery on the outskirt of town is ornamented with huge, green trees. They are the first honest-to-God trees I have seen since leaving Africa. Greetings, old friends! 

The old British part of town is a neat military compound; the rest is a jumble.


In the bus depot I meet a French traveler who has been through here several times and knows the country. He suggests a good bus connection to India that will leave this evening. I decide to move right along on the India-bound bus since I am feeling too sick and weak to carry my backpack around town looking for a place to stay.


We have a couple of hours to kill before his bus leaves. It’s raining so we sit in a café; drink tea and talk


This Frenchman is into a “Wisdom of the East” trip. He is on his way to see the Dalai Lama in India. He says I could also visit the Dalai Lama “who will see anybody”, but it is better to prepare for such momentous meetings like he (the Frenchman) has. He is a fruititarian, subsisting on a diet of fruit and honey. He also fasts frequently. He has very bright eyes and, though thin, seems outrageously healthy—especially when compared to me now! For the last few years he has spent his life working in France and traveling in India.


He gives me some tips for traveling in India and says that most Indians are “degenerate” but that one occasionally meets a healthy and high one—especially in the north—which make the country worth visiting.


The Frenchman boards his bus at eight and at nine in the evening I am on another bus bound for the Indian border.

...

284.Khyber Pass

I am feeling a little better and begin to observe my fellow passengers for the first time. They seem to be mainly European hippies-- long haired males heading for India’s cheap drugs.


We are approaching a border. We pass many adobe forts, some new some melting back into the soil. The man beside me says that these forts are the homes of various families of smugglers, which have controlled the traffic through here for centuries. They get along with the government but sometimes war against each other. Since nothing at all grows out here in the historic Khyber Pass, crime is the only way to earn a living.


Leaving the mountains, the highway, now paved, enters a wide plain. Walled adobe villages sprout here and there.

...

283.Another Chance

Another day— another chance.


I drag my backpack and half dead body to the depot and onto a Pakistan bound bus.


I am barely able to defend myself from the usual beggars and scum that come crowding up the bus aisle as soon as I drop into a seat.


Leprosy or something has demolished one woman’s face so she gets the coins. A sleazy man offers to exchange Afghani money for Pakistani rupees. I will need the money so I cash out my few remaining Afghani slugs, and then discover that it is illegal to carry Pakistani money INTO Pakistan. That rascal would make me an unwilling smuggler. A ragged boy wants to sell me cigarettes. When I decline he uses what is probably his entire English vocabulary on me: “Fuck off!”


The bus slowly rolls out of Kabul. The road follows a stream that gradually becomes a green torrent. Now the river plunges down a bare, rocky ravine, the road following in sharp twists and turns. There is no plant life at all. After an hour the road levels and we pass two lakes reflecting distant snow capped peaks.

...

282. Cape Horn

When I am not working on the UN poster I walk the snowy streets. Some children throw snowballs at me, others salute as I pass. Armed soldiers guard all the government buildings. In fact the only people on the streets are soldiers. They wear olive colored greatcoats with red tabs on the collars and fur hats. Their Asian faces and uniforms remind me of the photos of “The Enemy” during the Viet Nam thing. They warn me away from some buildings, which I have absolutely no desire to enter.


Whatever Polly saw in this place I do not see.


The UN Radio Station is a hopeless bureaucracy. The two young female secretaries speak English. They are attractive and seem “Westernized” but they are Moslem, after all, so dating is out of the question. The director is an odd Dane cordially despised by his staff. He invites me up to his lavish apartment for sandwiches, booze and conversation and this turns out to be the only pay for my work. I suppose the UN can’t afford to hire an artist.


There are more immature earthquakes. I am kept awake by my own spells of coughing.


I locate the Chinese embassy. They are sorry but they do not grant visas to backpackers. I find the Pakistani and the Indian embassies. They are not presently at war so I can cross both if I want to.


I am feeling very ill and depressed. One night I pass through what Melville called “a Cape Horn of the soul.” A time so dark and stormy I am not sure I am going to make it, I draw a dream-picture—using just a faint hint of color; a misty Hawaiian valley. While I am working on it I think it might be my farewell to life and I am glad it is peaceful and about a place where I have been happy. Then I take a long walk in the snow and somehow make it around my Cape Horn. 

...

281. UN in Kabul

Polly, the great world traveler I met in San Augustine, Colombia, told me that Kabul was one of her very favorite spots on earth. It sure does not impress me! It is dirty, poor and freezing cold, but I decide to stay a while to see if I can experience anything that will change my first impressions.


I ask the hotel man if he can provide me with a writing table and he takes out the spare bed and brings in a big leather covered table. It is wonderful for drawing. In the market I buy frozen cauliflower, raisins, assorted dried seeds and figs. Here comes the familiar diarrhea again.


Earthquakes wake me in the night. I develop a cough that gets worse and worse. I meet a man on the street who says he is looking for an artist to design some silkscreen prints. I show him my drawings and he takes me to the United Nations Radio Station office. They want me to design and print a poster advertising their teacher-training program. I accept the job. While I am in the Radio Station building there is an earthquake but I am the only one to run out into the street. Earthquakes are so common here no one pays attention to them. 

...

280. Kabul Afghanistan

Morning. No one is around. I buy a bus ticket to Kabul and never learn what the teashop terrorists or night fright was all about. Just another earthprobe experience, I guess.


As the bus pulls out of Kandahar the sky becomes overcast and snow begins to fall. We pass through more jagged mountains and desolate, empty plains and arrive in Kabul.

Kabul, Afghanistan: 

Damn! The bus station is six kilometers out of town again! I don’t know why they do this. Maybe to give the local taxi drivers employment?


A pleasant oriental face asks me if I need a hotel room in Kabul and if I do to try his so I go with him in his hotel taxi to the touristic quarter of Kabul: Chicken Street. The room he rents me is tiny but clean, neat and cheap. It has two cots, a wood stove and a color print of “Good King Winceslaus” looking out on a snowy landscape on the wall.


It is still early in the day and extremely cold outside the hotel and inside my room so I think I will try to find a warm coat I can afford. When I go out I discover there are lots of diminutive touristic shops on Chicken Street and most of them have inexpensive sheepskin coats and mittens for sale. The way you do business in these shops is to sit with the patron of the shop under a heavy blanket that covers both of your bodies and also covers a small charcoal stove which heats the under-blanket environment. The blanket is pulled up under your armpits, which leaves your hands free to drink the tea he offers you and your head free to talk business. A little boy tends the charcoal, brings the tea and hands the boss the coats he wants to sell.


It’s a pretty cozy way to get to know your customers and I feel so comfortable in the first shop I accidentally leave my camera. I don’t realize it is gone until I have sat with the patrons of a couple of other shops. When I do I race back to the first shop to retrieve it the boss hands it back to me and I gratefully buy his coat.

...

279. Freak Out

It gets dark early and by eight o’clock I am working on some drawings in the silent hotel room when there is a quiet voice at my door. I start to open it and then I remember the child’s warning in the afternoon and decide not to. The voice becomes louder and the doorknob moves. I don’t answer, but the voice gets more persistent and the door moves to and fro being pushed from the outside. This hotel is a one-story affair—a series of rooms built around a little courtyard.. There are no other guests here and the office is dark. I am alone.


With my pocketknife in hand I turn out my light and peer through the curtain of the small window. In the empty moonlit courtyard a man in robe and turban, waving a scarf, gestures for me to come out. I reflect that even a scarf can be a dangerous weapon and yell for him to go away.


He does, but a few moments later he is back scratching softly on the door. He’s really got me good and scared if that’s what he wants.


My body is so tense it might welcome the release of a fight, but I would no doubt lose since I am no fighter. I decide to stay in the room. If someone wants to get me he will have to break down the door. I have visions of the entire community from the brickworks lurking in the dark outside ready to lynch “the American Spy”: me!


After a few more shoves on the door, the freak-out man leaves. I stand tense and alert for maybe half an hour, then I push a light table and the bedstead against the door, toss the mattress into the darkest corner of the room, lay down on it fully clothed and fall asleep with my pocket knife in my hand.

...

278. Tea Shop Warning

Kandahar, Afghanistan: I purposely ditch the French travelers in this town. Traveling with the swordsman is too dangerous. Sooner or later he is going to provoke someone into a fight and if I am around I will have to fight on HIS side. I feel sorry for Isabelle, but she chooses to travel with hazardous companions. I pretend to take a hotel room near theirs as usual, then leave by a back door and find another place to stay.


Alone again, I enjoy turning the sketches of fiend’s tooth mountains I made on the bus into color pictures. In the afternoon I walk into the countryside far away from the town. There are some peculiar rows of brick kilns as tall as a two story building in the fields that I photograph. Some kids holler at me and shake their fists. I am probably trespassing or something but don’t think anything of it.


I continue walking through the fields until I reach a dirt country road. There is a shabby teashop and I stop for a cuppa.


The host is crouching on a raised platform behind a pit of glowing charcoal. A circle of little metal teapots surrounds a smoldering charcoal fire. He moves a pot onto the coals for me and fans the arrangement into a snapping heat.


I am sipping my tea when four small men crowd into the room. From their diminutive size I think they are children at first, but when I carefully observe their faces, I see signs of aging. I guess their age at about 18 to 22.


I think we are having a friendly sign-language chat when I feel the slight tap of a bare foot on my crotch. An accident? The closest boy-man (and until this tap I thought they were kids) whose foot touched me only smiles, but there is something wrong with his smile. I think maybe he is just some country boy that wants to get close to an interesting tourist. But when I rise to go, the second man blocks my way with his legs. I playfully put my hand on his shoulder to move him out of my way and am startled by his strength and resistance. He shoves me back with a broad grin. I step around him and out of the teashop into the lane heading back through the brickworks toward town.


Suddenly a tiny child runs out in front of me with terror on her face. She makes the universal danger sign, the “cut your throat” gesture with finger across the neck, points back toward the teashop and races back between some buildings. That is a very serious warning for me!


I walk as fast as I can and stay in the middle of the road.


I don’t know why these men would want to hurt me. Of course, they are very poor. I am sure some of them would kill me for my shabby clothes and boots, not to mention my camera, which probably represents more in cash value than any of them will earn in a year or two of hard work.


I have been carrying my camera in a beat-up old cloth bag so it won’t look tempting to thieves, but hell, they know I have something in there—even the old bag would probably be a treasure worth my life out here!


I don’t see anyone following though and I return to my small hotel room without incident.

...

277. Invitation

The “musketeer” wants to go in too. I tell him it may be possible if he does exactly like I do without question, but he is too slow.


I perform the ritual properly as I have been taught, washing my face, ears, hands and feet and rising my mouth out. Then I join the white-clad men trooping into the mosque. The soldier keeps the Frenchman out.


We pass into an inner room and the prayer begins. It proceeds a little differently from what I was taught but I do all right. It feels strange to be standing shoulder to shoulder with these gray old men in the dim light of the sanctuary, but it does not feel bad.


When the prayer is done, I leave quickly, lacing my boots on at the door. There is a growing crowd of more or less astonished Moslems who have never seen a “white” brother before. One man, who speaks a little English, invites me to stay with them in the town so that they can teach me more about Islam, but I tell them that I cannot. I can’t stand any more captivity.


My French companions are a little angry that I have been allowed to enter the mosque while they were kept out. They ask if I made the prayers as a joke. Not really. I wanted to join in the prayer and that’s all—maybe it does me good. That’s all.

...

276. Prayer Attack

At sunset we are passing an elaborate mosque. The French trio wants to see inside. I explain that it is forbidden for unbelievers to go into a mosque—especially for a woman! This vexes them and they march through the gate in the outer wall. I go along trying to convince them that what they want to do is very dangerous. We get as far as the ablution pool when I hear the familiar “call to prayer”. It’s time for the sunset prayers! A rifle-carrying soldier comes in and stops the French tourists before they can get into the main room, but I think it would be interesting and maybe even good for me to pray with these Moslem brothers in this strange old city, so I tell the soldier in halting Arabic that I would like to go in and join the congregation.


He is flabbergasted, but says it would be OK “if I am clean”. He means if I have done the ritual washing that is necessary before entering the mosque to pray. I tell him that I am not “clean”. He gestures toward the big pool. It will be a terrific health risk, but I immediately decide to chance it. Dysentery for wanting to pray would be a novelty anyway.

...

275. French Trio

The French trio and I continue by bus in the morning. In the afternoon we arrive in a mud town built near some crumbling old minarets and find a hotel with empty rooms. We walk out to see the small town. A baker is busy making bread in an oven under the floor of his shop. An adobe castle is disintegrating back into the dust of the street and a blindfolded camel is pulling a mill-wheel in an endless circle.


The noisy Frenchman is getting on my nerves. He is forever whipping out his big knife and his cash in a very stupid, provocative way. His ignorance and that knife are going to be the death of him and probably his countrymen. “A traveler to distant places should make no enemies” as my African writer Chinua Achebe said and this is about as distant as you can get!


Isabelle is young, strong, pretty. How she got mixed up with these two losers I don’t know, but they are a team and that’s for sure.

...

274. Afghanistan Border

Afghan Border Hostel.

I buy a good, cheap meal of rice, potatoes, bread and tea.


The darkened main room of the hostel is crowded with poor international backpackers. The smoke is psychedelic. There is so much coughing the French woman, Isabelle, remarks “It’s like a sanatorium”. Exactly. It’s high in the mountains, cold and probably, outside of this smoky room, quite a healthy climate. Later she whispers: “It’s like a monastery.” True. The only sound is subdued conversation and low laughter. Almost everybody in the room is stoned. The world’s most bizarre music is barely audible from a radio in the kitchen where the Afghani workers are cleaning up from the meal. Everyone is mellow except for one of the Frenchmen who has a huge Bowie knife that he loves to unsheathe with a howl and flourish like a Hollywood Musketeer, but even he is subdued.


I step out into the bright moonlight for some fresh air.


It’s good to be here. I feel great. It’s a wonderful trip!


Does this balance the depression I felt in the Teheran bus depot?


I fall asleep wrapped in my poncho lying on the clean, carpeted floor littered with other snoring travelers in sleeping bags.

...

273. Between Mattresses

Meshed, Iran: My hotel room is cold as the outdoors and there is snow out there. 

I can’t get the kerosene stove going for heat so I ask the hotel man for some help. He stuffs some wads of newspaper into the stove, tosses in a cup of fuel oil and follows it with a lighted match. There is a small explosion and the air in my room is suddenly filled with minute greasy floating ashes. The hotel man shrugs and brings me a second mattress. I sleep warm as toast between the mattresses.


Next day, I pay the usual inflated tourist taxi fare to the coldest embassy on earth, the Embassy of Afghanistan where, after waiting two hours, I pay for the visa stamp in my passport. Isn’t it interesting how bureaucrats do the same thing all day every day but never know how to do it?


Here’s the bus depot, here’s the bus and some new travelers: Two Germans, a Finn, a Pakistani, three from France and a dozen natives.


It’s dark when we reach the Afghan border. We international travelers move into a mini-bus and the highway becomes a dirt road. This is the first unpaved main highway I’ve been on since Africa.


It is a short minibus trip for us to the...

...

272. Meshed

The few words of Arabic I know astonish and delight my traveling companions. They are all pious Moslems who chant a prayer together every time the bus moves out from a rest stop.


Morning comes as we travel. The landscape is flat and white with snow and soon we arrive in Meshed. 

A cheerful boy riding a new Honda motorbike meets the bus and offers to guide me to a nice hotel. I climb on behind him and am delivered to a clean, cheap “hotel”. He offers to show me the sights of his town in the afternoon and I agree to go with him. Together, we visit a gold and turquoise decorated mosque, several gift shops and his brother’s carpet shop. The whole trip is a merchandising scam, but so pleasant you can’t get annoyed.

...

271. Spies

I am waiting in the depot for the bus to Meshed when an old gentleman collapses near me; he is not dead or drunk just in a bad way. Another old man waiting for a bus tries to tell me what happened, but my informant has had a tracheotomy and has to “talk” through a metal whistle-like devise installed in his throat.

We are all here: the good, the bad and the indifferent. We observe and we participate. This certainly is a depressing drama but the play always changes.

On the bus, a sturdy young soldier who speaks a little English occupies the seat beside me. He is friendly and entertaining. I have seen photographs of the handsome Shah of Iran and his beautiful wife displayed conspicuously in shop windows and on posters all over the city but the soldier tells me this is merely government propaganda. He suggests that all is not peaches and cream in Iran and the charming couple in the photos may not be as wonderful as they seem. At the lunch-stop the soldier buys me a nice meal: chicken, rice and apricots.

I am disappointed after lunch when police stop the bus and order all of us passengers to get out for a few minutes. When we get back aboard the driver tells me to sit in the front of the bus beside a skinny Turkoman who says he has been taught English by Peace Corps volunteers. He begins to sing the praises of the Shah. He says I should read the Shah’s book: “The White Revolution”. He seems to believe that everything in Iran is hunky-dory.

If I was a suspicious person I might think that an informant was setting me up so that I would make a report about the “optimistic mood of the people in Iran” to interested persons in America. This is not the first time I have been mistaken for a spy, as you know. Some governments do have heaps of money to waste on idiocy like “intelligence” as some ignoramuses call the reports from their spies

The Turkoman asks me if I have any American money for his collection, ho, ho. I haven’t heard THAT one since I left Peru.

.

 ...

270. Global Culture

I notice an unusual ratio of men to women on the street—though it is probably the same in all Moslem cities—that is, about twenty men to every one woman. 

The few traveling women from America I have met who have passed through this part of the world tell me that their lives have not been made more pleasant by all the attention from these men. So far I have not visited the city where twenty leering, groping women follow me down the street but maybe that’s fortunate.


The women I do see here usually wear a shawl covering most of their face. They seem to keep it (the shawl) in place, by clenching a corner of it in their teeth.


The downtown theaters advertise karate movies-- more sex and violence. It seems like everybody’s interested in that stuff-- the new Greek Drama offering catharsis for the first global civilization. Kick and shout! That seems to be where we’re at civilization-wise. The global cultural tide is sure at low ebb, but the tide always changes. 

(I think none of we of the living generation will live long enough to experience flood tide though. That may be a delight reserved for our great-great, ever-so-great grandchildren of the far-off future.)


I see few signs of poverty and no beggars. 

... 

269.Teheran, Iran

Teheran, Iran: Passing through the outskirts of town I see factories with familiar names: Alis-Chalmers, Canada Dry and Coca-cola. Some other Americans got here before me!


This is a modern city: wide streets, no traffic jams and green parks—the place is clean and orderly. I stay a couple of days.


In the archaeology museum I see a collection of miniature paintings, just the thing for a nomad’s gallery, some hand copied antique Korans, a frieze from Persepolis and some clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform A large stone statue in the same museum has cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions on it. I’ll bet that work of art has presented some interesting linguistic puzzles to scholars!


When I’m hungry I drop in at what appears to be a fast-food diner for big wheat pancakes, stew and tea—just like I bought at the bus station! I haven’t been sick since I left Lebanon. (Knock on wood!)

...

268. Tabriz, Iran

  The Tabriz bus terminal is at the edge of what appears to be an average-size city. The Italian and I catch an urban bus to the center of town and then we mosey around for an hour until we find a cheap hotel in a back alley. The room has two cots and kerosene stove and costs two dollars a night. When I go out to buy some food I meet a young man who wants to practice English. He helps me buy oranges and bananas and find the bus ticket office where I buy a ticket to Teheran tomorrow.

I share a meal with the climber. I provide the food and he provides the wine and beer. I have my first alcoholic drink since coming among the teetotalling Moslem brothers last September. It sure tastes good! The climber stays here.


Early morning: I am given a surprise by the taxi driver who takes me to the bus terminal where I will catch the Tehran bus —he gives me a piece of candy and will accept no money for the ride. I have traveled a lot of miles to have THAT experience!


There is some kind of mix-up about the ticket I bought yesterday at the agency. Another friendly man comes to my rescue and I am soon on the bus and riding through the snowy hills. About every five miles we pass an adobe village that reminds me of Taos Pueblo--in fact the whole scene is a lot like Northern New Mexico.


This bus is first class. It makes regular stops at clean, well-organized depots. When we stop for lunch, everyone buys a wooden token that we present at the lunch counter for a meal. I pay for two tokens with high hopes. I haven’t got the slightest idea what I have bought, but when the food comes I get a nice plate of tasty meat stew on rice, flat bread and hot tea!

...

267. Earthprobers

About these Pakistanis; there are many children looking cold but happy, impassive adults burning scavenged brush wood in a gesture against the cold and a few venerable patriarchs in rags. They have less survival gear than me but they have had a lifetime of toughening up. They will survive. I wonder where they are going in their earthprobe? Probably some outlandish county where the women have bare faces and the men shave!


The taxi takes the passengers to the first village in Iran; neat adobe houses and businesses nestled at the bottom of a deep canyon. The Italian and I continue in a mini-bus and we press on between snowy peaks and through postcard villages. In the empty fields, herds of camels graze.

...

266. Guessing Games

As we leave Agra, I take a good look at famous Mount Ararat in the distance. Not exactly my idea of a snug harbor, Noah!

This morning my traveling companions are ferocious looking Turkish soldiers and a nice Italian mountaineer who speaks English as fast as he can thumb through his Italian/English dictionary.

The Iranian border police are not too pleased to have me show up without a visa. Grudgingly, they issue me a three-day transit visa. This seems like a big country to cross in only three days, but what the hell…

On the Iranian side of the border a hundred or so Pakistani refugees huddle together in family clusters. The clothing of the Pakistani women resembles a Halloween trick-or-treat ghost costume from my childhood. They have substituted a cloth-tape lattice instead of the usual two eyeholes, but you can only guess what they are like under it. In fact, it is such a good disguise; they might not even be women!

I met a Pakistani in Africa who told me that he liked Americans but that we didn’t know how to treat women. His sister, he said, was an example of the proper way to bring up a lady. “She is twenty-five years old and has never been out of our house.” And it looks like I am heading toward Pakistan!

I join a taxi-full of travelers, and our driver weaves through the refugees, honking and calling them “animals!” in English. 

...

265. Agra,Turkey

Agra, Turkey: A “wild west” town of dismal clapboard hovels.

Four Pakistani men, my traveling companions on the bus, threaten to rearrange the driver’s face with their wicked-looking walking sticks if he does not take us to the border as promised, but he refuses to go on.

After much futile cursing and threatening, everybody gets out and disappears into the darkness. This is a replay of my midnight Amazon jungle bus adventure in Peru, but this time it’s freezing cold.

The Pakistanis will probably camp out and survive somehow but I must find shelter. A shadowy person appears and offers to guide me to a hotel. The “hotel” is one big room filled with smoking men. Upstairs is another big room filled with cots and these “beds” are not cheap. When I tell the man in charge I will look for another hotel, he offers to punch me in the nose for wasting his time. Criminey! What a superb night for violence!

I escape without a fight and wander around for a while in the snow. Here’s another “hotel” and they have a vacant bed! Saved!!

At dawn I am out again looking for transportation to the border. Here’s a carryall going my way. 

...