Something of a dump is Kerman bus station. There is a loud argument going on over something outside the front door. A young dude is selling watches and the equivalent of pornography here in Iran: photographs of scantily clad chubby women encased in laminate to make a key ring.
I nickname him Sunset Sam after the Mike Nesmith song Lucy and Ramona. He leaves the terminal without making a sale. The trip down here from Yazd was uneventful. We left the hotel at 5.45am and walked out into the cool morning air. It was still dark, but the sky had the deep indigo colour that signals approaching dawn in the desert.
The bus left at 6.40, and as we drove out of Yazd, the sun, huge and orange, was rising ponderously from behind a distant range of mountains. Its first light fell on a serried row of jagged peaks near the town, picking up their towering flanks in a ghostly shade of purple. The road was a straight strip of black across a barren ground, a tarplain upon which the glides were moving. The journey took five hours. Oases dotted the desert, a vast plain ringed by distant mountain ranges.
Here at Kerman, we buy tickets on the 1 p.m. bus to Bam. I remember a couple of points about last night. Before the movie, Das Boot, there was a propagandist film about the evils of American warmongering. I was talking to Hussein, a young Iranian with a very good command of English language. He translated the overdubbed dialogue for me. It is George Bush’s “read-my-lips” speech, used in the context of him ordering the U.S. military into action to kill innocent people around the globe. The trouble is, that speech was about tax increases.
Hussein also has some strange ideas about the West, mainly as a result of 15 years of government propaganda. He thinks that everyone in the US is crazy and has a gun. He thinks all married couples in the West are free to have sex with other people. On a more sinister note, he believes if a woman is caught with another man, she should be killed.
We arrive in Bam at 4pm. A man in a 2CV car gives us a ride to the Hotel Amir. The rooms are tatty but cheap, at 10,000 rials for a double room with shower.
CurseOfTheTraveller 