The eastern sky is a deep orange overlaid with indigo and black as we shoulder our packs and begin walking towards town from the hotel. We had left ourselves out: the staff proving unrousable at that hour…6:00 AM. A taxi ride takes us to the bus company office, where we sit on the pavement beneath the twisting trunk of eucalyptus growing along the road. An old man, yawning and bleary eyed, opens up the office and gives us some dates to eat while we wait.
At 6:20 a taxi arrives to take us to where the bus departs in another part of town. As the bus leaves Bam we continually stop to pick up extra passengers. There is a police checkpoint on the outskirts of the city. The police officers tap the bus looking for pockets of contraband. The road lies due east across a flat landscape of grey gravel. The driver is erratic. Dangerous. He attempts bizarre passing moves. To my left, outside the bus, there is a sudden heavy noise…CHOONG… like the sound of a heavy steel door closing. An orange lorry careers off and out into the sand, its right front side smashed in. The bus slows and I look out the back window. A tan pick up is askew across the road, pulverised by its impact with the truck. Without doubt there will be people dead inside, their lives ended as bone and flesh met a machine. The closing of a heavy steel door.
The driver continues to drive erratically for the entire journey. There are several more police checks. Every few kilometres, a watchhouse stands in the desert, each one with a mounted machine gun and a few barbecued-looking soldiers. The landscape is flat, barren. There are very few oasi. as we near Zahedān, the check points increase and become more heavily fortified with barbed wire and guns.
At Zahedān, we take a shared taxi from the bus station to the bazaar. It takes us quite a while to find the Hotel Hérmānd, but eventually we track it down in an alley of shops selling perfume in shalwar kameez. For 6000 Rials we get a room with a hand basin and piped music. The place is clean and quiet.
Late in the afternoon we go out to find the office of the Kōmite [the ranian secret police]. Rumour has it that all foreigners staying overnight in Zahedān must register with the Kōmite. It takes about half an hour to find the building and a policeman leaning against the wall outside tells us to come back tomorrow. “Fuck it,” we say, and resolve to tell anyone who asks at the border that we came from Kerman on an overnight bus. Our last meal in Iran is a delicious chēlo kebab with māst yoghurt.
CurseOfTheTraveller 