THE EPIC JOURNEY 1973; PART TWO

The Epic Journey of 1973;
 a very personal journey.
Part two

I spent a while in Istanbul, I loved it. In some ways I didn’t want to leave but at the beginning of this epic journey, we had planned to go a lot further than Istanbul so off we went again. Until this point we had been hitching lifts, young and stupid though we were, we thought maybe this was the time to start taking public transport, so we did.

We travelled by train from Istanbul to Ankara, looking out of the window we could see a river with what looked like red mountains in the background. The river was shallow and ran by the side of the train tracks, the water looked red from the debris it must have collected as it came down the sides of the red mountains. There were little turtles swimming around in the river and sunning them selves on the rocks by the water edge. Along the waters edge were telegraph poles with telephone wires and all along these wires fluttered bright green and yellow birds that looked like budgies. The noise these birds made could be heard above the noise of the train. The ‘tea boy’ on this train was a young man who swing his tea urn full of boiling tea in and out of the passengers seemingly with out a care in the world, the train was crowded and I shrank back in horror imagining all sorts of horrendous accidents with boiling water and running children. I don’t think health and safety regulations had been introduced into Turkey at that time.
 I liked Ankara; it was a modern city with parks and good places to eat. If you strayed away from the city centre there seemed to be hundreds of little garages all repairing one or two cars on the road outside their premises. They all had their tiny radios with them and the sounds of lots of different Turkish songs mingled into one big buzz of the unfamiliar. There were western banks where all the staff spoke English and you could change currency or travellers checks. Apart from odd little things, like the call to prayer, Turkish music blaring out and signs written in Turkish, it was just like any other western city. The people didn’t seem to dress or act any differently to any other people in any other city.  From Ankara we took a bus to Tehran, (Persia) via towns called Erzurum (Turkey) and Tabriz (Persia) this was a trek into the unknown, we travelled through the desert. Erzurum had ‘’The Koran School’’; which was housed in a building with twin minarets. By the time we reached Erzurum, things began to look and feel very different. This town was part of Turkey (still is) but it felt more ‘part of the east’ than the rest of Turkey had. I remember the horse and carts there; they seemed to be the equivalent of the local taxi. I remember I had run out of film by the time I reached Erzurum and didn’t manage to take any photos. These photos I came across on the web, they were marked Erzurum 1973, and I must admit it is exactly how I remember it. They came from this site
 http://www.merhabaturkey.com/1SHOWSBindex.html



On we travelled, another bus, another journey. I had never seen a desert before; I found the experience of the desert quite spiritual in a strange way. I began thinking about how different religions all seem to have stories about the desert and I began to understand why this should be. If you haven’t done it yourself, it’s a very difficult experience to explain. I found myself sitting on a bus, a pretty uncomfortable bus, for a couple of days, with only a few stops at places with  basic toilet facilities and dubious looking drinking water, and all in temperatures I had never experienced before. The air was hot and still, there was no wind, not even a breeze, they skys were without cloud, the desert looked endless. There was a road, more like a dirt track, as we headed east there were mountains to the left and a vast expanse of desert scrubland to the right. This scrubland was acrid and barren with tiny bits of yellowed grasses scattered around. If the air moved at all they bounced around the desert in dusty yellow balls. If you looked very hard you could see little villages with mud huts sheltered at the base of the mountain range to your left. Then our bus broke down, I never did find out why. Every one was asked to get off the bus and a group of men tried to fix it. These photos were taken in the middle of the dessert when the bus broke down. If you look carefully you can see the mud hut village at the base of the mountain.

 

Eventually the men managed to get the bus going again and we continued on our journey. We left Turkey, entered Persia and passed through Tabriz. Again I didn’t manage to take photos in Tabriz, I think the very hot climate coupled with photographic technology of 1973 didn’t make it easy to get goods shots.  Tabriz is the dominant city of Northwest Persia and is the second largest city in Persia. Tabriz has been a centre of the Persian carpet trade for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years and it is these carpets that I remember, there were rug shops every where, the most amazing rugs I had ever seen. These are pictures (not taken by me) of one of the traditional Persian rugs of that area.
 http://www.oriental-rugs.com/persian-tabriz-rug.html



And then we arrived in Tehran, what a joy it was to get off that bus and find ourselves a cheap hotel for the night. The city of Tehran was lovely; it was clean and there was the most wonderful park in the centre of the city, it was like a little oasis of green after spending days in the desert. The people all seemed friendly; most people seemed to speak English and they all had a favourite restaurant or a favourite shop to recommend. It felt like a city of culture, of art, of education, there were so many things to see and so much to learn. I wish I taken more photos, I wish I remembered more of the sightseeing. I have learnt a valuable lesson from my time there. Take nothing for granted; because never in a million years would I ever have believed this wonderful city would become what it is today. If I had known how very privileged and lucky I was to experience that city at that time every moment of my time there would be indelibly imprinted on my mind. Hind sight is a wonderful thing, at the time it was just another leg in the journey. It was here that I met up with and spent time with a young German couple; this is a picture of me and the girl in the main street of Tehran and a picture of the couple sitting on the wall of Tehran Park in the centre of the city.


It breaks my heart to remember that city as it was in the 1970’s, pre revolution Persia/Iran is unimaginable for most people today. This is a web site that shows more of life in Persia/Iran in the 1970’s, it’s very interesting, it shows a modern vibrant city full of young people dressed in typical 1970’s fashion, including mini-skirts, wandering around just like young people in any modern city.

http://www.pagef30.com/2009/04/iran-in-1970s-before-islamic-revolution.html

Next stop after Iran was Afghanistan, more uncomfortable buses, more deserts, more stiflingly hot air and more scorched, cloudless skys. Before we left Persia we passed through Mashhad. This city is now known as a pilgrimage site for Shiites; they go there to pay homage to ‘Imam Reza’, an Islamic holy man believed to have been assassinated in AD 817. In the 1970s, when I was there, Mashhad was an important center for commerce, religion and tourism, known particularly as the gateway to Afghanistan. The political situation over the whole of that area has destroyed almost all trade and travel and left the town primarily a religious town. This picture is one I found on the net, it is a school photo with the teacher taken in Mashhad in 1973.


I remember vividly entering Herat, the border town of Afghanistan. It wasn’t a very big town, and it was obviously smaller, more rural, less wealthy and altogether different to the wonderful cities and towns  of Persia we had so recently left. The thing I remember with such clarity about Herat is the many small lorries and carts, all hand painted in bright designs and colours and the way every vehicle seemed to have people stuffed inside, sitting on the roof and hanging off the edges. Along the main street there were people selling water melons, huge big ripe water melons and for some reason they also sold orange Fanta fizzy drinks. I’ve no idea why they sold Fanta as opposed to any other fizzy drink, but they did. The water melons were the sweetest imaginable, they were so very big and as soon as you cut into them the pale red juices would start to dribble out, in no time at all and no matter how clean you tried to stay, they red juice of the watermelon dripped up your arms. They also had shoe shops, but not like any shoe shop I had ever seen before. This sort of shoe shop was an open fronted building with a man sitting on red hand woven rugs at the back of his ‘shop’; he would have his tea urn and his hubbly pipe. He would sit hand stitching sandals made out of camel leather. If you wanted a pair of sandals from  this man, he would draw around your foot to make a template and from that he would hand stitch you a pair of camel leather sandals, usually in a couple of hours. There were two not so nice memorable things we took from Herat, one was the flies, there were flies every where and they seemed to stay every where until I left Afghanistan. And there was the poverty. Not I hasten to add povery as you would see in some under developed countries now, but poverty like I had never seen before. There were children, mostly young boys, who pushed carts full of peoples luggage or sometimes they would be seen pushing cart loads full of melons. These young boys, about 8 years old, lived on the streets; their carts were their homes and their means of making a living. At night when all was quiet they would sleep under their carts or sometimes curled up on top of their carts. They were always ready for the next customer, it was a hand to mouth existence but somehow they seemed to manage. None of them were very big children, but neither were they the emaciated pot bellied kids we see on all the famine appeals. Herat seemed to have a few bakers  where visitors and tourists bought the very sweet and aromatically flavoured local pastry for these children. There were also tea shops every where, every one drank tea all of the time, hot, sweet, strong, black tea served into your small china cup from a long handled metal jug. Herat was a small town, its main purpose was as a border crossing in or out of Afghanistan. We spent a week or so there and then decided to move on toward Kabul.

 Photos from Wikipedia of local Musicians in Herat, 1973.


This has taken me much longer to write out than I expected and consequently, I haven't managed to get as far as I planned, a bit like the real journey I suppose, nothing goes exactly to plan. Tomorrow the next installment will see us travel through Afghanistan.