Rift Valley Wandering

I begin my tale on board the Trans-Asia Express - the train from Tehran to Istanbul. Apart from continuing to freak out a little about Iran's rather distasteful treatment of their guests, I enjoyed three long days comfortably seated and bedded in a four-berth compartment while watching the bleak, snowy Iranian landscape transform into verdant views of Turkey.

When I say they were long days I was being literal. Crossing the twenty degrees of longitude while travelling west, I gained almost half an hour per day – I was effectively on Mars time. Not since the perennial droning of the cargo ship on the Arabian Sea had I felt more like I was preparing for interplanetary travel.

During the interstices experienced between powering through kilobytes of ebooks and hearing megabytes of podcasts, I got to know my berth companions, all Iranians visiting family in Turkey. Their ring-leader was a burnt-out cop called Hassan who, to my infinite annoyance, purposefully put on a southern American drawl to be 'cooler' and spent much of his time listening to his own podcasts on how to emotionally damage women so they can be more easily controlled.

The highlight of this smooth slide across the Near East was when the train's carriages were packed up and floated across the icy Lake Van on a ferry during the night just after crossing the Turkish border. The next evening, after all the Iranians on board were sure of their departure from the motherland, the partying kicked off. Head scarves were thrown in the air, alcohol was poured freely and rambling unsolicited political opinions were proffered as a guitar was passed around the dining car. I could completely empathise with their palpable sense of relief.

At last, emerging from the mountains during the night, we arrived at the Istanbul terminus - conveniently located within ten metres of the Bosporus. After triumphantly receiving a wad of cash from the first ATM I'd used in over a month, I stepped lightly onto the ferry next to the station with my bike and left Asia for Europe.

The transformation was immediate: narrow cobbled laneways, trams squealing around tight corners, the annoyingly high density of fascinating ruins from Classical times – all my ignorant stereotypes of Europe come true!

After spending almost two months without alcohol in Muslim countries I hit the backpacker party scene hard, usually finding myself with groups of American exchange students eager to dance the nights away. During the day I visited all the standard tourist fare: the Hagia Sophia, the underground cisterns built by Justinian, and a museum room filled with statues of fellow-traveller Alexander the Great. However, six days spent hovering at the precipice of Europe, not quite daring to plunge into the ease and cost of this civilised continent, I jumped on a plane (my first since Bali) and headed south to Kenya. Also, it was snowing in Istanbul. None of that, thanks.

That’s right – it was a new era. I’d abandoned my continuous travelling at the airport as I’d abandoned my bike at the post office (it was to arrive back in Melbourne twelve days later). My mechanical companion had taken me 9,998 kilometres across Asia and the Middle East (excluding side trips and city excursions) and needed to see the Australian bush once more.

The Qatar Airways flight stopped off overnight at Doha on its way to Nairobi, allowing me to rest my weary head whilst straddling four brightly lit, hand-rested chairs at the airport. Upon my arrival in Africa I was met by my buddy Sasha, the first of five friends from home with whom I’d be travelling during my two-and-a-half months in the continent. Sasha had been here a few weeks already, the beginning of a seven month African interruption to her Commerce/Arts degree.

Africa was a sudden shift for me. I’m not just talking about the abrupt climate change from snowy to tropical; nor the wild landscape and unique humanity-adapted biota; nor even the freedom of dress (widening my eyes as I walked the streets after over a year in culturally conservative countries). I am, of course, speaking of the powerful gravitational difference between the heavy high latitudes of Turkey and the centripetally leavened equator. No wonder the locals grow so tall here.

Sub-Saharan East Africa is certainly a land of extremes. The human genetic diversity is immediately apparent for one thing, as is the large range of megafauna no-one’s managed to kill off yet – some of these Sasha and I checked out at the Nairobi National Park, a morning spent giraffe spotting and spying on wild lions yawning by the road beneath the incongruous modern skyline of the metropolis – but some of the biggest extremes are found in people’s attitudes to foreigners.

Often people are overwhelmed with curiosity about us and generously hospitable. Others, however, seem resentful towards the wealth disparity on display. This will extend to not only charging us several times the local cost for something, like any efficient capitalist with an eye to the capabilities of the market, but sometimes they even use price as an instrument of punishment for our relative wealth.

“You have the money, therefore you should pay what I want”, Is one prevailing attitude, much to their financial detriment in the face of alternatives. We encountered this a lot, even when we knew the much lower local price – bargaining was not an option. This ‘suck the tourists dry’ attitude culminated in an unpleasant mugging as we arrived in Dar es Salaam – but I’ll get to that later.

One of the main activities Sasha and I had decided we wanted to do in this part of the world was to climb Kilimanjaro, for the awesomeness points if for nothing else. In the few days before our trip was due to begin we headed for the hills to prepare with some Rift Valley volcano trekking – the mini-Kilimanjaro, Mt Longonot. Annoyingly, after spending the day buying food and local-minibus-hopping to arrive at sundown, we were informed by the ranger that camping in the park would cost us a not-insignificant thirty bucks. Our indignation rising at this special ‘foreigner price’, we stormed out to find a spot to stealth-camp at the park boundary. This moment confirmed exactly how compatibly stingy Sasha’s and my travelling styles were. Sadly, our superior sense of self-satisfaction at stymieing the system was sabotaged by the consumption of cold chow – we’d brought a stove, but no matches.

After a somewhat sleepless night reassuring Sasha that the occasional rustlings outside her tent were neither angry buffalos nor violent tent-invaders, we emerged at dawn to find ourselves amongst a grazing herd of gazelles and a... stand?... of giraffes. The park ranger in the morning gave us the strangest look on learning that.

Mt Longonot itself was climbed and circumambulated during the day, affording us spectacular yet sweltering views of the deeply sunken caldera and the sunlit plains extended of our ancestors’ old stomping grounds.

And at last, after a day raiding Nairobi for proper camping gear to survive the freezing heights of Kilimanjaro, the success of which was celebrated by storming a local pub at the dodgy end of town – only to discover that the sexes were segregated (hey, how am I supposed to notice the womanlessness of pubs after spending half a year in India and the Middle East?), we were on a bus across the border to Tanzania.

The next day, standing at the Kilimanjaro park entrance with eager trepidation, Sasha and I met the rest of the group travelling with us up the mountain. This consisted of one person: Chris – a Canadian/Barbadian ex-champion sprinter, a ‘black muzungu’ in the local lingo (‘muzungu’ being the Swahili word for ‘outsider’, lobbed with varying degrees of derogatoriness). After a brief introduction, this young professor of Black Identity at a nearby university soon began extolling the virtues of stuffing a tampon up one’s nostril when suffering from the effects of a nosebleed. Up to this point Sasha and I had been worried we’d be joined by humourless midlife-crisis cases.

We were treated well on this trip. Too well. The three of us required the services of three guides and seven porters, each porting all our gear, food and tents, plus the gear, food and tents for those doing the porting. In the evenings, after a civilised four-hour slog, we had buckets of warm water brought to us, tents pre-erected upon our arrival at camp including one ‘dining tent’, and meals that got more extravagant by the course. Initially, I was a bit miffed that the national park mandates this excessive and expensive luxury for tourists, but soon I was complaining about the diminishing supply of milky hot chocolate and the failure to provide a table-cloth. A decent foot-massage would have gone down well too.

Kilimanjaro is a monstrosity of a mountain. Disfigured as it is by side eruptions in the style of a man who wakes up one day to discover he is merely a mole on another man’s face, it looms over the surrounding plain as though it were the rest of the universe. The neighbouring 4.5 kilometre elevation micro-protrusion, Mount Meru, sits beneath Big K’s bulk like a cowering little brother, and Sasha and I spent much of our second day scoffing at our good friend Steve’s later intention to ascend it.

For each day we climbed The K, the landscape, the biota, the scenery and the weather all shifted so dramatically it was hard to escape the conclusion that we were actually ascending into different continents, and, later, onto different planets. Lush, dense rainforest sporting monochrome colobus monkeys gave way to alpine grasslands replete with hardy ferns and awkward-looking penis plants. This soon evaporated into a desolate wintry boulder field punctuated by plagues of scavenging brown mice whose main amusement factor derived from their ability to transform Sasha from rugged mountain conqueror to squealing damsel in distress. Chris also kept up my morale by suffering acutely from the main side effect of the Diamox altitude sickness suppressant: frequent urination.

Each morning we awoke to clear skies, the sunrise over the cloud-tops and an ominous underview of the mass ahead. But inevitably, just after setting off, it would rain, or snow, for the rest of the day, forcing us to clamber over streams and through waterfalls as we climbed: the monsoon, right on time. Finally, we arrived at the highest camp, getting to bed early for an alpine start to the summit of... 11pm.

Arising at a time in which, if in Australia on a Saturday night, I’d be getting ready to get off my arse and go to that housewarming in the eastern suburbs, we wrapped up our bodies with every single item of clothing our packs contained, and initiated the ascent. Our spirits were lifted wildly by the sight of a massive thunderhead wafting along next to us, and as we climbed above it we witnessed one of the most spectacular storms we’d ever contemplated seeing – although we were also pretty keen to get above it so we wouldn’t get electrocuted. This keenness to ascend was exacerbated by our discovery that there were several groups ahead of us. With a single nod, Chris and I understood at a fundamental male level that we had to beat them. And to Chris and my collective amazement, Sasha was not only up for the challenge, but led the charge up the hill.

And soon we were at Stellar Point, the confluence of all six Kilimanjaro routes (we’d come up the scenic and somewhat hardcore Machame way), and, after scoring many victims of our immense speed, we were now in the lead. At this stage we’d long since lost all feeling in our fingers and we were being exhausted by the low altitude (not to mention all that climbing we were engaging in).

The final hundred metres to the summit was brain-liquefyingly difficult, clomping through snow and passing unappreciated glaciers and epic views. But at last we got to the summit sign: 5,895m, the highest elevation I’ve ever been on land (and the fastest I’ve ever travelled with respect to the Earth’s core). And we were first – Sasha in particular. Immediately upon reaching the top I keeled over in nausea, spending the next half hour waiting for the sunrise to vomit over the scenery while holding my stomach and groaning – although it wasn’t enough to stop me celebrating Port on the Hill, our highest yet.

Much to my annoyance, Sasha didn’t experience any altitude sickness at all, and thus took all the good photos of the world-burning sunrise over the ocean of cloud beneath us. As we descended in daylight we came across dozens of other walkers struggling up, some, literally being carried by their porters, sporting twisted expressions of altitudinous agony, our guide boasting ‘Kwanza!’ to his counterparts: ‘First’.

But at last we were back at camp. Of course, having got up at 11pm that ‘morning’, reached the summit at sunrise, and descended until 10am, we still had four hours of walking to do to get down to 3,000m. I can tell you I slept pretty damn well that night. Beyond that, it was only a matter of unwinding the biota levels back to rainforest, sorting out the extremely fraught and terribly awkward experience of mandatory tipping, and re-adjusting to normal oxygen levels down at Moshi.

In the following days, the two of us jumped on a bus to neighbouring Arusha where we socialised with a local friend of a friend of Sasha’s, re-acquainted ourselves with Chris for an evening and finally allowed Sasha to clean her nine pairs of underpants. But at last, after a demonic fourteen hour bus ride that disintegrated the back seats next to us, we were onto our next adventure: Lake Victoria.

Basically, the plan was to do an anti-clockwise loop around Tanzania, visiting the various lakes on the way, before meeting up with our other buddies at Dar es Salaam. From the port city of Mwanza, we took a ferry across to the island of Ukerewe after spending an hour trying to shake off a ‘helpful’ local demanding cash for his unnecessary directional assistance. Now out at ‘sea’, Lake Victoria’s lake status became irrelevant as we took in the sweet marine air. After our arrival, we spent an idyllic couple of days dining beneath a sporadically electrified thunderstorm, riding bikes from the ‘Melbourne’ to the ‘Darwin’ of the island (during which we enjoyed the incorrigible company of curious local kids) and finally rehydrating ourselves on the minutely malt-flavoured water Africans call beer in the presence of littoral ugly-stick stricken marabou stalks – I’d been abstaining from my beloved stout so my good friend Rob’s would be my first since Hong Kong.

Our next lake was that of Tanganyika, of Livingstone fame, to which we arrived after a 5am to 5pm bus ride. Here the plan was to catch a ‘water taxi’ from Kigoma to the Burundi border and come back the next day in time for the weekly train to Dar. This was a train we were destined to miss.

Boarding this water taxi – a large, open, motorised wooden boat crammed with about 100 people, much like the ones seen in Australian Liberal Party leaders’ wet dreams – we were met with a scene of beauty we hadn’t anticipated. As the afternoon waned and nightness descended, the steep jungle loomed menacingly out at us like a frozen tsunami of trees and baboons. Even more menacing, however, was the distant opposite shore of the DRC – Conrad’s Congo. You could almost hear the martial drumming.

At the end of an evening covering ourselves in tarpaulin for protection against the rain, helping to bail out the rising boat water and being the subject of our new friends’ bets over whether we’d donate to them our shoes, the sun at last set over the ominous opposite shore. The spectacular sunset and then eerie fishing lights of the lake reflecting the brilliant star field above shielded us from the realisation that we were now on a wooden boat at the Congolese border, at night and with neither accommodation nor any road access for at least fifty kilometres inland. If we’d put our minds to it we would have recognised this state of affairs as bad news.

Luckily enough, Sasha employed her French speaking skills to chum up with the local Burundians and found us a home to stay in at the tri-corner border between Tanzania, Burundi and the aquatic part of the DRC without even getting us knifed as we were led deeper into the jungle than either of us felt particularly comfortable about. In the end, though, it all worked out fine. Other than being constantly asked to fund frivolous medical expenses by our young host, Isaac, and discovering we were stranded in their border village for a day (Sundays are serious in this part of the world).

This forced stay ended up being well worth it, I must say, despite missing our train. We swam the crystalline waters of Lake Tanganyika, drank in a dank pub beneath the daily thunderstorm, attracted derision for our poor stone-skipping ability but destroyed the local team at successive games of pool. The highlight, though, was gaining permission to cross the border for a beer in Burundi where we watched colourful dancing Muslims glide past the bar on their crowded, wooden festival boats. At last, however, we bid our generous (yet rather mercurial) host goodbye – at 4am – for the water taxi back to Kigoma.

The thirty-hour bus ride from Kigoma to Dar es Salaam, my second-longest yet, was all the more interminable for its unnecessariness. It didn’t help me that my usual Celebrity Heads adversary had contracted something on the lake and was thus dead to the world for the duration. However, two days later we were safely back in a civilised-sized city and about to meet our excellent friend Pip from home. we walked excitedly into town to find a local bus or taxi to take us to the airport to greet her arrival and we were soon met by a charismatic young local who was eager to help us out. Within no time we were happily on our way, sharing a taxi with our new friend – a man calling himself William – and another hop-on squished in next to us.

And then they all turned around to face us.

Axis of Evil

Soon after I'd stepped off the ferry from the UAE and first put my foot onto Persian soil I realised how badly I'd planned this trip. Lying in my unusually expensive hotel room after an evening of testing ATMs for compatibility with my bank card I at last got to the page in Lonely Planet that told me that, owing to a recent tightening of economic sanctions against Iran, I could only use cash.

Bad news. Bad, bad news. My forehead immediately heating up from the whirring gears of comprehension, I furiously emptied out my pack onto my bed in an Easter-egg hunt for forgotten US dollars. Okay, I thought, if I can survive for the next month on a budget of seven dollars a day, I might just be able to afford a visa into the next country. What a shame that night's accommodation cost four days of my budget. Well, I'd heard that Iranians are incredibly hospitable - it was time to put that to the test.

The next morning I got a look at what I'd got myself into. I felt like I'd been transported back to the land of my childhood: the streets were quiet, people smiled a lot and most of the cars were made in the late seventies. Iran is like Cuba plus twenty years. Taking my eyes off the quaint retro-town of Bandeh-e-Lenghe I pumped up my tyres (I've had a very slow leak for the past two months) and headed away from the coast and into the desert. Soon, I was greeted by an army of giant concrete tepees receding off over the plains that I initially regarded as a potential source of cheap housing but was later disappointed to discover actually sheltered awkwardly deep wells. They seemed to be straight out of Frank Herbert's Dune series.

Towards the end of my first day's ride through the immediately arid Iranian desert I felt a low rumble like a poorly tuned truck. The previously blue skies now flickered with distant lightning over the parched landscape and I knew time was running out to seek shelter. Thankfully, while stocking up in a small desert village on a can of pineapple slices costing a third of my day's budget, a bunch of guys jumped out to invite me into their home. I made an almost audible sigh of relief that the hospitality rumours were true.

However, this was one of the most normal night's stays I experienced in Iran. Over the next month I found myself crashing in three mosques (the secret of Islam's success - fully heated mosques in winter, I nearly converted right then and there), a school, a crowded student flat and even, almost, a military base. This latter source of emergency accommodation involved ingratiating myself with the base's commander and boisterously entertaining the recruit dormitory before eventually heading to bed. Sadly, this all ended in tears when, in the middle of the night, the base got a call from high command demanding to know why they were harbouring an enemy of the Islamic Republic. They kicked me out in my pajamas. To be fair though, the military did ensure I didn't have to pay for the hotel they dumped me in - I should have thought of getting the Iranian military to pay for my holiday earlier.

Apart from all the weird places at which I stayed I was mostly invited into family homes. The patriarch of one of these took me to his weekly game of lame volleyball - a sport invented for the large number of men in the city of Lar who'd been shot in the leg by Iraqis during their war with that country. Shuffling around on the dusty indoor sports hall floor using only my hands for locomotion I impressed the town's limping veterans with my spectacular serving aim.

Annoyingly though, success was never guaranteed in finding a bed (or actually a floor - which is what everyone sleeps on in this country). On two occasions I was forced to sleep outside - once in a burnt-out housing estate out of town, kept awake by a nearby group of local bogans and, later, distant wolf cries; and on another occasion, taking the opposite extreme, on a park bench in a large town's main roundabout - enlivened by an overlooking resident coming out to give me a box of Ferrero Rochers in the middle of the night. Other than the chocolate I have rued my lack of tent and the crappiness of my US army sleeping bag (and unrolling this in mosques is always an awkward experience - it's covered in cheerful American flags).

Another awkwardness occurs when my host, an imam or revered father, inevitably asks whether I'm a Shiite Muslim or Sunni Muslim. At this point his educated and worldly son will lean in and quietly inform him that I am a Westerner and therefore a Christian.

"Actually," I helpfully clarify, "I'm an atheist. It's my opinion that the god you worship every day doesn't even exist." I'm not sure how much they appreciate this insight into my metaphysical philosophy. Thankfully my Farsi isn't quite good enough to communicate the full extent of this heresy.

The ride leading up to the fairly banal city of Shiraz (maybe its banality was related to its absence of wine) was, as always, mindblowingly spectacular. Vast flat plains punctuated by striated mountain ranges, the road zigzagging around them to avoid expensive tunneling. Some rolling green hills made me feel like I was on the Tour de France, a comparison enhanced by motorists offering me food and clothing through their windows as they passed. Of course, some people can be annoying - I do still get the sneered 'Why?' gesture. How do they expect me to answer? "Yes, cycling through Iran is all part of my evil plan to destroy the world."

It was in the learned city of Shiraz that I heard of a method of acquiring some cash - through a hotel in the desert city of Yazd, a 400 kilometre detour. On the way I checked out the ruins of Persepolis, still smarting from the ravages of Alexander the Great's drunken party and subsequent house fire (what a night that must have been!). Knowledge of that conflagration kept my spirit warm as I ascended into three kilometre elevation mountains and was instantly struck by a massive snowstorm.

If there's anyone out there who's tried to ride through a snowstorm they'll know how much worse it is than rain. Not only is visibility reduced to about the distance of your handlebars, but even squinting, your eyes sting with the impact of each snowflake. Abandoning my day's ride half-way through I was forced to return to a town I'd past about ten kilometres back, a friendly truck driver giving me a lift for the last small stretch. Annoyingly I left my helmet in the truck's cabin but I think the extreme paranoia of hitting something for the rest of my ride adequately compensated for my reduced impact safety. As an added bonus, losing the false security of my head-protection launched me into a state of hyper-reality that really enhanced my cycling experience.

I spent the next two nights stranded in the small town of Safa Shar waiting for it to stop snowing while staying at the expansive house of a Zoroastrian engraver/cargo ship captain. On the second evening the local 'sportsmen' took me 'duck hunting'. This involved driving dangerously through deep snow in a 1970s sedan for an hour, stopping frequently when bogged, quickly disembarking to confirm the dearth of ducks, then taking pot shots at stray dogs on the way home. These guys out-boganed the Omanis.

But at last, digging my bike out of the snow, I was on my way. The next three days saw me dropping off the huge snowy plateau upon which I'd been stranded, crossing the vast and genuinely empty Abarqu desert, and finally climbing over another bitterly cold mountain range to Yazd.

Yazd offered my first encounter with foreigners in Iran - the backpackers' hostel there was swarming with them. My main contact here was Jemima, a slow-traveling Sydney girl and friend of my old Uni buddy Adrian, who introduced me and a bunch of backpacking characters to various local digs, bachelor pads and even an impromptu santur concert (a traditional Persian instrument) over dinner one night. During the daylight hours we all explored the Zoroastrian sky burial sites, went on a desert village tour and clambered over the interlocking roofs of Yazd's burnt-sand coloured skyline as the sun set over the mountains.

My companions seemed to involve a fair few cycle tourists, but none riding at the time - all had left their bikes in Tehran on their way across the popular Central Asian route so they could tour the south. One of these, James, even had to resort to eating canine roadkill to survive a deserted stretch in Turkey - I was glad I'd be taking the train.

During all this I was trying to set up a bank transfer with the manager's brother-in-law in India so I could finally get some cash. Here's a tip for doing this yourself: you know the description 'to appear on your statement' your bank lets you write when setting up an online transfer? The bank reads that. Don't describe your transfer as "Iran Cash" - you get a load of anxious emails demanding you call the bank immediately to tell them why your trying to violate international sanctions against the country. After carefully explaining the situation for five days I gave up and left the city, borrowing heavily from Jemima to get me to Tehran. Having left, the bank, Westpac, later spontaneously let the money through... but it took two entire months for it to arrive in India. In the end it was returned to my account because I wasn't related to the recipient - minus two large $20 transfer fees for their trouble which they still refuse to reimburse.

The final thousand kilometres riding to Tehran went by in one long deserty blur. Here I frequently found myself clocking up 150 kilometre days, barely stopping or even changing gears. I interrupted this journey with a few days in Esfahan so I could apply for a visa extension, which I got in twenty minutes rather than purported three days probably because of how awesome the visa official thought my trip was. Esfahan also produced my ebook reader, sent to my hotel there from Mumbai after I had to leave that city too early for its reception. At last I could finally dispense with the grotesquely heavy paper version of James Joyce's Ulysses!

While in Esfahan I hostelled with a Japanese backpacker who spent three days hanging around the headquarters of the Islamic militia, the dreaded Basij, trying to get his passport and camera deconfiscated. He'd been caught taking photos of one of Esfahan's historic bridges... while a demonstration connected with the recent Arab uprisings marched over it. He eventually had them returned within hours of his departure for home.

It was with great sadness that I rode the final 500 kilometres to Tehran for the conclusion of my cycle tour, precariously navigating between the twin nasty countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. The scenery was still spectacular - brain-numbingly vast stretches of desert, isolated villages perched on hillsides, and, at one point, a view of the gibbous moon bulging out from behind a sky-piercing icy mountain elevating a good mood fueled by both endorphins and adrenaline (produced during ascents and descents respectively). This later scene was just before cycling over Iran's underground uranium enrichment plant where I was briefly stopped by the army employing their Farsical language at minimum comprehension levels. It was unfortunate that it was at this exact point that I met the only other cycling tourists in Iran (a Swiss couple) - the army forced us to go our separate ways before we'd got a proper chance to exchange touring stories.

But at last, fifteen kilometres below the massive round cycling total of 10,000, I had reached the capital, Tehran. The next day, after three hours of waiting in queues at the main post office, I'd sent my panniers back to Australia. Annoyingly, my overlong bike was to remain with me for the train ride to Istanbul.

That afternoon, my stuff strewn haphazardly throughout my windowless hotel room like the contents of an inefficient garbage compacter, I went online in the lobby to check my emails. Chatting for a few minutes with Jemima who happened also to be online, we suddenly discovered that we were both in Tehran and, in fact, only about 50 metres away from each other. This called for immediate tea-ing it up (alcohol being illegal in this country) and I jumped across the street to join her for a brew.

Night having fallen, we took the metro across town to what Jemima described as the 'best soup in Tehran'. Well, this was certainly an offer I couldn't refuse and I of course joined her metro-hopping with alacrity - a decision that was to result in one of the creepiest experiences I'd ever had. During our long and eventually soupless search for this establishment, settling instead on kebabs, Jemima told me how she'd been followed around everywhere she went by the secretive Basij, presumably due to a weird case of mistaken identity. She reckoned they thought she was some kind of foreign activist for the opposition movement (they're obsessed with that idea here). She even pointed out neatly-shaven men standing around watching us as potential militiamen. I put this down to paranoia until, just about to take the escalator back into the metro system for our return home, one of these neatly shaven men turned to us and told us to sit down.

We sit. More men emerge from the crowd to make sure we don't go anywhere. They ask for our passports (they're at our respective hotels) and cameras (I keep quiet - mine's in my pocket). After waiting a few minutes we're suddenly grabbed from the side and pushed into the open door of an already crowded car that's just pulled up on the kerb. The driver goes crazy navigating the clogged city streets of central Tehran, pulling into cordoned-off bus lanes, overtaking trucks and speeding around corners. None of the men in the car speak English so a phone is handed to Jemima through which she's asked who I am and what we're doing in the city. It worries me that our story, that we were searching for the best soup in town, seems so implausible they can't possibly believe her.

Soon we're driven into the underground car-park of a suspiciously Soviet-looking concrete building. I check the time in the car: eight thirty p.m. After about 15 minutes sitting on the back seat a group of burka-clad women grab Jemima, blindfold her and take her away. A group of men then come and blindfold me, leading me into an elevator and then the Orwellian 'Room 101' of the institution. They make me put out my hand to stabilise myself against a wall while an English-speaker interrogates me through my left ear.

Up to this point I'm mainly feeling confused and unnerved, assuming it's all just some massive error that will soon be resolved. Standing facing the wall, blindfolded and questioned, I begin to worry about how long we'll be detained and what these guys might do to us. I constantly brace myself for a blow to the head (which never comes) and assume that at any minute I'll find myself waking up in some forgotten cell block. They ask me questions the whole time - who I am, what I'm doing, who I know in Iran, what Jemima's up to. Once I've been mugshotted with my ID they then lead me to believe they're ransacking my hotel room. They seem particularly confused by my assertion that I'm in Iran to pedal my bicycle around their nice country and that I'm completely free of any secret ambitions to overthrow their unpleasant government.

At last, after what seems like many more hours than the two and a half they have me standing there, they make me sit down and hold out my hand. "This is it," I think, "This is where they break my fingers." Instead I'm handed a banana and a bottle of water. I'm led back into the elevator and then, rather than the dank holding cell I assume I've just been rationed for, out onto the street. The car pulls up again and I realise I'm being released.

"Jemima! Where's Jemima!?" I demand.

"I'm here, Felix," a voice near me explains. "I'm standing right next to you." We're both still blindfolded.

After another wild drive through the now dormant streets we're dumped from the car with our bananas and bottles of water to find our own ways home before the metro closes down. As we part I want to give Jemima a hug for support, but these things are inappropriate in this country. I get back to my hotel room towards midnight - it hadn't been ransacked by the Basij, but my pannier-less bike gear is strewn all over it so it's hard to tell.

What an ordeal! I woke up the next day and basically holed myself up in the room not daring to leave until my train for Istanbul departed that evening. Despite the friendly Iranians in my luxurious four-berth cabin I was pretty uncommunicative until I'd had my passport stamped with a Turkish visa. At that point I burst out with, "What the hell is wrong with your country!?".

The story passed up and down the train to Istanbul. Most were embarrassed about what terrible hosts their country had been to me, but many were impressed I was let out without being tortured or indefinitely imprisoned. It was with great relief that I crossed the Bosporus with my bike three days later at the conclusion of my continuous overlanding adventure - I was at last safely in Europe.

Little did I realise what else I was in for once I'd flown into the vast African continent six days later...