A cycle courier takes on the world

These are five words I hear far too rarely. But it’s not that no one ever offers to help me. Oh no. (See the rest of this blog for ample evidence to the contrary.) Rather, quite a lot of the ‘help’ I receive is actually unrequired, unrequested, and sometimes downright unwelcome.

Before you start thinking I’m an ungrateful hussy, let me issue the general disclaimer that of course, without the very welcome assistance of hundreds of friends and strangers, this project would never have got off the ground, and I’d never have made it as far as Lahore.

But not all help is helpful. Back when I was fixing punctures by the side of the road in London, by far the most difficult part of the operation would be fending off the swarms of men who’d descend like mosquitoes in the hope of rescuing a damsel in distress. Some of them would even ignore me when I said ‘thanks, but I know what I’m doing’, and stand around offering encouragement and unnecessary advice (‘That’s it… Now make sure it’s nice and tight… Good. Now pump it up…’), while I ignored them back and got on with it.

And it’s been similar since I’ve been touring. Of course, it may not be because I’m a woman. Maybe I just have a stupid face, or exude an air of incompetence. But given then gender profile of my would-be rescuers, I cannot help but conclude that it has something to do with my ovaries.

After all, apart from the whole being-a-girl thing, I think I come across as being pretty capable. I ride a heavily laden bike, on my own, through the Turkish winter and the Iranian mountains. When I repair it, I open a bag full of impressive-looking tools and gadgets. I appear to know how to use them. I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.

Yet as soon as I climb off the bike, someone appears and tries to take it from me, as if a delicate flower like me couldn’t possibly wheel it round the corner on her own, even if she has ridden it all the way from Wales. When Ben and Johannes and I were following our host’s car through the streets of Zanjan, all of us equally exhausted after a long day in the saddle, I was the only one who was offered a lift. When I take the bike apart to clean or fix it, any man in the vicinity will instantly be drawn to help, even if he doesn’t know the first thing about bikes, meaning that, in addition to the task at hand, I have to supervise him, answer his questions, fend off his erroneous advice, work around him, and constantly try to stop him from messing things up even more. In most cases these men seem comically unable to comprehend that I actually know what I’m doing – let alone that I know more than they do.

And if the man in question DOES know something about bikes, it gets even worse. It’s customary that when two cyclists meet for the first time they will minutely inspect each other’s bikes, almost before they exchange names. Tom Kevill Davies hilariously and aptly compares this to dogs sniffing each other’s bottoms. The ensuing conversation (‘so you went for XTR rather than XT – interesting choice’; ‘aren’t you worried that you won’t be able to get spare chains for a nine-speed cassette?’; ‘ah yes, you can’t go wrong with a Chris King headset – unless you went for the pre-2011 model of course’) can go on for hours (sometimes even days, if you end up riding together), and is frequently tinged with competition and oneupmanship. If you’re a girl, it will be assumed that you don’t know the first thing about any of it, even if you explain that you designed and built the bike yourself.

One riding companion gave me a running tutorial as he fixed a puncture, as if I had never seen such a thing done before. Another volunteered to help me adjust my v-brakes, and then turned out to know even less about them than I did. And male cyclists the world over have, without being asked, given me advice on things I already know, repeatedly questioned my knowledge and decisions, and sometimes even taken matters into their own hands and made adjustments to my bike without asking me first.

On occasion, people trying to help me will actually make matters worse – like the man who came up behind me in an Iranian petrol station, when I was lifting a heavy canister of water to refill my bottles, grabbed the canister from me without any warning, and only succeeded in spilling water all over my gloves. (Try riding at sub-zero temperatures with soaking wet gloves. It ain’t fun.) Or the man who broke one of my panniers as he ‘helped’ me to lift my bike over a kerb. (Thanks mate. Now I have to spend time and money sourcing a new anchor hook.)

‘Chivalry is dead – women killed it!’ responded a fellow traveller in Yazd, after listening to me rant about this for a few minutes. And I do sometimes feel a little guilty for complaining, when these men are just trying to help, and clearly have their hearts in the right place. So I’m always polite, and thank them, and try not to show them how irritated I sometimes am.

But then again… I find a lot of this unsolicited help annoying, insulting, patronizing, and downright UNhelpful. And by constantly suppressing my annoyance, in order to avoid upsetting people, I’m not only perpetuating the status quo, and letting them think it’s OK, but also prioritising their feelings over my own. (After all, why shouldn’t I, since I’m only a woman, put up with all this inconvenience, swallow the insults, and quietly put right the damage they’ve done to my bike and mood once their backs are turned, because after all, they meant well, and it wouldn’t do to hurt their feelings?)

Maybe, if chivalry is this annoying, it should be allowed to die off.

Or maybe chivalry is actually something quite different. After all I’ve been extremely grateful for some of the help I’ve received over the last few months, from people like Raphael, who taught me how to dismantle and regrease my hubs in Goreme last December, and the woman who devoted several days of her life to instructing me in the art of wheelbuilding last summer. It’s wonderful to be offered help when you actually need it.

According to Sir Sidney Waterloo,

The gentleman is he who feels himself at ease in the presence of everyone and everything, and who makes everyone and everything feel at ease in his presence.

And might I suggest, oh aspiring gentlemen, that to put people at their ease, you need to anticipate their needs and preferences. Not everyone’s will be the same. Indeed there are some women who set out to cycle round the world without knowing how to fix a puncture. (I cite the late great Anne Mustoe, and Astrid Domingo Molyneux, who, when I met her at Explore in 2010, told me about getting her first puncture in Turkey – and having to sit down in a bus shelter and get the manual out.) I’m sure they’d be extremely grateful if you swooped down in your shining armour. But don’t assume that someone knows less than you about bikes, just because she’s a woman.

I have been guilty of gender-based assumptions myself. One morning in London, I noticed a man in the corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, wearing a fluorescent yellow jacket and standing next to an upturned bicycle. I didn’t have any packages in my bag at the time, so could have offered to help, but he looked like the kind of person who knew what he was doing, so I carried on towards the coffee shop. Ten minutes later I walked past again, and he was still there.

“Do you need any help?” I asked.

His face dissolved into relief.

“Oh yes please!” he said. “I am totally blagging it.”

I looked more closely. He had a puncture and, having somehow managed to get his front wheel off, was attempting to wrest the tyre from the rim using a penknife. On the ground beside the bike was a brand new puncture repair kit, which I correctly guessed he’d just bought from the CycleSurgery on Procter Street.

I didn’t know all that much about bike mechanics at the time, but I knew how to fix a puncture, and he was pathetically grateful to me for teaching him. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d have come to his assistance more swiftly if he were female, and realise that assuming a man knows everything about bikes is just as bad as assuming a woman knows nothing.

Of course, some women, just as some men, will be all too grateful for your help. But how is one to tell the difference between an Anne Mustoe, who wants you to fix her puncture, and an Emily Chappell, who would really rather you left her alone? It’s very easy. You ask her.

Do you need any help?

If she does, then well done you, you’re her new hero. If she doesn’t, then you’re probably just a nuisance.

The day before I was due to ride into Balochistan, I woke up to the devastating news that a London cycle courier had been killed by a bus on Bishopsgate.

I didn’t know Henry that well – we’d nod in passing, and had had one or two brief conversations when our paths crossed in loading bays – so the grief I felt wasn’t as immediate or particular as it would have been for one of my close friends. Instead it felt nebulous and all-encompassing, trickling through my mind like a grey mist, and settling like a miasma over my morning. My brain wearily sifted through the anger I always feel when something like this happens – the outrage that cyclists are still dying on the roads in one of the world’s most developed cities; the fury that no one seems to be doing enough to stop it; the horror that somebody’s life should end so sharply and so brutally. But there was a new piquancy to these well-trodden emotions – every time a cyclist is killed in London (and this is a distressingly regular occurrence) I point out that next time it might well be someone I know. This time it was.

An unsettling layer of irony is added to Henry’s death by the fact that last year he appeared in Ed’s Up, a TV show in which Ed Robertson (from the band Barenaked Ladies) flies around the world “trying some of the toughest jobs out there – in some of the toughest places”. Robertson spent two days working as a London cycle courier, under Henry’s patient tutelage, and the episode was heavily derided by the courier community, for the fact that the job doesn’t come across as being tough at all (the footage consisting mostly of Robertson screaming “woooooaaaaaargh!” as he wobbles at low speed through near-stationary traffic), despite the producers’ best efforts to emphasize how deadly it is. “You would be talking in the region of three to four hundred a year” replies John Lambert, of Rico Logistics, when asked about the death rate among London cycle couriers, shortly before Henry appears to put Robertson through his paces. As people were quick to point out on the Moving Target forum, at that rate, the entire work force would be wiped out within a couple of years. (In actual fact, the most recent death until now was Seb Lukomski’s, in 2004. There are several couriers still on the road today who remember him as a close friend.)

But now Henry is dead, and Lambert and Robertson’s banter about the dangers of the job (“where will I die, exactly?”, asks Robertson, poring over the map) comes across as horribly cavalier and uncomfortably prescient – as does the post I wrote a couple of months ago, about the perceived dangers of solo cycle touring in comparison to couriering. I announced that I had decided to ride through Balochistan after all, since several close encounters with lorries on my way into Istanbul had reminded me that I am far more at risk of being killed by traffic than I am by Taliban, and that I was even more at risk during the three years I worked as a courier.

And now here I was, sitting in the courtyard of a comfortable and nearly deserted guesthouse in the city of Bam, on the eve of the most nervously anticipated leg of my journey, mourning someone who hadn’t even had to leave London to meet his end, and thinking anxiously about all the people I know and love who are still riding around the city day in day out. Perhaps I was mourning all of them, knowing that there is every likelihood that someone else will be killed someday, that it may well be someone I’m close to, and that there is nothing I or they can do to prevent it. It’s a brutal job, and also a brutal world.

Bam was an appropriate place for this sort of grief. In 2003 Bam was flattened by a major earthquake, which destroyed the city’s 2,000-year-old citadel, flattened 85-90% of its buildings and killed over 26,000 people. Nine years later, the disaster is still uppermost in people’s minds, and comes up in almost every conversation. Everyone in Bam lost friends, family, property, possessions and livelihoods, if they were lucky enough not to lose their lives. Akbar’s Guesthouse, a long-established landmark on the overland route between Europe and South Asia, was reduced to rubble, and re-established in a series of tents, before shifting to the newly built concrete compound where I now sat, enjoying the sight of the date palms against the bright blue sky, sipping cups of tea, and recovering from the 200km I’d ridden in one day to get there from Kerman, so as to buy myself the rest day I so desperately needed. Bam doesn’t feel like a disaster zone, even though there are still far more buildings in various states of construction and demolition than you’ll see in most other cities. Unlike the desert I’d ridden through to get there, the town is full of trees, and the streets are quiet and sunny.

A couple of hours into the morning, a smart-looking man in a down jacket and aviator shades strolled into the compound and joined me at my table. He introduced himself as Reza, and explained that he was a local engineer and tour guide, who dropped into Akbar’s from time to time, simply to meet people from the outside world. As it happens he – and everyone else here – had heard on the grapevine that a solo female cyclist was on her way east, and had been looking forward to meeting me.

Since about the middle of Iran, I’d been back on the main overland artery to India, following in the footsteps of generations of cyclists, motorbikers, hitch-hikers and drivers, from Tim Slessor to Moin Khan. In some ways this gave me the gratifying sense of being part of a Great Tradition. But at times I felt distinctly unadventurous and unoriginal, plodding along this very well beaten track. If you ever have the opportunity to stay at Akbar’s, you’ll be regaled with stories of all the many travellers who’ve drunk tea in his courtyard over the years, and shown the stack of notebooks (retrieved from under the rubble in 2003) in which they recorded their anecdotes and advice, before the days of the Lonely Planet forums. (I was particularly alarmed by an entry from some Dutch cyclists, whose bikes and tents ended up riddled with bullet holes after they camped in the desert between Bam and Zahedan. Thankfully this was more than ten years ago.)

But these days the torrent of overlanders has dried to a trickle. Back in the day there would often be as many as ten cyclists staying at Akbar’s at any one time. But now weeks can go by without anyone passing through, and I had the whole place to myself, having just missed a British motorcyclist called Matt, who left for the border the day before I arrived. Reza and I speculated on the reasons for this. The main one, he reckoned was the earthquake, which destroyed Bam’s main tourist attraction (the Arg-e-Bam) and made it famous for all the wrong reasons (I remember seeing the carnage on the news in 2003 – Bam certainly didn’t strike me as somewhere I’d like to spend my holidays). I told him that Balochistan’s reputation for lawlessness and kidnappings was probably also to blame (several overlanders I know have changed their routes, and are now going north of Afghanistan, through Central Asia, or catching a boat to Dubai and then flying to India), along with Pakistan’s insistence that travellers now apply for visas from their home countries – many people don’t realize this until they get to Iran, and are faced with the option of flying home to submit their application, or changing their route.

We talked about how things must have changed over the years, and I told him about the trends and contrasts I’ve observed in the recent history of overland travel. In 1963, Dervla Murphy cycled through Iran and Afghanistan on her way to India. Her journey wasn’t without its scaremongers (she had to fight tooth and nail in Tehran to acquire her Afghan visa, and was warned that an American woman (?) had been abducted and murdered there just a few weeks previously), but she fell head over heels in love with Afghanistan, and describes it as a paradise of mountains and meadows and orchards, and its people as the most beautiful she’d ever seen. Thirty-nine years later, Rory Stewart passed the same way on foot, tracing the footsteps of the Mughal emperor Babur. His book (The Places In Between) depicts Afghanistan as a hostile, nightmarish country, where Stewart, despite his Pathan appearance and fluent Dari, is frequently threatened and intimidated by the people he meets and stays with, and, by his own admission, doesn’t expect to make it out alive. The contrast with Murphy’s account is appalling.

Bam hides a similar contrast, under its placid, sleepy, sunny exterior. Although the place feels unusually peaceful, there are constant reminders that, less than a decade ago, half the population was killed in the space of a few minutes. Reza told me how he’d been summoned back from Esfahan to help coordinate the rescue efforts, and I tried in vain to find some common ground with people who had experienced such horrors – to imagine what it would be like to see my home and all its surroundings reduced to a pile of rubble. Everywhere I’ve lived – London, Cambridge, my parents’ house in Wales – has been standing for hundreds of years, and it had never seriously occurred to me that it might not always be there, and could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes. Admitting that it couldn’t possibly compare to what happened in Bam, I told Reza about riding into work past Brixton’s burnt-out shops, during last summer’s riots, and the shock of seeing a blackened cavern where the shopfront of Footlocker had always been. The difference, Reza was quick to point out, was that in London I hadn’t seen bodies lying in the street – quite possibly the bodies of people I had known and loved. The thin grey cloud of grief that had been hovering over my head all morning sank down into me once again, and I felt the sadness filtering into every corner of my mind, and tears rising in my chest, although, as I told myself, this was pointless. There was nothing I could do to understand; nor was there anything I could do to alleviate or prevent the senseless cruelty of it all.

Reza works as a civil engineer and sometimes as a tour guide, although of course, the latter career has stalled somewhat over the past few years. He offered me a free tour of the Arg-e-Bam and the old city that afternoon and, after securing his assurance that very little exertion would be required on my part (this was, after all, supposed to be a rest day), I gladly accepted and we climbed into his 4×4 and set off through the sleepy lunchtime streets, under the dappled shade of the eucalyptus trees.

We pulled up at the citadel a few minutes later and I prepared myself for the worst. Until 2003, this was one of the most impressive structures in the world – and one of the oldest. Constructed around 2,500 years ago, it predated both Christianity and Islam. It was older than the English language. It was standing solidly there in the desert when Shakespeare was writing King Lear, and when Da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa, and when the London I know and love was just a scattered collection of muddy villages beside the river. It survived wars and invasions, and outlived empires. But when the earthquake hit, early one morning, it crumbled into dust.

The sun was so bright as I stepped out of the car that the massive golden ramparts in front of me stung my eyes and I blinked and sneezed uncontrollably. It was easy to see where parts of the building had been reconstructed – their sheer, well-finished walls contrasted uncomfortably with the grey rubble that surrounded them. Reza led me into the building site, explaining that, although efforts are being made to reconstruct the citadel, with financial and technical support from countries all over the world, a lot of it will be left just as it is, to remind people that what happened in 2003 is now part of the building’s history.

Even in its ruined state, the scale of the citadel is extraordinary. Usually, when I visit an ancient building, I imagine how it would have looked centuries ago, when people were still living and working there. In this case I was also trying to picture how it would have looked a mere decade ago, with its walls still proud and immaculate. Reza tried to explain what had changed, both since the earthquake knocked the citadel down, and since the reconstruction team began to put it back together (providentially, Bam was listed by UNESCO just a year before the disaster, and as a result there has been a lot more assistance than might otherwise have been forthcoming) and I told him how heartily I wished I had passed through ten years before, and seen it in all its glory. Unsettlingly, I realised that some of the buildings I’ve seen and admired on my way through Europe and the Middle East might no longer be there next time I pass through. Which ones?, I wondered. The cathedral at Koln? The Blue Mosque in Istanbul? The mausoleum at Soltaniye? Nothing is permanent.

I was reminded of the low-key envy I feel for Dervla Murphy, that she got to see the great Buddhas at Bamiyan, before they were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001. Rory Stewart passed through soon afterwards, and describes the enormous empty niches, with many of the monks’ caves still intact behind them. Reza shared my outrage. With so much pain and destruction already existing in the world, he asked, gesturing back towards the city of Bam, why did human beings feel the need to create any more?

I got back into the car, feeling close to tears, thinking about the book I was reading, about the undeserved death of a single American soldier in Afghanistan, thinking about Bam, thinking about London, thinking about Henry. The sky was still blue, the remaining walls of the citadel still shone golden in the sun, and the road was lined with date palms as we drove north out of the city, towards the desert. There was no point in crying. None of this sadness touched my life directly, and there was nothing I could do to resolve it. Crying would have been an indulgence. But I still sat there quietly next to Reza, feeling the strong liquid sadness surging up in my chest and settling just behind my eyes.

He turned on the stereo, remarking that he had built up quite an impressive music collection, simply by copying files from Akbar’s guests over the years, and skipped through tracks until we were listening to Paul Simon. It was a familiar song, unconsciously buried in my memory from long family car journeys of years long past. I had never really listened to the lyrics before.

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

There is no answer, of course, and I have have no conclusion. But perhaps this was the best that I could offer – that life’s miracles and wonders are inextricably woven into its horrors and cruelties. That I am here, though many people are not. That for me, at least on the surface, Bam was a place of peace and friendship and palm trees.

We took a long straight road out of town, and within minutes were in the desert, and I was shrieking with fear and delight as Reza put his foot on the gas and roared up near-vertical outcrops at breakneck speed, rattling over the loose stones and somehow managing to stay upright, even when the vehicle was tilted so far over that I was almost sitting in his lap. When we paused at the top of one of the hills, the air was completely still, and the palm groves of Bam spread out silently beneath us.

When we pulled up at the guesthouse a couple of hours later, my mood had lifted, and there was a bring red Landcruiser parked outside, with an ‘Austria’ sticker on the side. We had company.

When I was planning this trip, I  found myself consciously resisting giving it any sort of name, brand image or overriding theme. Occasionally I thought I really ought to have some kind of running project to follow as I went along, but I felt much more keenly that deciding the nature of my journey in advance would end up limiting what it might become. I wanted to keep my expectations to a minimum. I even told myself that ‘cycling round the world’ was an idea I should be prepared to abandon, if something came up that made more sense.

I think I was right to do so – because many of the assumptions I did make about this journey have turned out to be completely incorrect. For example, I always thought that when I left London I would leave behind my bubbly social butterfly self, and become a lean, gruff, haggard, lonesome warrior, finding my own way through the world, going for days at a time without human contact or company, and becoming completely self-sufficient, both physically and psychologically. But, as it turns out, I have become more connected to the world than ever before. I imagined the trip as a long solitary meditation, as I crawled along between the road and the sky, not a soul for miles around. And there  have been a few days like that. But what sticks in my mind far more is the friendliness and hospitality of all the many many people I’ve met along the way. I didn’t expect this at all. I had no idea the world would be such a welcoming place.

I’ve tried to show this in my records of the journey, even though I sometimes worry that these endless heartwarming tales of hospitality might get a bit repetitive. Even after six months, I’m still amazed by the constant generosity I’ve encountered, and keep thinking to myself “oh dear, this would never happen in the UK … and I must do something about that”. It occurred to that the concerns of my friends and family before I left – that I’d be attacked, that I wouldn’t be made welcome, that I’d be lonely – might reflect the way we in the UK treat strangers: with fear and suspicion, or simply with apathy and unfriendliness.

Less than two months before I was due to cross into Iran, the British Embassy in Tehran was stormed by a mob, and closed shortly afterwards. I received a few alarmed emails from friends and relatives, assuming that it was now far too dangerous for me to travel in Iran, and begging me to reconsider my route. But a couple of Belgian backpackers I met assured me that it would all be fine, and I should carry on regardless. Iranians are some of the friendliest people on earth, they insisted, and nothing like how they’re portrayed in the Western media.

And of course they were right. The contrast with the baying mobs you see on the news is positively absurd. Many of the Iranians I met are well aware of how they’re portrayed in the media, and asked me to tell people back in the UK that governments and people are two very different things. So the rest of this post will be an overt attempt to redress the balance a bit – to introduce you to some of the lovely Iranians who befriended and hosted and looked after me while I was in their country. And there were many more than I’m able to include here. I’ve selected the few of whom I have good photographs, or particularly entertaining stories, but bear in mind that there were dozens and dozens more, from the kind gentleman who hosted three hungry cyclists at a moment’s notice in Soltaniye, to the many people who handed me cakes and sweets and drinks and fruit from their car windows as I rode along. (Would this happen in your country? Why not?)

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These are the first people I met in Iran, an hour or so after crossing the border, when I was still nervous and bewildered, as I always am when dealing with the unfamiliarity of a new country after leaving one I’ve come to know and love (and leaving Turkey was quite a wrench), and also slightly scared that Iran would turn out to be hostile and anti-British after all.

But then a white car drove past me, braked and u-turned abruptly a few yards up the road, and pulled up alongside me in the layby where I was eating my lunch. A family of grinning Iranians got out, brandishing a video camera and all of their phones, and spent about ten minutes photographing me and my bike and each other, before getting back in the car and driving off, all of them waving. They spoke no English, but seemed delighted to see me, and I had no idea why this might be.

In the small town of Shirin Su, where I landed after one of my hardest, coldest days on the road, I was deposited in Zehra and Maryam’s house by a gentleman who was either their landlord or a male relative – I never worked out which, and don’t even know if they had any say in whether they’d be hosting me. But they treated me as though they’d been looking forward to my arrival for weeks. Maryam settled me down right next to the stove, fetched a blanket from the other room, just in case I still somehow managed to be cold, and spent the rest of the evening mothering me. Zehra brought out dinner, and then sweets, and then a tray full of fruit and bowls of sunflower seeds. And a steady stream of friends and neighbours arrived to inspect me, practice their scant English on me, inspect my family photos, and attempt to teach me Farsi. It was a lovely evening.

On my way to Esfahan, about 100km into the ride, with 100km to go, I stopped at a service station to go to the loo, fill my bottles, and top up on biscuits. It was about midday, and I still hadn’t decided whether I was capable of making it to Esfahan that evening. I had camped more than a day’s ride from the city, but less than two days’ ride, meaning that I could either push myself through a 200km+ day (with several days of mountains already in my legs), or I could split the distance (e.g. 130km/70km) and arrive in Esfahan halfway through the next day, meaning that I couldn’t really justify taking the following day as a (much needed) rest day, since I had to keep my daily average up if I was going to make it to Pakistan before my visa expired.

The service station (one of the first I’d come across in Iran) was run by an extended family, and presided over by an effervescent grandmother, who came and sat at my table with me, instructed one of the boys to bring me a cup of tea, and starting chattering to me in a mixture of Farsi, broken English and extravagant sign language. She had a whispery, papery voice, and every now and then would make some sort of lewd joke, and break out into gales of laughter. She suggested I stay and marry one of her grandsons (who looked like he was about seven), informing me with a lot of winking and smirking that he was a fine virile young man, and would get me pregnant within minutes. She asked to see a photo of my mother, picked it up, and gave it a flamboyant kiss. She spotted my cycle helmet, investigated it from all angles, then put it on right over her headscarf and started dancing around in delight. The rest of the family looked on and laughed. I was persuaded to have another cup of tea, and then some more biscuits. We all posed for photographs, and I wondered if I could convince them to let me camp at the service station. It was only halfway through the day, but the mountains had left me tired and grumpy, and I was beginning to be irritated by the legions of curious men who would slow their cars down to gape at me as they crawled past – then stop in the next layby, wait for me to overtake them, and repeat the whole performance.

But after two more cups of tea and a lot more chatter, I was ready to go again. The grandmother gave me a big hug before I got back on my bike. The whole family waved me off, and even though I was now riding into one of Iran’s monstrous headwinds, I started to pick up speed. Fortified by their company and friendliness, I somehow managed to push my way all the way to Esfahan, earning the rest day I was so desperately in need of.

I never found out these women’s names. I met them in a small village in the centre of Iran one afternoon, and they reminded me of other grandmothers I’ve met the world over.

And this is Mohammed – meeting him was one of the highlights of my journey. He lives with his family in Toudeshk, between Esfahan and Yazd and, when he was only a young boy, became fascinated by the foreigners on heavily loaded bicycles who would pass through the village on the main road leading east. He began studying English so that he could talk to them, and eventually one day a German man turned up who desperately needed somewhere to sleep. So Mohammed took him home, and from that day forth he began hosting as many cyclists as he could. He and his brother’s family now run a homestay (which they are in the process of upgrading to a proper guesthouse), and have begun welcoming other travellers as well as cyclists.

There’s a surprising amount to do in and around the village (you can go for treks in the desert, climb sand dunes and visit wetlands), but for me the main attraction was the opportunity to sit around and do nothing. I usually take my rest days in cities, so that I can squeeze in a little tourism between all the long days in the saddle, but this means I spend the whole day walking around looking at buildings, and end up just as tired as I was when I arrived. In Toudeshk I spent hours sitting on the living room floor in the sun, while little baby Nasta played around me, and her mother Fatima pottered around in the kitchen. I washed my clothes, and spent a couple of hours scrubbing the grime of the Iranian winter off my bike. That was it. It was just what I needed.

I spent a night sleeping in a mosque on the long, dusty road between Yazd and Kerman. I set up camp in the corner of a large, warm, carpetted room, and as the evening wore on, quite a few families came to join me, staking out their own corners with blankets and pillows, pouring endless cups of tea, and frequently coming over to offer me food. And just as I was thinking of going to sleep, a couple of my own age came up to me and introduced themselves with great excitement.

Their names were Omid and Fatima, and they had returned from their own cycle adventure less than two weeks previously – a six-month tour of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and South East Asia. They unfurled a large banner emblazoned with all the flags of the countries they had visited and the words “Islamic awakening and celebration of cycling with the slogan of the Prophet and respect for religious books”, and scattered with the signatures of people they’d met along the way. Fatima, with great pride, showed the the autograph of one of Khomeini’s descendants, but I was more interested in a message from none other than Johannes, whom they’d run into earlier that day (so he and I must very nearly have crossed paths again).

I wrote my own message next to his, and we spent the next couple of hours looking through all the different visas in each other’s passports, and admiring each other’s photos.

Theirs were pretty impressive.

And you can see their website here. It’s all in Farsi, but there are lots of pictures.

A few days later I met Behnam. I had stopped a couple of hours into the day to buy bread in a grocery shop beside the road, and he invited me up into the cab of his lorry, for a breakfast of eggs, fresh bread, oranges and tea. His English was surprisingly good, and I discovered that he had completed a degree in translation studies in Esfahan, before becoming a lorry driver. (It reminded me of my own unorthodox career progression, from literature student to cycle courier.) Unlike some of the male drivers I’d encountered over the past few weeks, he and his two colleagues were unfailingly polite and friendly, and before they set off (they were heading for Tehran, with a load of cucumbers) I was presented with a large bag of oranges and some chewing gum, along with Behnam’s email address and an exhortation to keep in touch. As ever, I can’t imagine this kind of thing ever happening in the UK.

And, last but not least, here’s Akbar. If you travel through Iran to Pakistan you’re bound to meet him, because there’s only one road through the desert, and when you get to Bam there’s only one place worth staying – Akbar’s Guesthouse, beloved of generations of travellers. The charming Akbar has been hosting overlanders for decades (I was reading a Jon Krakauer book – “ah yes, he stayed here once”, remarked Akbar), and knows all there is to know about the local attractions (now substantially diminished since the 2003 earthquake) and the road ahead. I was looking forward to meeting him, but didn’t know if we’d necessarily get on – many men in his position, well aware that they have become legends in their own lifetime, will insist on holding forth self-importantly, bending your ear for hours on end with all their well-worn stories, knowing that they command too much respect for anyone to consider interrupting or disagreeing with them, asking you questions about yourself and then talking over your response, handing out unsolicited and often unwelcome advice and sometimes even commandeering your entire itinerary. (A gentleman of this ilk in Kerman, ignoring my protests, virtually insisted that I take the train to Bam, since it was far too distant and dangerous for me to cycle. If my CouchSurfing host hadn’t turned up to rescue me, I think he’d probably have driven me to the station personally and stood over me while I bought my ticket. Needless to say, I covered the distance comfortably and safely in a single day.)

Akbar is nothing like this. In fact, his company is extraordinarily restful. He’s a mine of fascinating stories, but he’s not going to drag them out in the same old droning performance for every single traveller who passes through. You get the impression that some of the tales he recounts haven’t crossed his mind for years. And although he’s probably heard every possible overland experience a thousand times over, he seemed as fascinated by my paltry anecdotes as he must have been by the very first cyclist he met. But he was also very happy just to sit companionably in the courtyard, drinking tea and eating oranges. He won’t be asking you all the same questions you’re so bored with by now (where are you from? where are you going? how do you like Iran? are you married?). He’s heard it all before – he doesn’t need to prove anything, and neither do you.

Bam was my launchpad for Balochistan, the lawless region that straddles the Iran/Pakistan border, which people have been warning me about ever since I decided to cycle that way. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on whether I should risk cycling that way, what safety precautions I should take, and how likely I was to be abducted or murdered. I planned to ask the advice of everyone I met in Bam, since they seemed more likely to give me accurate, up-to-date information than whatever hearsay and the internet had yielded up to now, but I still ended up being told something slightly different by everyone I spoke to. Akbar, who has seen thousands of people pass through Balochistan safe and sound, refused to be drawn into any of the scaremongering or speculation.

“Ah, you’ll be fine,” he assured me, and that was that. And of course, he was right.