Jamie Maslin - Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn

We drove late into the night before pulling up next to a deserted gas station in the Turkish town of Erzurum. Ilhan took the bed at the back of the cab, whilst I tried to nestle down in front. This was none too easy since there was a huge gap between the seats with the gear stick protruding in the middle. To make matters worse, as soon as Ilhan’s head hit the pillow, he began to snore. Not your normal snoring, mind you, but strong enough to give the local seismologists a scare.

My industrial-strength wax earplugs wouldn’t touch it, and being a very light sleeper, I knew I was in for a ghastly tormented night. I rolled about uncomfortably trying to sleep, but it was no good, and I decided to cut my losses and head outside with my sleeping bag. Even with the doors shut and several feet away from the truck, the snores resonated at a ridiculous level.

Outside was a complete mess, strewn with piles of broken glass and trash, and illuminated by a big red light near the deserted garage, and a bright white light out on the road. Next to the garage was a small slope leading down to a patch of waste ground, which backed onto several houses. From these the vicious barking of dogs emanated.

Looking down the slope, I surveyed the waste ground, which appeared slightly flatter and less carpeted with glass than the area immediately outside the truck. I decided it was home. Lying on my side to minimize the effect of the streetlight, I got as good a rest as could be expected under the circumstances—bugger all. After a while, though, I went into that state where you’re neither fully awake nor fully asleep, although you are getting some limited benefit. This semi-peaceful state shattered like a falling mirror in an instant. I awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly and opened my eyes to a waking nightmare. To my horror, I saw through sleep-blurred eyes four bloodthirsty-looking dogs running out of the darkness at me, less than forty feet away. In a nanosecond, my adrenaline hit fever pitch and I scrambled madly to my feet, only to fall straight back down again since my legs were still in my sleeping bag. The dogs closed the gap, their barking now chillingly close.

I got up again and ripped off the sleeping bag in a panicked flurry, throwing it behind me as I ran like a man possessed toward the slope and the safety of the truck. I powered up the hill, stumbling on the rocky surface and smashing my shin against a boulder in the process. Finally, I reached the top. I spun around, panting like my pursuers, and looked down at them whilst my heart thundered away in my chest. They were going crazy at the bottom of the slope, growling and barking away, but although they could have scaled it, they seemed to have reached an invisible boundary that they wouldn’t venture past. The waste ground was clearly their domain and not to be invaded. I backed off farther, not wanting to test this theory out, and not long afterward they did the same, disappearing into the darkness from which they had come.

My sleeping bag was still down there, but the thought of going to retrieve it didn’t exactly appeal right now. It took a while before I plucked up the courage, and when I did so, I was on hyper alert and at running speed in and out. The prospect of the truck’s cab and Ilhan’s snoring seemed strangely appealing now. I climbed back inside the warmth of the cab and resigned myself to a disrupted night. The snoring was still deafening but it was far preferable to a mad dog attack. It was one of the worst night’s “sleep” I’ve ever had.

In the morning, Ilhan arose with a contented smile looking well-rested and ready to face the day ahead. We arrived at Horasan, which was a small rural place, by midmorning and bade each other farewell, since Ilhan was heading north. I stood out like a sore thumb here and received many strange looks from the locals who clearly weren’t used to seeing European hitchhikers this far east. Some young lads, one of whom spoke a few words of English, came over to where I was standing and tried to persuade me to catch a bus to Iran instead. I hadn’t hitched this far through mad dog and psychopath attack to cheat on the last section and pay for a ride, so I shook my head with a smile.

Opposite where I waited was a load of livestock being transferred from one truck to another. It wasn’t a nice sight: in the process one poor cow stumbled and fell to the ground, where it was beaten repeatedly with a stick. It just made it harder for the animal to get back up again and was sickening to watch; the blows came in thick and fast, and echoed off its body.

Half an hour later, I got a lift in a very modern and fast truck. It drove along at speeds Ilhan’s poor vehicle could only have dreamt about, which felt worrying given the huge size of the truck and the small width of the roads. The driver spoke no English, but instead of silence I was treated to some religious chanting coming from the stereo. At one point, the driver put his hand on his heart and mumbled some chanted words reverently to himself. He looked across at me to make sure I was taking it all very seriously. I tried my best to look pensive but was more concerned with his one-handed high-speed prayer driving.

We parted company in a small rural Turkish village, the name of which I never learnt, next to a bridge over a river that was blocked by several goats and cows ambling along to get to the embankment nearby. They took a good while to clear, and on seeing me and my backpack, their young herder shouted a warm English “hello.” He looked rather pleased with himself when I responded with the same.

A few minutes later, another modern truck responded to my request for a lift and pulled up some distance from where I stood, creating a huge cloud of dust. I ran over, opened the door, climbed the steps leading up to the cab, and was just about to haul myself inside when the driver stopped me by indicating that I should take off my shoes first. He pointed to his immaculate carpet, then to his feet, and shook his head with a smile. I climbed down the steps again, pulled my shoes off, and got in.

This proved to be my final lift all the way to Iran and the end of my hitchhiking proper for this trip. I was extremely pleased. It turned out to be a conversation-free ride since the driver spoke as much English as I did Turkish or Farsi, the Iranian language, but we managed to establish early on what each other’s names were. His was Kerim, and he was driving all the way to Tehran, the capital of Iran.

The landscape we drove through was beautiful, but the music he played at a deafening volume was anything but, with eighties Irish crooner Chris de Burgh blaring from the stereo. This was my first encounter with the peculiar popularity of de Burgh all over Iran, and although not my first choice of auditory stimulation, it did, at the time, make a welcome change from the likes of repetitive religious chanting.

The last settlement before the Iranian border is the small Turkish town of Dogubayazit, known affectionately to travelers as “doggie biscuit.” Just twenty-two miles from Iran and at an elevation of some 6,000 feet, Dogubayazit commands spectacular views of Turkey’s highest peak, Mount Ararat, which rises majestically from a plain to reach nearly 17,000 feet.

At one time, Dogubayazit had been a significant trading town thanks to its location near an ancient trading route that ran from northwestern Iran to the shores of the Black Sea. But when the trading route’s importance declined, so did that of the town, and today this predominantly Kurdish settlement provides services for people stopping off between Turkey and Iran, and for those visiting Mount Ararat.

The snow-capped Mount Ararat dominates the town’s surrounding landscape. It is considered a holy site by the Armenians and is, according to some, the resting place of Noah’s ark. Genesis 8:4 states that the ark came to rest on the “mountains of Ararat.” The counterargument to this handy pinpointing of the ark’s location is that Ararat was the Assyrian way of saying “the empire of Urartu,” which was a whole geographical region, not simply a mountain. Still, many people are adamant that it’s somewhere up the mountain, and numerous expeditions have set off in vain to try to find it.