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4.8: Overland to India
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We
decided to travel overland from Damascus to Delhi. Of course we could
not cycle the distance in the time available. We had originally planned
to fly because we believed that it was impossible to cross the border
from Pakistan into India. We learned about a group of British cyclists
who did manage to make the crossing and made new enquiries. It turned
out that it was quite possible to travel overland. Moreover, it was the
less expensive option as well as being far more interesting and ecologically
sound than flying. So we applied for visa's for Iran and Pakistan. The
Irani visa turned out to be the most difficult. After several weeks of
waiting for a tourist visa, we applied for a transit visa to be prolonged
once inside the country. We decided to catch a train from Alleppo but
first we wanted to test the health of Maya's knees and enjoy a few days
of quiet cycling through the Orontes Valley. We visited Hama and Apamea
and rode 210 km in three days.
The train ride from
Allepo to Teheran took two and a half days. On the train we met Saber Sanami,
a good-natured family man from Teheran. Later we visited him at his home
in Northern Teheran. We also met a couple of German 'travelling carpenters'
with whom we shared a sleeper compartment. They were dressed in traditional
frock and were partaking in an 800 year old tradition of craftsmen having
finished their formal education travelling to further their knowledge
and skills in other countries. The two will be on the road for three years
and a day. They travel with no more than their tools, a walking stick
and a change of underwear. Except for their plastic water bottle and toothbrush,
nylon sleeping bags and a list of e-mail addresses, the two were carrying
nothing that they might not have had on them two hundred years ago as
well. The contrast with our technology-laden bags could not have been
bigger. During their interviews the two talked about the need to get back
to bare essentials and their uncertainty about the effect their journey
might have on the rest of their lives.
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From Teheran we travelled on to Esfehan.
Getting our bikes on the train was an adventure with a happy ending thanks
to the help of a resourceful railway assistant who had us buy tickets
for a whole compartment so that we could take the bikes in there with
us and who convinced the train chef that this was a good idea too. After
that rush a young man from Esfehan came to sooth our racing hearts with
the wonderful music from his beautiful sitar. The following nights we
stayed with his family of whom we interviewed every member: Kamiar himself,
who had stopped his studies in Botany to 'play the sitar from six in the
morning till twelve at night', his dad a successful orthopaedic surgeon
(who took a look at my knees and helped me look through his books), his
mum, a housewife who has fought hard to provide a safe and stimulating
home in a limiting national environment and his younger brother who wants
to be a robotic engineer and dreams of encounters with aliens and space
travel.
In Esfehan we extended our visa but got only five days on top of the seven
we already had. So we travelled on towards the border with Pakistan. We
stopped a few days in Yazd and in Bam where we had interesting evening
conversations with our host and were we visited a Zurchane or 'house of
power'.
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Upon arrival in Pakistan
we spent a very tough 17 hours on a bus to Quetta and from there we travelled
on to Lahore in a far more comfortable train compartment. On the train
we talked with a police supervisor from Karachi who had surprisingly philosophical
ideas about the future. In Lahore we visited the vast campuses of the
Punjab University and the University of Engineering and Technology where
we also attended a symposium on draught and water management making use
of the opportunity to talk with some of the academics and government representatives
present about longer term questions concerning water.
From Lahore we cycled
to Amritsar across the Indian border, read all about our times in India
in the next instalment of this overview.
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Read more on Agence Future's adventures in the middle east:
<< 4.7: Beirut | Index
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