Day 27 – Bam - Zahedan

Friday 12th October 2007

Another day, another shake down. After breakfast it was time to check out and settle the mini bar bill, which everyone duly did before hopping on the bus, nice and simple. If only this was the case. Apparently we were 200,000 short and rather then just pay the equivalent of £10 to sort this out pride took hold and everyone was files back in to the hotel to check their bill. After a good hour it was established that the only money that was going to change hands was the hotel returning it to us for over charging. Behind schedule we finally headed out to the next military check point where we would receive our escort for the next stage. Due to the delay we had missed out escort to Zehedan and would have to wait for them to return, fun, fun, fun! Luckily it did not take long for them to return and with a new escort with even bigger guns, included one mounted on their truck. With Borat playing on the coach TV we continued through Iran via various military check points and we were also joined by a Swedish traveller on a motorbike who was also headed to Pakistan. Apparently the high military presence on the road is due to the high importance of this road for the opium smuggling trade, comforting thought!

The day was destined to get even more interesting with a military stop in the afternoon coinciding with our driver losing his marbles. He decided to tell the military that the women on our bus were blasphemous for not wearing their headscarves, the men were covered in tattoos and to the surprise of the OzBusers we were all apparently having sex on the bus! Our driver had also begun to shout and spit at out Iranian guide who had told us this story. This incident has the potential to cause serious trouble for us but luckily the military saw past the crazy and put one of their guys on our bus to watch him till we reached our hotel.

We reached our last stop on Iran and found it was, unsurprisingly for Iran, under construction, after a quick unload of everything from the coach in case crazy driver was not there in the morning it was soup, kebab and bed, tomorrow Pakistan beckons.