Mohammad

Door knocker in Toudeshk

'Every day after school I would go to the main road. Rain or shine. Most days nothing happened. I would just sit there on a rock, my eyes glued to the horizon. Cars. Only cars and trucks. Whenever a bus stopped, I would go up to the driver and ask him whether he had seen any cyclists that day. Usually, the answer was no. But sometimes one of them would say: yes, I spotted one today, some forty kilometres from here. You just sit there and wait, Mohammad. All the bus drivers knew my name. But the people in the village called me Mohammad Crazy.'

'On those rare days that a cyclist entered our village, I would jump up and wave and shout Hello! and Stop! and Where are you from? That was all the English I knew. Most would say Hello or Salaam without stopping. No time, some of them said. Still, that was better than nothing and I would go home happy.'

'One day a tall boy decided to stop. He told me he was from Germany and needed a place to sleep. By then I spoke some English. English was my favourite subject at school. I told him there was no hotel in our village. In the next town, forty-five kilometres from here, he would certainly find something. The boy frowned. I'm very tired, he said. Can't I spend the night at your place? I thought it over. My heart said yes, but I was afraid my mum would say no. I decided to take him to my grandparents' house. Both of them had died some years before, and the house was empty. There was not a single piece of furniture. But the boy was happy. He put his bags in this corner, where we are sitting now, and rolled out his sleeping bag over there. That night I brought him my supper, and the next morning my breakfast. I was hungry for a day, but I didn't mind. I was hosting a cyclist!'

Nastaran, Mohammad's niece

'When I turned sixteen I went to the bank, got a loan and converted my grandparents' home into a guesthouse. It was difficult at first. You've seen how nice Toudeshk is. The mud-brick buildings, the desert... But the problem was that no one knew about this village. Gradually, things started to improve. Cyclists recommended my place to other cyclists they met, and that's how it began. I've been doing this for nine years now and in that period I've hosted over five thousand travellers, including five hundred cyclists. People like it here. They like the tranquility. And we serve them something else than kebab! They play with my brother's children, climb the mountain to watch the sunset, or just relax in the courtyard. And everyone pays according to his budget. But it's always a bit less for cyclists. Haha!'

'You know, they don't call me Mohammad Crazy anymore. They call me Mohammad Tourist. But it's not tourists I'm interested in. It's travellers. That's why you won't find a big sign when you enter the village. It would change the atmosphere. Some things are better kept small. But if you happen to meet other travellers, please tell them about this place. After all these years I'm still eager to meet them.'

Esfahan in 6 Shots

'Esfahan nesf-e jahan', the old saying goes. Esfahan is half the world. Strolling around the city's central square it's difficult to argue with that. I sit down for a moment to take it all in. Then I open my guidebook and read: 'This central square (originally known as Naqsh-e Jahan or Pattern of the World) was first built as a garden (1602 AD) and is the largest enclosed square in the world (Tiananmen Square is larger but it is open)'. Tiananmen Square. It seems a world away, though I know I've already covered fifteen thousand kilometres of an estimated thirty thousand to Beijing.

The largest enclosed square at the centre of a journey to the largest open square; a city that is half the world; a square in that city that is the pattern of the world... My mind starts to spin like a globe. I look up and try to focus on the clear lines of the domes and porches that surround me. Minutes pass. When I'm sure no grand insights are about to materialise, I get up, take a few snapshots and give in to a more basic urge. It's time to check out the restaurants in this half of the world.

The sixteenth-century Ali Qapu Palace

The dome of Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

Six o'clock: time for some tea and qalyan (water pipe)

Blue mosaics everywhere

Fun on the Zayandeh River

Bazaar bizarre

Friends!

Approved by Iranian army: holy shrine in Qom...

'Stop, mister!' Damn. I was hoping to pedal along without so much as touching the brakes. Usually, a polite nod suffices to see me through road blocks and police checks, a strategy that even worked in Azerbaijan, where policemen in Soviet-style uniforms like to pester people by turning their car inside-out, preferably at ten or twenty-kilometre intervals.

Pretending I don't speak English doesn't seem the best of ideas in a no-nonsense country like Iran, so I reach for the brakes and wait for the soldiers to get out of their four-wheel drive. Three youngish lads, laughing at something, saunter towards me.

'What are you doing?', the chubby one asks. I look down at my bike and outfit. It seems rather self-evident. 'I'm cycling', I say. 'Travelling.' Puzzled looks. How to explain something that is best illustrated by doing what they have just witnessed? Then I remember the magic word. I point at myself and shout: 'Tourist!' Ah, tourist, they nod in unison. Even though I'm too cocky to think of myself as a bloody tourist (two-wheeled explorer sounds much better, in my opinion), the soldiers seem satisfied. But just as I start nourishing the hope that they might let me off the hook, the bearded soldier with the stern face demands to see my passport. 'Control', he says, before switching to Farsi. I hand him my passport, which he pockets without even glancing at it. Next on his list is any digital equipment I may be carrying. Camera? Phone? I produce them with a cheerful smile, though any cheer I may have felt rapidly evaporates as I notice that the third chap is filming everything that is going on.

...detail of painted ceiling in Fin Garden...

Registering my surprise, the chubby soldier grins and repeatedly utters the words 'control' and 'military'. Then he points at me while his hands perform a spinning motion. I gather he wants me to hop back on my bike for some grilling at a military base. I look around. Vast plains to our left, snowy peaks to our right. We're alone in an empty landscape.

As the four-wheel drive follows me at a leisurely pace I can't help but grow a bit self-conscious. Are they laughing at my riding style? The hunched back, the granny gear I always use? The sun beats down mercilessly, and soon I have to stop to line my helmet with a buff to keep the sweat from running into my eyes. I look over my shoulder. Smiles and friendly nods.

They must have checked all my pictures and text messages by now, I think as we're on our way again. Anything incriminating? I'm racking my brains to come up with something that could be deemed offensive. No nudie pics, as far as I can remember, nor funny faces next to one of the ubiquitous portraits of the ayatollahs. Then it hits me. We're not far from Natanz. An uneventful town if ever there was one, but somewhere in the vicinity an underground uranium enrichment plant is purring away (if that's what underground uranium enrichment plants do). Perhaps they suspect me of spying... I try to discard the thought. How on earth am I supposed to take pictures of something that's underground?

...and a restored Qajar-era mansion in Kashan.

After a good twenty kilometres the car overtakes me and pulls over at a barbed-wire gate. The driver motions for me to stop. What follows strikes me as a not very funny TV sketch. The soldiers make me unpack everything, but it's not a very thorough job they are doing. What's this for, they want to know, flipping through the pages of a ruled notebook. And that? It's a water filter, sir. Then the bearded fellow indicates the stick tied to the bike frame. I use it to ward off dogs, and it's always good fun to imitate a yapping mutt whenever people wonder about its use. The effect is the same as always: a hearty laugh.

Having established I'm not a spy nor a friend of the zionists nor an avid collector of gay porn, it's time for some banter. One of the soldiers starts listing all the Dutch football players he can think of. His eyes light up every time he comes up with a name. I nod and hum, but then he concludes in a way that makes me laugh: 'Roy Makaay! Dennis Bergkamp! Robin van Persie! Europa! America! Holland! Iran! Friends! No fighting! Friends! Ruud Gullit!'

Jinxed

My saviours at the fastfood joint

And the puncture mystery deepens. Finding myself shouting profanities at a half-deflated tyre on a Tehran expressway settled it: I had to get to the root of the problem or I would lose my mind. A bad streak, OK, fine, I can handle that. But this particular bad streak was creeping up a bit too high on the improbability scale. In fact, things were getting so unlikely that I started suspecting there might just be a logical explanation for the mess I was in. On my first day off in Tehran I had a go at the case. While my host's mum served me scrumptious pancakes, I scrutinised the inside of the rear tyre. After a few fruitless spins, feeling my way like a surgeon who's looking for a nasty protrusion, my fingertips detected something that felt like a fixed grain of sand. A bit of tweezing revealed a microscopic piece of metal wire. Victory is mine, I thought. Case closed.

My smugness didn't go down well with the gods of cycle touring. I'd hardly left Tehran when disaster struck again. An undeniable loss of pressure in the rear tyre. I bowed my head in defeat and halted at a fastfood joint at the edge of a small town. The owner proved to be an obliging fellow who led me to a small storage room where I could peacefully fiddle with patches and tubes. After a while his brother came in to bring me a plate of deep-fried I-don't-know-whats. (He must have sensed that bike repair and food make an excellent combination.) Unable to find whatever it was that caused the puncture, I decided that the tyre was jinxed. I managed to resist the temptation to burn it, then fished around in one of my panniers for a spare. By then it was too late to hit the road again, so I gladly accepted the owner's invitation to roll out my air mattress and stay for the night.

Now, the good news is that tyre and tube seem to hold up. The bad news is that this episode turned me into a complete neurotic, checking the tyre pressure whenever I can, sighing with relief when I find that everything is all right.