words “road safety” don’t sit well together. The country has some 200,000 reported road accidents a year, and no doubt many more unreported ones, and roughly 28,000 road deaths per annum. This appalling figure crowns Iran with the unfortunate title of country with the highest rate of fatal road accidents in the world. My Lonely Planet had some interesting comments on the rules of the road, in particular stopping at red lights. Apparently, the willingness of a car stopping at a red light has less to do with road safety and more to do with the number of armed traffic cops the driver can see within rifle range. No shit.
We got to experience the full nightmare that is Iranian road travel on our bus to the Caspian. We were given seats at the front of the bus near the driver who drove like a psychotic, suicidal IndyCar racer on crack.
He pulled out without looking, overtook on blind corners next to jagged cliffs with no crash barriers, tailgated whatever vehicle was in front of him, and at one stage sped around a massive row of cars stuck behind a slow-moving farm truck by using a sort of imaginary middle lane—the type of thing you would only consider doing on a computer driving game, and even then you wouldn’t be so reckless, unless you wanted to end your go. To the oncoming cars, he just honked his horn aggressively.
But most of all what scared me was the speed. He drove so fast it really was suicidal, and we missed oncoming cars by the narrowest of margins on several occasions. As a result, I found myself slamming my right foot down involuntarily onto an imaginary brake pedal. At the speed we went, it would have been game over permanently, no doubt about it.
Things got worse when the driver added his cell phone into the equation. He drove with his right hand, holding the phone with his left but to his right ear, and even started gesticulating at one stage with his steering arm. I watched in horror just waiting for the bump in the road that would turn the wheel and send us headfirst into the approaching vehicles. My late grandfather used to say, “It’s better to be twenty minutes late in this world, than twenty years early in the next.” Well, I was getting ready to meet up with him in the next, and prayed like the condemned man I knew I was.
At one stage, we approached some traffic cops by the side of the road, but somehow the driver managed to hit the brakes and avoided being pulled over. He glanced across at me as if to say, “We showed them, didn’t we?” I gave a nervous half grin back. They say that monkeys smile when they’re scared to indicate non-aggression. Whether that’s true or just a load of monkey piss, I don’t know, but the smile I gave him was of the primate “scared and defenseless” kind.
Whilst he was still in view of the law it was a cautious, “Mirror, signal, turn—okay, slowly into first gear and ease on the accelerator . . . Now check your mirror, that’s it and slowly into second.”
He drove as cautiously as an eighty-year-old grandma with eyesight problems and bad nerves at the wheel of an economy Sunrise Mobility Scooter. If I thought this brush with the law would have a lasting effect on his driving then I was about to be sorely disappointed. As soon as we rounded the corner, he dropped the clutch—we were back at the Indianapolis 500 and now he was playing catch up. I gave in, held on tight, and just closed my eyes like a kid on a scary roller coaster.
I awoke from this prolonged nightmare when we finally arrived at our destination. We got to the city of Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, at sunrise. Before getting on another bus, Ricardo and I both needed a good stiff caffeine injection, so we scouted out a little chay shop and drained an ocean of the stuff. Whilst there, I read up on the place. Rasht had a population of 400,000, making it the biggest city in the Caspian region, and was the area’s main industrial center. It was a popular holiday spot for people from
We got to experience the full nightmare that is Iranian road travel on our bus to the Caspian. We were given seats at the front of the bus near the driver who drove like a psychotic, suicidal IndyCar racer on crack.
He pulled out without looking, overtook on blind corners next to jagged cliffs with no crash barriers, tailgated whatever vehicle was in front of him, and at one stage sped around a massive row of cars stuck behind a slow-moving farm truck by using a sort of imaginary middle lane—the type of thing you would only consider doing on a computer driving game, and even then you wouldn’t be so reckless, unless you wanted to end your go. To the oncoming cars, he just honked his horn aggressively.
But most of all what scared me was the speed. He drove so fast it really was suicidal, and we missed oncoming cars by the narrowest of margins on several occasions. As a result, I found myself slamming my right foot down involuntarily onto an imaginary brake pedal. At the speed we went, it would have been game over permanently, no doubt about it.
Things got worse when the driver added his cell phone into the equation. He drove with his right hand, holding the phone with his left but to his right ear, and even started gesticulating at one stage with his steering arm. I watched in horror just waiting for the bump in the road that would turn the wheel and send us headfirst into the approaching vehicles. My late grandfather used to say, “It’s better to be twenty minutes late in this world, than twenty years early in the next.” Well, I was getting ready to meet up with him in the next, and prayed like the condemned man I knew I was.
At one stage, we approached some traffic cops by the side of the road, but somehow the driver managed to hit the brakes and avoided being pulled over. He glanced across at me as if to say, “We showed them, didn’t we?” I gave a nervous half grin back. They say that monkeys smile when they’re scared to indicate non-aggression. Whether that’s true or just a load of monkey piss, I don’t know, but the smile I gave him was of the primate “scared and defenseless” kind.
Whilst he was still in view of the law it was a cautious, “Mirror, signal, turn—okay, slowly into first gear and ease on the accelerator . . . Now check your mirror, that’s it and slowly into second.”
He drove as cautiously as an eighty-year-old grandma with eyesight problems and bad nerves at the wheel of an economy Sunrise Mobility Scooter. If I thought this brush with the law would have a lasting effect on his driving then I was about to be sorely disappointed. As soon as we rounded the corner, he dropped the clutch—we were back at the Indianapolis 500 and now he was playing catch up. I gave in, held on tight, and just closed my eyes like a kid on a scary roller coaster.
I awoke from this prolonged nightmare when we finally arrived at our destination. We got to the city of Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, at sunrise. Before getting on another bus, Ricardo and I both needed a good stiff caffeine injection, so we scouted out a little chay shop and drained an ocean of the stuff. Whilst there, I read up on the place. Rasht had a population of 400,000, making it the biggest city in the Caspian region, and was the area’s main industrial center. It was a popular holiday spot for people from
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