Zahedan - Esfahan

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Zahedan Bus Terminal

The Zahedan bus terminal is away from the city. No one speaks English and it is a bit of a pain. Fortunately two guys who came with me from the border to Zahedan helped me buy the ticket to Esfahan. It cost Iranian Riyals 65,000/= or they also call it Tumans 6,500/=. Obviously One Tuman is equal to 10 Riyals.

There was a dodgy looking guy who came and started asking questions in Farsi. Then another friend I had made while being there came up to me and started talking. Then the dodgy guy went up to him and started asking questions about me. Questions like where I am going, who is funding me etc. Anyway the dodgy Zahedanian went his way the moment the guy I knew took his bus and I wasn’t bothered anymore.

The Pakistani guy, whom the Iranian border guard argued with, had at this point gotten quite friendly with me. He was in Iran to get married to this Pakistani Muslim girl from Germany. Since his mum’s sister died a couple of weeks ago they couldn’t hold the wedding in Pakistan hence decided to hold it in Iran. I was invited for this wedding and I stayed if I am in the area I will come.

The Zahedan terminal is quite large, fairly well maintained though. There are two kinds of busses. Mercedes and Volve. The Volvo is more comfortable than the Mercedec. It’s almost double the price however I took it because you never the weather. I’d rather go in comfort to less than zero temperatures and the Volvo is faster too.

Zahedan - Esfahan

The bus was a super luxury Volvo bus which cost IRA65,000/=. In spite of the anti-American protest they have been having they showed 50 First dates which I thought was quite ironic.

1.5 hours in to the journey as I was warned by some Pakistani people there was an army check point and they searched the entire bus. Everyone had to get down and each bag was checked. Some rice gunnies were poked by a pick like thing to make sure they didn’t conceal anything in them. The whole episode took about 20 minutes and we were on our way.

The landscape continued to be mountainous; gets a little boring after while.

Right throughout the night, I can vaguely remember as I kept waking up halfway when ever the army stopped, we were stopped about 6 times. However these were not full checks. Essentially the driver speaks the army person walks inside the bus says that we are “safe” (this part I added) and goes away….

There were times when we had to wait for a long time and there were other busses being checked as well, so we were in a queue.

I woke up around 5.45am it was still dark and by the time I could see anything clearly it was around 6:30am.

I saw scattered mountains and far way however the general view was quite plain and brown.

After a while I saw white patches on some mountains which eventually turned out to be mountains with snow. After a while the entire area became white and it was quite beautiful; snow everywhere. It appeared like being at 5000m on my way to Lhasa, Tibet.

When I tried to take a picture of the Snow Mountains the guys near me got all excited and started talking to me. They asked me which country I was from and I said from Sri Lanka. Then they wanted to know where Sri Lanka was. I said below India. I said the “Chai” you drink is from Sri Lanka. They misunderstood and gave me a cup of tea. Then I had to bring in Tsunami for the rescue and said can you remember “Tsunami” and they were like are yeah yeah…these people didn’t speak any English but with difficulty managed to understand what they were saying and asking. Iranians just like the Paks love to pose for photos.

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