The sheep’s legs were splayed apart and it looked mighty startled to be held around the hips. But it made for a great photo. Months later when I got the film developed, it looked, for all the world, like the taxi driver was getting down and dirty with a technicolored piece of mutton, and the poor ewe didn’t look in the slightest bit happy about it.
We took a different way back, which I hoped would take us past the taxi drivers who’d had a laugh at my expense and that I could now have one at theirs. There was much more life on this route, and we passed through some incredible rural mud-brick villages. These contained the biggest, most out of proportion haystacks I’ve ever seen. They were huge, oversized things piled up in little square roofless buildings, and extended many times the building’s height into the air. Although I had chartered a private cab, when we passed a couple of guys standing by the side of the road in one of the villages, I gestured to the driver to pick them up. He didn’t have to think twice and pulled over in an instant. We took them to the next village. Although I’d already experienced some wonderful landscapes in Europe and Turkey, I was still bowled over by this drive, with its huge dramatic gorges and twisting mountain roads.
It was with sheer delight that I spotted the junction up ahead where the sarcastic cabbies were waiting. I couldn’t wait to get the last laugh and see their faces drop as we zoomed past and I waved triumphantly at them. I got my three fingers ready to indicate the price and hauled myself partially out of the car’s window. Goodness knows what the driver, who gave me a most concerned and confused look, thought I was doing. As we got closer, I noticed to my utter dismay that most of the cabbies were sitting around in the shade of a tree facing the other way. As we drove past, I waved frantically and shouted at the only one facing me and held up my three fingers at him.
He looked extremely confused. I hoped he’d tell the others about the strange tourist he’d seen waving madly from a taxi cab and that they’d work it out, but I wasn’t optimistic. I laughed at this and then wished I hadn’t; my lips were horrendously cracked from the sun of the last couple of weeks and were excruciatingly painful. Having been on the road for so long, I hadn’t had a chance to get any medication, but now it was getting beyond a joke and they needed sorting out, and soon. If not, I sure as hell wouldn’t be getting any kisses for the foreseeable future—and I couldn’t be having that.
Tomorrow, I would be heading off to the thriving city of Tabriz, so I got myself down to the bus station to book a ticket. This was situated on Maku’s one and only main road, Imam Khomeini Ave. Maku, as I was soon to learn, was far from the only place where something was named in honor of Khomeini.
Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was born in a small central Iranian village called Khomein and later moved to the holy city of Qom to study philosophy, law, and theology, which was the family tradition. He earned Shiite Islam’s highest clerical title of Ayatollah in the 1920s and pretty much kept to himself teaching and writing for the next few decades.
In 1962, he came to prominence by criticizing the country’s American and British installed dictator, the Shah, and his proposals to diminish the clergy’s property holdings and give greater freedoms to women. Two years later, the Shah banished him from the country for attacking a bill he had approved that gave American servicemen based in Iran total immunity from arrest. Khomeini attacked the bill by saying that the Shah had “reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog,” since if a dog was run over in America then the person responsible could be liable to prosecution, whereas if an American now mowed down an Iranian, he could do so without concern of consequence, as he would be untouchable by the court
We took a different way back, which I hoped would take us past the taxi drivers who’d had a laugh at my expense and that I could now have one at theirs. There was much more life on this route, and we passed through some incredible rural mud-brick villages. These contained the biggest, most out of proportion haystacks I’ve ever seen. They were huge, oversized things piled up in little square roofless buildings, and extended many times the building’s height into the air. Although I had chartered a private cab, when we passed a couple of guys standing by the side of the road in one of the villages, I gestured to the driver to pick them up. He didn’t have to think twice and pulled over in an instant. We took them to the next village. Although I’d already experienced some wonderful landscapes in Europe and Turkey, I was still bowled over by this drive, with its huge dramatic gorges and twisting mountain roads.
It was with sheer delight that I spotted the junction up ahead where the sarcastic cabbies were waiting. I couldn’t wait to get the last laugh and see their faces drop as we zoomed past and I waved triumphantly at them. I got my three fingers ready to indicate the price and hauled myself partially out of the car’s window. Goodness knows what the driver, who gave me a most concerned and confused look, thought I was doing. As we got closer, I noticed to my utter dismay that most of the cabbies were sitting around in the shade of a tree facing the other way. As we drove past, I waved frantically and shouted at the only one facing me and held up my three fingers at him.
He looked extremely confused. I hoped he’d tell the others about the strange tourist he’d seen waving madly from a taxi cab and that they’d work it out, but I wasn’t optimistic. I laughed at this and then wished I hadn’t; my lips were horrendously cracked from the sun of the last couple of weeks and were excruciatingly painful. Having been on the road for so long, I hadn’t had a chance to get any medication, but now it was getting beyond a joke and they needed sorting out, and soon. If not, I sure as hell wouldn’t be getting any kisses for the foreseeable future—and I couldn’t be having that.
Tomorrow, I would be heading off to the thriving city of Tabriz, so I got myself down to the bus station to book a ticket. This was situated on Maku’s one and only main road, Imam Khomeini Ave. Maku, as I was soon to learn, was far from the only place where something was named in honor of Khomeini.
Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was born in a small central Iranian village called Khomein and later moved to the holy city of Qom to study philosophy, law, and theology, which was the family tradition. He earned Shiite Islam’s highest clerical title of Ayatollah in the 1920s and pretty much kept to himself teaching and writing for the next few decades.
In 1962, he came to prominence by criticizing the country’s American and British installed dictator, the Shah, and his proposals to diminish the clergy’s property holdings and give greater freedoms to women. Two years later, the Shah banished him from the country for attacking a bill he had approved that gave American servicemen based in Iran total immunity from arrest. Khomeini attacked the bill by saying that the Shah had “reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog,” since if a dog was run over in America then the person responsible could be liable to prosecution, whereas if an American now mowed down an Iranian, he could do so without concern of consequence, as he would be untouchable by the court
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