Taken From All About My Hat The Hippy Trail 1972
The following day, Atash took Al and Keith by car to a bus stop where they boarded a bus to Mashhad. It seemed like a journey that would never end, a long hot and dusty road in a bus crowded with women in black, men in a variety of garments, and a few live chickens.
Mashhad was well over seven hundred miles from Tehran the way we had travelled – but just one hundred and twenty miles from Afghanistan.
Yet we reached Mashhad in the late afternoon, found a small hotel and were already out for dinner in a cheap eating house. It was hard to find real vegetarian hot food, so Al resorted to rice with nuts and sultanas called Kabuli rice, and salads. But that was plenty after a hot day on the bus. The next day they would find the Afghan embassy and get their visas.
Keith read a bit about Mashhad out load from his travel guide.
“Mashhad is the second most populous city in Iran. It is located in the north east of the country close to the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. It was a major oasis along the ancient Silk Road connecting with Merv in the East.
“Long a centre of secular and religious learning, Mashhad has been a centre for the arts and for the sciences.
“Mashhad is also home to one of the oldest libraries of the Middle-East called the Central Library of Astan-e Quds Razavi with a history of over six centuries. The Astan-e Quds Razavi Museum, which is part of the Astan-e Quds Razavi Complex, is home to over seventy thousand rare manuscripts from various historical eras. There are some six million historical documents in the foundation's central library.”
“Maybe tomorrow we can go and see the Imam Raza Shrine. It says it's a Golden Temple,” said Keith.
The following morning they arose quite early, as they wanted to see the Temple Shrine and a bit of the city and also had to get their visas. So they headed out, ate a small breakfast at a street café, and started walking, following a small map given to them at the hotel.
The streets were either dusty or muddy. On their journey to Mashhad they had noticed many small settlements or villages that seemed mostly composed of mud huts. But now, despite the mud, the building were of stone. Many were clearly quite old and badly in need of repair.
They found the Embassy first and quickly they had their passports stamped for entry to Afghanistan and permission to stay for up to four weeks. They had to pay for that, but despite shortage of cash it was very cheap, they thought, just pennies.
So after the Embassy they headed to the bus station to find out how much it would cost for a bus the next day, to Herat, a town in Afghanistan about two hundred and thirty miles from Mashhad.
The bus station was awash with mud. They had to literally wade through it, to reach the office, but once inside it was clean and it did not take long to learn that the bus left in the morning and was cheap. First they would have to go to a small border town called Tayebad, in the morning.
By that time the lads were tired of walking and hungry and decided not to visit the Shrine. We went back to the hotel.
The bus journey to Tayebad was incredibly bumpy, often on more of a muddy track than a road, and every time we passed another vehicle there was a great hooting of horns. Definitely not a comfortable ride.
The bus stopped there for an hour or so and then amidst what seemed like total chaos with people loading massive piles of luggage on to the roof, we left for Afghanistan, where the bus would stop for the night in the tiny border village and passengers could find somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and complete the formalities.
Al and Keith were the only Western travellers on that bus – everyone else was from Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Al and Keith took their rucksacks from the roof of the bus and headed into a wooden shack labelled, in English, ‘Passport and Customs’.
This was close to a small town called Islam Qala.
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