Magic Bus (11 page)

Magic Bus spawned many copycat operators, one of whose coaches was held to ransom for almost six months during the first Lebanese civil war but, in the early 1980s, the original company met a prosaic, unenlightened end when forced into bankruptcy.

In the seventeen or eighteen years of the trail's existence, before the Iranian border was closed, the land of extremes was baking in the heat of the Shah's White Revolution. The Shah – installed by the CIA coup – wanted his country to embrace Western values without bloodshed, to forsake religion for capitalism. He listened to Dolly Parton records. He drove a Cadillac convertible and a Rolls-Royce. He drank a glass of wine on national television. Most Iranians were unsettled by the speed of change. They mistook the Intrepids – the first Westerners that many of them had met – for ambassadors of the capitalist world. In the tense political climate, their casual morality and liberal humanism must have insulted – even enraged – traditionalists and zealots alike. These breezy unorthodox travellers, hitching across Iran on a shoestring, helped to stir the stern Islamic reawakening.

South of the highway, a scorched, stony plain unfolds toward Iraq. Power lines loop above parched squares of fields, between mud-brick settlements and distant grain silos. Distant flames of oil refineries plume on the horizon. A greenhouse catches the sun, flashing semaphore signals across the land, and the bright light sears my eyes.

Khomeini's portrait looms above a bustling chemical factory. The military guards wear white spats. At a highway checkpoint, a well-spoken young man in neat black trousers and pressed shirt studies my passport, asks the purpose of my visit and wishes me a safe stay in Tehran.

Tehran. Capital of revolution. Shrine to martyrs. Home to the Revolutionary Guard's nuclear-weapons programme. An urban disease fed by anger, despair and pollution so thick it tints the air. Once the most westernized city in the Middle East, it's now a sprawling cemetery to tolerance.

I push out from the pavement in a clump of riders, calling out my destination to the trawling drivers. With four other men, I snatch a shared taxi downtown, spiralling into a coil of roundabouts, chaotic concrete flyovers and filthy squares. On the heaving streets, muscular paramilitaries hold hands, beggars intone prayers, young women promenade in tailored
rupushes
, tight on the rump, drawing attention to their figures. Flights of mopeds congest the grids between identical grey tower blocks, squeezing the wrong way up bus lanes, racing into littered bazaars. If the Americans ever try to invade Iran, goes a current joke, their tanks will get stuck in Tehran's traffic jams.

In the sixties and seventies, after the Gülhane and Do
ğ
ubeyazit, travellers headed for the Amir Kabir;
the
place to stay in Tehran. ‘Dirty, only one sheet per bed, but at the very heart of the soulless, tinsel and glitter Coca-Cola city,' according to the trail's first guidebook, published in 1971. The hotel occupied the top two floors of a concrete horseshoe of balconies and walkways. Downstairs was a tyre emporium. Sixty rials – about a dollar – bought a mattress in the dorm. The toilet was at the end of the hall.

‘The Amir Kabir?' remember trail veterans. ‘That's where you contracted
real
dysentery.'

Today the tinsel and glitter has been dulled by the search for moral purity but Amir Kabir Avenue remains, and still satisfies Tehran's huge appetite for motor parts.

On foot, I press along its length, through the roar of raised male
voices and the stench of old Ford Falcons. The pavement is lined with racks of Volvo bus springs, sets of Torx wrenches and rolls of sheet metal. A shopkeeper leans against the bars of his display window as if imprisoned by pistons. A mechanic repairs mopeds under a flyover. A tinsmith makes throttle cables on his lap. Above him, behind enclosed concrete balconies, shrouded eyes watch, women's lives unfold and the songs of caged birds lift to the tall blue sky.

I climb the steep stairs to the Hotel Mashhad, ducking because of the low ceilings. Its owner thinks I want a room.

‘Only Western tourists stay here,' he assures me. ‘Last night there were twenty: Norway, Sweden, Canada.'

Young Pakistanis peer over his shoulder. I see no Westerners, not here or on the streets. ‘And the hippies?' I ask. ‘Did they stay here too?'

‘They date back to the period of the diseased person.' The King of Kings. The American snake. The Shah. ‘Maybe this hotel was then called Amir Kabir,' he says, trying to oblige me. ‘Maybe not. Everything change. You want see room?'

I don't.

Next door, the Goodyear Guest House has been driven out by Caspian Tires. Toora Wheels have run over the Youth Hostel Ferdosi. At the Hotel Arman, where the arguments of Russian traders funnel down the lift shaft, the duty manager simply shakes his head. He tells me that all the old overland hotels – the Toos, the Mehr and the Amir Kabir – have gone, their dormitories now stacked floor to ceiling with corroded batteries and inner tubes.

‘Could I meet someone who worked at the Amir?' I ask the manager.

‘No Tehrani can remember those days.'

Of course. Too much history has passed since the last Magic Bus was hurried out of town by an adolescent guardsman waving his Kalashnikov.

I drop back down to the street. A prehistoric Oldsmobile rams an ancient Volkswagen, spilling its load of newly picked oranges. They scatter across the tarmac like fugitives, rushing for freedom
until their sweet sticky juices explode beneath tyres. Swarms of flies sizzle in the pulp and under the midday sun.

‘It's gone,' says Rudy.

‘The Amir Kabir?' I guess. What else would a sixty-year-old Englishman with a pierced ear and bandanna be looking for here? Except perhaps a Rover fuel-injection pump.

‘What a drag,' he sighs. Hooded eyes stare at me from under thick eyebrows. And at my notebook. ‘You look like someone who knows where a man could buy a beer.'

‘A friend in Tabriz told me that Iran Air stewards smuggle in duty-free to sell uptown.'

‘Then I'm out of here.'

Rudy's face is thin and dry, hatched by laughter lines, thatched with sparse red hair and spiked by a majestic, bulbous nose useful for sniffing out artificial stimulants. His lanky, hard-muscled frame bespeaks a life unhindered by moderation. As he strides back toward Khomeini Square, I tell him, ‘The uptown neighbourhood's called Zaferanie.'

‘Zaferanie?' says Rudy. ‘The drive-in used to be there. I'd park the Bedford sideways so everyone could see the film.'

‘What Bedford?'

‘The Silver Dart. We'd drop the windows, put up our feet and watch
Yellow Submarine
.'

‘When was this?'

‘I started driving to India in '66.'

Rudy was a bus driver. Forty years on – with kids grown up, wife enrolled on an OU course and his Cornish tourist coaches sold to a local entrepreneur – he, like Penny, has returned on a sentimental journey.

‘My Bedford was a tatty Barnstable school bus with bad brakes,' he tells me. ‘The idea was to drive to Pakistan and flog it for a profit. I got to the Maidstone bypass and the brakes caught fire. Bam! “How far you going in this thing?” the fireman asked. I told him Lahore. He said, “You won't reach Southend.”'

‘So the Silver Dart didn't make it?'

‘It made Istanbul,' says Rudy, flourishing his hands, uttering
wide-mouthed automotive sounds. Narcotics alone could not account for such frenetic energy. ‘I was about to leave for Pakistan when I noticed that the other buses driven by Europeans were taking passengers. I thought, just a minute, never mind selling the blinking vehicle, I'll fill it to the gunwales with freaks. $25 to Tehran. $50 to Kabul. I mean, we're talking about absolute nu'pence but when you've got thirty or forty people onboard and you're doing your backwards and forwards, you can make
beaucoup
bucks.'

Beneath a ‘Down with foreign mercenaries' poster a small boy calls out to us, ‘OK USA!', novelty in his voice. We flag down a Zaferanie-bound taxi on Hafez Street. On the back seat Rudy tells me that for more than a decade he followed ‘that long line of loonies' between London and India, a trip taking about three weeks each way. He advertized in
Oz
and
Private Eye
(‘Want to take a trip on a little £.s.d.?'), hand-printed his own tickets, collected passengers on a corner outside Victoria Coach Station.

‘On my second run, there were twenty of them, all stood on the street with their huge suitcases and backpacks…'

‘Don't tell me: girls in beads, guys with battered twelve-string guitars…'

‘… plus a chick in a mauve boiler-suit who was going to Ceylon to surf, if you can believe it. Her board flew off – along with the roof rack – when the paved road ended outside Ankara. I'd sent everyone an itinerary, telling them to bring only essentials, plus a blanket for when we broke down. They turned up with sewing kits, St Christophers, even steak pies and Christmas puddings. Everyone's auntie had been round the night before saying, “Ooo, you're travelling around the world, you can't go without
this
.”'

Rudy's first stop on the continent was Amsterdam. In Dam Square, he would open the old Bedford's door and shout out, ‘Anyone for India?' He'd call by the youth hostels in Munich and Salzburg. He'd stop at the places where the Intrepids picked up mail, cashed traveller's cheques, found themselves stranded.

‘People would get off, people would get on. No one was in a
hurry. They'd sleep, play the guitar, slip back together into the love bunk.'

‘The love bunk?'

‘The
fabulous
love bunk. I'd taken some seats out at the back and made a bit of a bed, just like on Kesey's bus. The Bedford's springs and shocks were terrible and we'd go bouncing,
bouncing
across Europe. Dear God,' he says, looking out at a wide hot boulevard, ‘this used to be Eisenhower Avenue.'

At an intersection, women in long-brim
chadors
funnel between the cars. A tout taps at the window and offers us an illicit pack of playing cards. Rudy leans forward to shout directions but, as our driver speaks no English, he reverts to body language, rocking left and right on the back seat.

‘Did you hear about the Sheffield City coach owned by a Bradford insurance agent named Quddus?' I ask him. ‘In the winter of '71 it started out for Rawalpindi, but the engine was so useless that all thirty-five passengers – barefoot Westerners in flowing dresses and Pakistanis in saris – had to push the bus over the Alps in a blizzard.'

‘Must have been another Bedford,' sighs Rudy, turning away from a child prostrate on a traffic island, exposing his hunchback, holding aloft an alms tin in his small, outstretched fist.

In Turkey, Rudy had been a regular at the Pudding Shop. He convinced the Çoplans to paint their logo on his bus in exchange for a free fry-up every time he passed through town.

‘You were some entrepreneur,' I say.

‘I had to keep the wheels turning. Nearly lost them once or twice. In an Istanbul traffic jam, this little fibreglass Ford started edging alongside me. I've never liked people who try to get away from the lights before me. Well, the bus's aluminium trim lipped in behind the Ford's wheel arch. When the lights changed, I pressed the gas – vroooom! – and heard a terrible tearing noise. I'd ripped the entire bodywork off the Ford. The poor Turk leapt out of his car seriously pissed off. Then – talk about Moses and the Red Sea – all the traffic cleared. I started driving for my life, with the Turk running behind and an American passenger sliding down
a window, waving his fist and yelling out, ‘Don't fuck with the Dart, man.'

‘Another trip – and this is the gospel truth – I almost drove Timothy Leary to Delhi. He was on the run from the FBI here in Tehran.'

‘That'd be 1973.'

‘Could be. Dates were never my strong point. Leary phoned Indira Gandhi to ask if she would grant him political asylum. “India is my spiritual home,” he told her. Like, give me a break. He said the bus was too dangerous and flew to Kabul, where Interpol arrested him.'

Outside the window unfold endless, stifling suburbs. Distances seem huge, destinations unattainable. A decrepit taxi passes us, towing a smashed ambulance with a lash of seat-belt webbing. A Pontiac, another gas-guzzling memento of the former elite, cuts between them, snapping the belt. With its frayed, stubby end, a furious medic beats the offending car.

‘Travel was easy back then. A Western passport protected you,' Rudy says, watching the arguing drivers. ‘When you're young, you're immortal, aren't you?'

Our taxi drops us in Zaferanie, the Belgravia of Tehran on the slopes of the Alborz mountains. Here, men in ties buy NAD stereos and drive new LandCruisers, indulging themselves in the present day, while elsewhere in the city the poor embrace a populist message of heavenly promise.

We stroll between airline offices, advancing uphill, Rudy dropping broad hints about the nearest beverage bar. Caution is not a word in his vocabulary. No duty manager offers us a tumbler of Talisker in a back room. No local financier invites us to a private party in a penthouse suite. I let on that my information on illicit alcohol might have been another of Babak's distilled fantasies.

‘But my thirst remains most real,' says Rudy.

‘How about some tea?' I suggest.

Above the noise of the city rises Sa'd Abad, a lush, lofty park surrounding the former Shah's summer residence. Parrots and woodpeckers dart in the canopy of green, sixty feet above the
winding footpaths. On the tree trunks are carved the initials of male friends. Outside the White Palace are two head-high bronze boots, the only remains of a giant statue of Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Rudy and I climb to a tea house beyond the Green Palace, now a museum of ostentatious furniture not looted during the Revolution. We sit on a carpet-covered
takhts
lounger, shoes off, drinking tea and eating dates. The waiter welcomes other patrons by wiping off tabletops with a towel. We listen to their scattered laughter.