The Big Adventure Blog: The end of a dear friend, but the beginning of many more

Greetings! We're currently sitting in a lounge of Dubai Airport. The events in this blog post actually happened almost 2 weeks ago. Because of a few sensitive aspects of the events, we decided to wait until we had successfully exited Iran before posting. Enjoy!

Life can change in a moment. Sudden events can thrust you from one "space-time continuum" to another. It's when events cause the end of one's time here on earth that we can be most jolted. So it was when a dear companion of ours' life ended suddenly with a heart attack last week.

We were driving from Tabriz towards Tehran, and planning to spend a night wild camping in the mountains. We had just filled Harry up with diesel and were in good spirits. After a few kilometres I had noticed an unusual ticking noise coming from engine, so stopped to check it out. The oil was quite low, so gave it a good top up, and put the ticking down to low oil pressure. We carried on towards the mountains when suddenly there was a locking and crunching sound, and then deathly silence as we rolled to a stop. We knew straight away this was fatal. No amount of de-fibrillation was going to restart this heart any time soon.

Despite the sadness, there was in fact a tinge of relief. This is because we were still very uncertain about the what we were going to do with the vehicle on arrival to the UAE. The "default" option was to ship the vehicle back to England, but the problem was that the cost of doing this was going to be equal or even greater than the value of the vehicle once back in England. Adding to that the prospect of additional costs to get it up to MOT (WOF) standard again meant that it wasn't an attractive option. I had researched every other possible option, but all came with costs, caveats and clauses. It's difficult to explain without going into long detail, but simply selling the vehicle in Iran or Dubai was not possible (without serious penalties) because of the special documents used to enter in the first place.

Abandoning the vehicle to customs was an option we had considered, so the sudden death of Harry had brought us to lock in this option, just slightly more prematurely than we'd hoped. After getting a tow back to an area full of car garages near town, the first challenge was trying to explain to the enthusiastic mechanics that we didn't want to fix it. We ruled this out, because of the combination of the time involved, as well as the additional cost, making bringing Harry back to England even more of an economic loss. But for a national full of people that have become experts at fixing and repairing everything (due to sanctions, imported parts and spares are very limited, and extremely expensive), this was very hard to accept. The next day though, we were totally back in their good books...

Because we were abandoning Harry to customs, we had to find a home for most of our possessions that we had been carrying with us. Some of them were specific 4WD accessories, so I was keen to find a 4WD enthusiast who would most appreciate them. This seemed like a difficult task to achieve in less than 24 hours, and in a city where we didn't know a soul. I found a local automotive group on Facebook and sent a message off - within a couple of hours my phone was ringing and an enthusiastic guy told me that he and his cousin were on their way to our hotel. They were young guys (early 20s) who, like lots of Iranians, are mad about cars. For the next two days they made it their mission to do everything they could to help us. They ferried us back and forth to the car (from our hotel), found a truck to carry it to Tehran customs (4 hours drive away), helped us buy things we needed in town, and on top of that bought us a delicious dinner one night! We were happy to give them some of the 4WD things, but still had a whole lot more car and household things to get rid of. With just 1 day to get rid of it (and apparently no such thing as Cash Converters), we decided to hold a pop-up car-boot sale right where Harry was parked! We laid the tarpaulin down on the ground and started emptying the contents of the car onto the tarp. It only took a few minutes for some locals to understand what was going on, and before long we had a swarm of people surrounding the car inspecting our things and yelling out offers, all in Persian of course! It was pretty chaotic for about 20 mins as I tried to continue emptying the car, while negotiating bids in Tomans (which is 1/10th of Iranian Rials value, just to make it more difficult) for our things. The items were readily snapped up at a fraction of their value by the locals who thought all their Nowrooz's (Iranian new year) had come at once! After selling our crate full of half-opened food items, including some from Britain, it makes me laugh thinking of some random Iranian family at home drinking Yorkshire tea!

As we were nearing the end of the sale, some police officers turned up. We couldn't quite make out whether the officers were curious, coming to shut us down, or just waiting to arrest us! Of course we couldn't speak any Farsi with them, and they seemed to indicate something like a "No" message, but we just played dumb and innocent, and continued to stash our pockets with Rials as we hawked off the remains of our things. Of course, being technically "imported" items, I was well aware that the sale of our things wouldn't be viewed too well by any customs official who was a stickler for the rules. The police officers seemed pretty relaxed, and we thought we were OK, but then a higher-ranking police officer turned up and started making much more clear indications that we were not doing the right thing. Just at the perfect moment, our local friend and saviour for the day turned up and spoke to the higher-ranking officer on our behalf. We quickly put the last of our things back inside Harry, herded the crowd away and sped away from the site in his car. I hadn't yet sold my toolbox (deliberately), but was planning to after I'd taken a few tools out. One of the police officers had a quiet word to our friend, indicating that he'd quite like to buy the toolbox and remaining tools. I was totally happy to keep the officer appeased, so we arranged a rendezvous a few kms down the road. After a final exchange of cash, we had gotten rid of most of our stuff, and later off-loaded the remaining bits to the friend and his family.

Challenge No. 1 completed, we now had to get the vehicle to customs in Tehran, and the documentation completed to get our security deposit (for bringing the car into Iran) released. We arranged to bring the car to customs in a few day's time, while we travelled to Tehran the next day. We arrived in Tehran to meet our host family. They were a couple who had both grown up in Tehran, but recently had approval to emigrate to New Zealand, and were very excited to be finally achieving their dream. They were also really excited to be hosting some locals from their soon-to-be-adopted country, and made us feel extremely welcome. After the stress and sadness of the past few days, their nice and relaxing home was the perfect environment to rest and recover. Our recovery was aided by two-straight days of rain, which meant that we spent the first two days without leaving the house, just eating (amazing food, of course), chatting, reading, watching TV, and quickly becoming close friends. We'd planned to stay with them originally for three nights, and ended up staying six (which they told us was still not enough)! More friendly, helpful and hospitable people I don't think you could find anywhere on this earth.

Wednesday was "customs" day - the day of delivering Harry to customs in Tehran. Our host had kindly agreed to come along and help. I thought I might have been able to manage on my own, but was very grateful for his assistance. The truck carrying Harry turned up on time, so this was a good start, but on entering the complex I had another "Sero border" moment, where the reality of people, desks, offices, buildings and warehouses was far more chaotic than I had imagined. We got the paperwork under way in one of the main offices, and our host handled the whole process with exceptional ability. We spent the next 2 hours running from one office to another, getting one form filled, then taking it to another office to sign, only to run it back to the first office to “approve” the signature and gain the paperwork for the next step. After at least a couple of hours and much determination by our host, we finally had the right papers to enter the customs area with the truck and Harry. Again we ferried from one area of the customs huge yard to another, getting forms signed, talking to the right people, and finding the right place to be. We finally made it to the unloading ramp, only to find the truck deck was slightly too low, and we couldn't roll Harry off. After about an hour of trying different techniques, we finally got a big forklift to come, who easily scooped Harry up and plonked him down in the sad “abandoned cars” corner of the yard. We thought the day was almost done, and getting the final “receipt” for delivery would be easy, however it was another one and a half hours of running from one office to another, trying to get the paperwork completed before Customs shut down for the day. Finally, at about 3:30pm, we left customs with the paperwork done, the receipt in our hands, and a happy/sad feeling of being free of our beloved Harry. The poor truck driver had patiently (mostly) put up with the ordeal, and stayed many hours longer than first planned, so we gave him an extra wad of cash for the inconvenience. Walking out of customs I was in awe of what our host had doggedly achieved - there is no doubt that without any "proper" Farsi speaking skills, I simply could not have done this on my own. We finally made it back home around 5pm, tired, sad, but pleased that we had successfully completed the difficult task.

So we are now car-less, and continuing our travel by bus. It is sad that we weren't able to drive all the way to our "final" destination of Dubai, but at the same time part of the brief of this adventure was coping with unexpected events. Being able to adapt to changes and move on through difficult situations is a bigger achievement for the trip than simply arriving at our destination as planned. With over 90% of the possessions we carried with us sold, given away as gifts, or handed off to total strangers, we continue our [amended] journey with simply what we can carry on our backs.

We have grieved for the loss of our dear friend and companion, but also celebrate in making more new ones. Dear friends whose sacrifice and generosity to us will be remembered for a lifetime. We hope we can remain friends for that long, which frankly, is much longer than we can expect a rusting old Land Rover to last.