June 9, 1963
We drove down, down, down through high picturesque mountains till Johnny felt sick; very rocky and barren. It was a long way still to Quetta. We watched a mountain railway winding in and out, through tunnels, near the road. Before Quetta we came down into a vast barren plain and could see everything spread out, signs of civilization again.
We got to Quetta about 11:00 a.m., right in the middle of church so we drove around the town a few minutes to pass the time. We got some supplies in the bazaar. Then we drove back to the mission compound and were warmly greeted by the Rockies. They gave us a good lunch ad we bathed, washed clothes by hand and washed the car.
We told the Rockies about our cold night up on the pass and they checked the newspaper and found out for us that it had been 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Muzzafagarh the day before (where we had been on June 7th).
We were in the Maring’s house (another Methodist missionary family) and it was very pleasant. We slept out under a grape arbor, in the yard, that night. There was a plum, apple and a peach tree in the yard. It was lovely to have lots of water to get clean. We went downtown and got a big can to carry water, some vegetables and better rice, medicines, and bread. We had a lovely refreshing dinner and were glad to get to bed.
June 10, 1963
We were off at 8:30 a.m. or so. We made a last stop for a few things in the bazaar and set off on the road. This was the real jumping off place. After this was the unknown and pretty deserted country. We stopped at two road signs and got pictures, London 5,878 miles to go. Mother got her first driving lesson and didn’t do too badly but the road went up over a little mountain so she had to quit.
We passed a Landrover full of European kids and they waved but we did not stop. It was another blistering hot day. About 10 or 11 we came to the real desert. It was about 4,000 feet elevation. The road wound past black, tortured looking, bare rock, clumps of green desert bushes, drifts and ripples of sand. No shade or relief anywhere.
For lunch we stopped under a four foot square bus stop shelter which we shared with a waiting passenger. The sun would just burn you up in no time. About 2:00 p.m. we drove into another little dust storm. Everything was barren and depressing. The road, however, was very good black top.
About 4:00 p.m. we came into Dalbandin, our target for the night. The houses were scattered and half covered with sand dunes. We bought gas, found a tap near the military outpost so we could wash, and decided to drive on. It was too hot to stop. The road ahead was even more gruesome. It was a moonscape with miles and miles of black gravel covering acres of sand and not one blade of grass or one breath of life visible. Probably the most horrible place I have ever seen or will ever see again.
There was almost one hundred miles of this landscape and the road was only gravel now, the black top gone, very washboard in spots. About every fifteen miles we would pass a little square fort, few signs of life around them till unset when we found that there were people inside them.
We passed several road crews raking the gravel on the road and they waved as we passed. Once in a while we passed a man walking off into the distance across the desert. Where could he be going? We saw a few camels grazing on who knows what, black gravel?
About 5 or 5:30 p.m. we got to Nok Kundi, the customs barrier between Pakistan and Iran. We stopped and give in our passports and permits for processing. Found a place that sold a very poor version of Coke. There were several other foreigners, a young couple on a motorcycle, etc. We set up camp in the rest house for the night. No one was there when we arrived. Only brackish water for bathing. It was fearfully hot.
We cooked super on the porch, set up our beds and tried to sleep. Soon others came. Daddy was invited for a “drink” with an officer who said he knew a lot of missionaries in Lahore, but daddy preferred to sleep. A party of two in a Volkswagen arrived in the middle of the night – having driven 600 miles across Iran. The man was an engineer returning from duty in Congo. His wife looked tired.
….
June 11, 1963
We got up and away early. The road got worse and worse for the last one hundred miles more desert. We could see the railway coming along with us. At last in the middle of the desert with Grand Canyon type mountains on one side and a huge water-course, dry as a bone, there was sign “Pakistan ends – Goodbye!” Immediately the road signs and all the markers stopped and the road disintegrated into a track. At the other side of the big, dry river bed [wadi] we came into a little town, Mirjevah, Iran.
We were flagged down by the police and asked to show our papers. The train had just pulled in and the railway gate was down there so we sat and bathed our faces and hands in the pool out front while Daddy talked to the police. The people only spoke Farsi. We drove around the deserted looking streets and bought some gas from a big oil barrel; time to push on to Zahidan. We drove through the heat, stopped at a little caravan serai for lunch and were surprised by how cool it was inside. Dust storm all afternoon and so hot.
As we came into Zahidan there was a policeman flagging us down. We had not gone through customs in Mirjevah. He wanted us to go back 60 miles. Finally we got that straightened out [daddy paid?]. Got some good tasting water finally in the customs yard and we could hardly wait to let the Halazone act to take a drink. We needed to cash a check but the banks were all closed over the long noon hour so they sent us to the airport. We found the way there and some army men led us to the barracks. They gave us a drink in their mess hall. The boys all eyes us like they hadn’t seen American girls for a long time [ever?]. The major could cash our check for $50. They were cute guys. We could see planes taking off and landing. Bobby loved it.
We stopped to camp for the night another few miles on behind a sand dune. We were up in very rolling hills about 6,000 feet. It was hot at sunset but cool to sleep under the stars and waning moon. We could hear trucks rolling by all night.
June 12, 1963
We got up at 4 a.m. and started off because this was supposed to be the DAY, the very worst day of all. We were in the Afghan Pass and finally about 6 a.m., after sun up, we climbed up into steep hills and crossed the ridge. We started down steeply, stopped in a dry stream for breakfast of tea, hard boiled eggs and bread. The mountains were quite high, 7,000 feet, and very pretty with all sorts of different colored strata. The pass was just a narrow gorge.
We came down into the real desert, crossing the Dast-i-lut Salt Lake, and thought it would be bad. It was not as desolate as the end of Baluchaisthan had been, rolling sand dunes, stony patches, some reeds and shrubs. We kept watching for towers, fort ruins, etc., marked on the map and saw some old ruins. Then we came to the desert light house, stopped and got a picture. We climbed to the top and Johnny counted the steps. Soon we were passing little settlements, oases? With palm trees, irrigation ditches, some very pretty red stone pillar formations. [I drove about fifty miles here.] And so into Bam by noon , very good time and the worst was supposedly past.
We looked for a restaurant and a hotel so we could have a rest. Found a Brazilian who had an Iranian wife and three daughters in Teheran, who had lived and worked in or with Americans so he had a U.S. accent. He helped us find a place to stay, upstairs in a little hotel and helped us order nan and sheesh kabobs, Cokes, which we took upstairs to our room to eat. Mom began to wash clothes and we all bathed in the bathroom until the hotel people got it across to us with sign language that our bathing was melting the walls downstairs. It was wickedly hot in that upstairs room. At 4 p.m. we couldn’t stand it anymore so loaded up the van and left. Daddy bathed in a cold, swift irrigation stream outside of town and we drove one. We stopped for the night in a lovely little valley, sand and prickly bushes, some camels grazing nearby. We got a good sleep. There were mosquitoes but it was cool.
June 13, 1963
We got off early. The Iranians know how to save their water and every time there is any water at all there is a lovely settlement with tall cypress trees and green fields. So refreshing after hours of scorching heat, miles of sand dunes, prickly bushes, sand eddies and not a living soul.
At noon we got to Kerman and ought nan right out of the oven at an interesting bakery. We watched them put it in with long shovels into the furnace and then when it comes out they thrown it down on the hearth to dust off the ashes, then set it up on a rack. Everyone buys and carries it off. The cities all look alike. Suburbs of high walled houses, trees showing over the walls, clear water running in the ditches on the road sides. There are wide roads, lovely squares with cypress trees, gardens, fountains, shops all around the square. We met a young student who spoke good English who showed us around. We went to the post office and sent telegrams that we were delayed. Looked at an old mosque our guide wanted us to see. He wanted us to come to his home but we went on. We stocked up, watermelon, tomatoes, bread, Cokes and gas.
Out of town a way a stone flipped up and cut the tire and we had a blow-out. We changed it and get in to Rafsangan around 3 or 4 p.m. Tried to buy a tire. It would have cleaned us out of Irani money so we stayed till the bank opened. It was hot in the car, a crowd formed staring at us, and we felt awful. We parked outside the bank, there was a flower garden inside. Got out of town finally and found a lovely cool canal to camp, three lined, cold and swift. There was a wind and semi-dust storm blowing. There were people at the road and they offered to let us stay in their house and asked for medicines. They were gracious and kind. Apparently all the buses and trucks stop here for water.
June 14, 1963
Off at 7 a.m. About 10 a.m. we came to an old fort on both sides of the road. It looked really ancient. We found a big, round well full of brittle green weeds, water clear as crystal but salty. We sat and drank our tea and cookies and went on refreshed. The scenery is all the same, sand and stones with bare colorful mountains on the horizon and corrugated road.
Came into Yezd at noon. We went into a restaurant into the back room and ordered rice, anan, kebabs and orange soda. We saw the men drinking liquor in small glassed. The we ordered tea and found out that it was hot tea in fragile, little glasses, served with a lump of sugar which you dip in the tea and suck.
We went on. About twenty miles out of Yezd the car began acting up. Stopped at an open room like a mosque and Daddy cleaned the air filter. An old man sleeping on a lovely old rung woke up and offered us a seat on it, hospitable and kindly.
At 6 p.m. the car stopped dead. Everything seemed to have shaken loose; the oil cap had fallen off. A truck driver stopped and looked at the engine with dad. He said motor “thaman,” electrical system – or something “not thaman.” Daddy flagged down a Volkswagen of men going into Nain. We all sat in the van, in the dark, scared stiff and ate a supper of dry bread, canned deviled ham, apricots and condensed milk. We put the lantern in the back window and Johnny and Bobby went to sleep. Patty and I were wide awake. At 9:10 p.m. daddy came back with a curly haired little mechanic in a Jeep with a driver. Everything in the engine was loose. They fiddled with it and the mechanic coaxed it into starting and we drove into town. Daddy had bought us a big sack of nougat which we ate for countries to come.
We got into the town about midnight, terribly sleepy and tired. A restaurant owner cleared out his back room with lovely Persian carpets on the floor where we spread out and went to sleep.
June 15, 1963
I forgot to say we saw several Persian cats wandering the streets as we drove in the night before. Nice long haired ones. We woke up to find ourselves in sort of a bus station. Buses were parked in back. The yard was filthy and the bathroom behind was unspeakable. Mother would not let us use it. “Curly” and his assistant showed up and worked on the van while we breakfasted on yogurt and cleaned the car, inside and out. We took everything out, swept out the dust and tidied up the load in back and on top. By then we had put the van back together and the mechanics paid, about $10 for everything. We were out of Nain by 9 a.m. The road lay up over a mountain ridge, 2,000 feet or higher. We went up to 7,000 feet valley between 8,000 foot peaks, past pretty little villages, wheat field and stone fences. Pretty and picturesque. Coming down into the plain again we went past a lot of heavy construction machinery, roads being constructed, very dusty. We found an irrigation ditch and washed up as best we could outside Isfahan.
The town of Isfahan was fabulous; a big city set in garden fields, tree-lined streets, a garden paradise. We drove into the downtown square, founds, ringed by flower beds, a road circling the square and surrounded by old blue domed mosques, colonnaded buildings and other beautiful old buildings. We found a restaurant right off the square. They would not let us in but motioned us to go across the street. There we were shown into an upper room and food was brought to us – rice, nan, kebabs, yogurt, and water cress. It was hard to communicate at all but they served what they should we should have. Such interesting shops. Lots of tourist curios. I spotted a shoe store. Lots of modern shops too.
Julfa is across the river from the main city. We got across to it and drove up and down for two hours asking for the address we had and using the little map we had which was wrong. Met a Geman and others who spoke English. We had given up till we found the German man and he got us on the right track. Just as we turned in a little lane with high walls and big doors. Mrs. T. came out and mom recognized her immediately as Sarkies’[1] mother. We piled out of the van joyfully. Just then one of the tires went flat [our only flat of the whole trip].
The house was so interesting. You enter through the big door and into a courtyard. It had several fruit trees, cherries ripening, other fruit too. Flagstones on most of the courtyard around the trees. Small rooms to left and right of the entrance and then her rooms, up a flight of 12 or 15 steps. There was a balcony with a railing, and a dining and living room with her bedroom behind. The kitchen was just a small boarded space. There were lovely, colorful Persian rugs, fine heavy lace curtains. The nice furniture was immaculate and polished. We were welcome by lots of family members. An uncle and his youngish wife, a girl cousin, and a young man cousin, Caro, a real doll. He spoke fluent English and was the curator of the Julfa cathedral and Armenian museum.
After a bit Uncle Minas took us out again to see the sights. We went to the square and to a park with a hall where the old shahs used to hold audiences. It was beautiful, all marble with huge wooden pillars. Paintings with gold leaf inside (icons) like we had seen in the cathedral which was covered with paintings right to the roof. The garden here was full of roses and green grass with reflecting pools. One pavilion had twenty pillars and is called the Pavilion of Forty Pillars because of the reflecting pool in front of it. We were taken out to the edge of town to see a little mosque with a shaking pillar. It was pretty ramshackle.
Back for more tea and we sat and visited with the relatives till time to eat dinner (9:30 pm). Lucy and her husband and daughter were with us. Lucy is Sarkies’ sister. She has two sons in California, one studying pharmacy. Also there was Uncle Minas with his wife and son. The niece spoke English and had a lovely beehive hairstyle. Dinner consisted of nan, rice, roast meat, roasted potatoes, salad, and stewed, mixed fruit for dessert. We were a big crowd around the table. There was lovely china and silver. Mrs. Toomikian had bedding for us – snowy sheets, heavy quilts all covered with white sheets and pinned in, big thick pillows and heavy mattresses. The beds were laid out on the Persian carpet.
The lower rooms were all rented out and the renters came in quietly and left their shoes at the door to their room. Each had a water jug nearby. The well was under the corner of the living room. Cool water was brought up in a sort of basin.
[1] Sarkies Tommikian was a student of my grandfather, Mason Vaugh, at the Agricultural Institute in Allahabad and still lived in India.
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