“We think you’ll probably die,” Rebecca Lowe was told after she announced her plan to cycle solo from London to Tehran. It was early 2015. Islamic State had just seized a swathe of Syria and Iraq and to her friends and family it seemed a mad idea. Yet, as she says, the chance of being murdered by a Jihadist was “roughly the same as being struck and killed by lightning” and she dismissed her mother’s pleas. The true dangers, revealed in this funny and freewheeling account of her year-long, 8,000-mile odyssey, were the roads, dehydration, dogs and lecherous men.
Riding a brand-new, untried bike that she christens “Maud” and carrying, among other things, a collapsible wine glass and a ukulele, Lowe makes herself out to be part-Edwardian adventurer, part-ingenue. “I was not particularly fit, had no sense of direction and held uncharitable views about people in Spandex,” she writes. In fact, she had already cycled “in a few interesting places before — India, Mexico, the Balkans”, while the idea for the trip came after she had pedalled 50 miles out of Beirut the previous December to write about the Syrian refugee crisis in northern Lebanon. A puncture on that sortie had shown her how “astonishingly helpful” people were. It dawned on her that, as a female cyclist on a much longer trip, her very vulnerability meant she would see and hear much more.
This approach was risky. In Lebanon, “pulling up beside me, a paunchy chap in a black Mercedes rolls down his window, and announces, simply, ‘Sex.’ ” Lowe replies: “Tel has teezi” (“Kiss my arse”). In Jordan, forced to hitchhike back into town to buy a new inner tube, she has to threaten her driver with her penknife after he grabs her breast. In Egypt she is relieved then horrified when a passing tuk-tuk driver who has just slapped her bottom is stopped and beaten up by the policemen who are shadowing her.
While disturbing incidents such as these punctuate the story, Lowe’s bet paid off. The Slow Road to Tehran is full of insights and confidences a man would not have heard. In Egypt she hears from young men how the astronomic cost of a wedding makes a couple put off marrying; the importance of a bride’s virginity means the country’s parlous economic situation drives sexual frustration instead. The alternative, she learns from another man, “is just to have anal sex. That’s what my fiancée’s mother told us to do.”
“Much of my route has followed the path of the first Crusade,” Lowe notes as she approaches Istanbul. Having crossed Europe and Turkey she reaches the Syrian border. There she takes a ferry to Lebanon, continuing south through Jordan, then hops across the border into Egypt and follows the Nile down to Khartoum.
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Her aim was to beat the arrival of winter on the Anatolian plateau and cross Sudan before the sun became too hot the following spring. From there — because at that point Saudi Arabia was still closed to tourists, let alone solo female cyclists — she flies to Oman before crossing the Gulf and cycling up through western Iran to her final destination, a journey in temperatures as high as 48 degrees.
She exploits free accommodation websites and her contacts to the max; an invitation to a party in Tehran is secured “from the former room mate of a lawyer I met through a journalist I stayed with in Kosovo”. People and places along the way provide hooks for interesting digressions — for instance, what Turks’ beards reveal about their politics — and good introductions to local history.
The author gets away with waspish descriptions of the people she encounters — a woman has “a parboiled face” while a man wearing a shell suit and a gold chain “is clearly from the Jimmy Savile school of conspicuous criminality” — by mocking or being rude about herself. In Muscat she winces when she glimpses herself in a mirror. “The figure staring back seems shockingly sturdy, like a saddle or an old shoe.” Struggling to find the Dead Sea, she spies a man and decides to try out some of her “best Arabic”. “My hamster escaped,” she tells him. “I miss you.”
Lowe has a particular gift for evoking the squalid, nondescript places down unmade roads where she finds lodging, where men lounge about while prematurely aged women cook, clean and mother. A dog has a tongue like “raw bavette”. Harmanli, which lies on Bulgaria’s border with Turkey, is “an unsettling place, charming in parts, but with a stale inertia at its core . . . Everything feels suspended here, in this shadowland of stray souls. I find myself suddenly desperate to escape and move on.”
Lowe’s time in Cairo (waiting for an Iranian visa) and her journey down the Nile are the best parts of the book, her brushes with officialdom providing an unsettling insight into life in two police states. Her earlier experience of Egypt during the Arab Spring gives her an extra edge. Jimmy, a once gregarious businessman who owned a guest house and restaurant in 2011, now “looks like a beaten man . . . His eyes are empty, his shoulders slumped. The flame that used to burn in him has died.” “Egypt can’t be saved now,” he tells her. “Too much damage has been done.”
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Lowe, a freelance British journalist, has a forthright confidence that brings to mind those earlier Middle Eastern adventurers Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell. Digesting the news that a Kurdish human rights lawyer whom she had met in Istanbul was shot dead two days later, she describes herself as “untouchable and immune, my passport strapped like a shield about my waist”. In a book remarkable for its honesty, this seems a strange, though possibly necessary self-delusion, but it reminded me of the awful fate of Rebecca Dykes, a British Embassy worker who was raped and murdered by her taxi driver in Beirut two years after Lowe passed through.
Despite bitter experience, the people Lowe meets remain, for the most part, optimistic that their lives will change. In Tehran, the hardline clerics are mocked for their absurd theological gymnastics — such as whether your offspring would be legitimate if you accidentally impregnated your aunt during an earthquake. “It’s difficult,” says a man working for a Syrian NGO, “but, whatever happens, I feel we’ve won. Before the uprising, there was no civil society in Syria. Now, everyone is an activist. We’ve seen a cultural revolution.” Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian novelist, agrees. “The fight’s not over,” she tells Lowe over dinner. “It’s only just beginning.”
The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride Through Europe and the Middle East by Rebecca Lowe, September, 416pp; £18.99
