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I should have known I was going to have my issues with Iran, when an officious member of the crew told me I had to put on my chador almost as soon as we had scrambled up into the seating deck on the ferry. I could feel the usually dormant feminist within me sharpening her claws.
Theresa all covered up in the ferry
We had both had mixed feelings about Iran. It was the first country on our trip, which automatically gave it a certain attraction, and many previous overlanders had said that they wished they had had more time there.
The ferry trip from Sharjah to Bandar Abbas was in fact very pleasant in the end. We had to deliver the car to the port at 9am, and then passengers were instructed to return at 3pm. We obeyed in German fashion, and found ourselves hanging around until immigration actually opened at 5.30pm. Apparently the ferry company tells people to arrive at 3pm, knowing that they will arrive at 6pm.
The car in the ferry to Bandar Abbas
Dinner (rice and kebabs) was served just before a surprisingly prompt departure at 9pm, at which point anyone wanting to sleep crawled off into some dark (and cockroach inhabited) corner of the “lounge”. The two other overlanding groups were clearly more practised than us. They had arrived at the port with their cars in the late afternoon, and snuck downstairs to their cosy campers as soon as the ferry left Sharjah, whilst we stayed upstairs trying to sleep through a football match between Chelsea and Barcelona with Farsi commentary at full volume.
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Waste Management
There seems to be a general waste management problem in Iran.
Public rubbish bins are available at petrol stations, and in parks. Otherwise no rubbish bins were evident.
Roadsides or embankments from roads into valleys seem to be the preferred place for dumping building and municipal waste. People take the initiative to burn litter at the roadside when the volume becomes unmanageable.
Every town or village has a semi-official rubbish dump, which is either a large ditch, or a cliff edge where the rubbish is tipped over the edge into the valley below.
None of the dumps we saw were fenced, and in most cases no earth was placed over the rubbish and therefore lighter plastic waste was strewn across the area. Livestock is generally left to roam freely, under the supervision of a herder, and it is therefore highly likely that camels, cows, donkeys, goats and sheep ingest plastic within the dumps, or as a result of the waste being blown across the surrounding area.
An extremely high density (at least two items per square meter) of plastic waste was visible within a radius of approximately 750m of the dumps. Within the next 2 kilometers the density drops to approximately one item per ten square meters, with plastic bags making up 90% of the waste. After three to four kilometers from a dump there are at least four or five items within a five hundred meter radius.
Here is the link to the Google Map site of our route, i.e. our overnight stays so far. As the SPOT GPS tracker only keeps the positions saved for seven days, this map is more permanent, and shows the more or less exact position of our sleeps since leaving Dubai.
View PNSF Expedition route so far in a larger map
Our passion is the great outdoors. We love to discover new places, but unfortunately we have encountered all too often the destructive effects of plastic pollution in the most remote corners of the globe.
Thus the idea came to combine the two – a great journey with a great cause. PlasticNotSoFantastic was born…
Join us in our quest to: explore – encounter – investigate – learn – ACT!
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