Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2009 | Page 58

life

INTERVIEW

Close encounters

Travelling in their replica of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Nick and Carolyn
Pointing have travelled through Turkey and Iran. But their plans were
about to be severely interrupted
Benazir Bhutto, the English-educated iconic
politician, and to many westerners the face
of Pakistan, had just been assassinated. A
state of emergency had been declared. It
was not an auspicious time for Nick and
Carolyn to be contemplating travel through
Pakistan.
Intending to cross Iran and go east into
Pakistan, and thence to Afganistan, they
found, when they arrived in Tehran
repeated warnings against travelling through
Pakistan. “At first we shrugged it off,” says
Carolyn, “but then a German woman who
spoke fluent English said ‘Don’t go, don’t
go. You cannot – there are so many bandits,
you’ll never be seen again.’ We thought we
ought to check.”
Nick rang the British Embassy. “They said
‘You’re in what? Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?!’
Under no circumstances were we to proceed
– there’d been four Westerners kidnapped
recently.”
The answer seemed to be to put the car
on a freight train which went from central
to southern Iran. Carolyn went off to the

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station while Nick stayed to prepare the
car for the journey. And they each ran into
trouble.
Stations can be confusing and frustrating
places in your own country, but when the
language and customs are alien they can
be near impossible to negotiate, as Carolyn
was about to discover. “There were glass
counters, like a Post Office, and I just had
to guess which queue to get into. While I’m
queuing, I get an elbow in my side from an
Iranian woman.”
Being dressed head to toe in black, to
conform to the strict Muslim code, was an
insufficient disguise of her obviously Western
white skin and blue eyes. The old woman
who had touched her was waving her hand,
showing she should get out of the queue.
“So I waved my hand, to show I was staying.
She pulled my sleeve, I shook my head – I
was staying there! Then she gets a whole
load of people who grab chairs from the side
of the room and effectively barricade the
line to push me out of the queue. She was
pushing chair legs into me. It was nothing

less than an assault,” says police officer
Carolyn, more used to being the other side
of such incidents.
As the woman was “chuffing on in farsi,”
Carolyn confesses: “I gave her a mouthful
and walked away.”
Carolyn returned to find Nick had fallen
into an incident over which he had no
control. So many people had stopped on
the duel carriageway to have a look at him
as he prepared Chitty that the road was
blocked. “Then in all the kafuffle a taxi
knocked a motorcyclist off his bike. Now
there was petrol from the bike running
under the car, the biker had smacked the
taxi man down and they were fighting, and
suddenly hundreds of blokes were looking
at me and shaking my car left to right. There
was petrol on the road, violence – and it’s all
my fault!”
Police ushered Chitty away from the main
road, though this drew another 100 people
to stare. “Then suddenly a door opens, an
old lady comes out and offers me a cup of
tea. It was bizarre!”

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