A Traveller On Horseback

This is the third book by this author which I have read, and I find them a great read. Dodwell writes in an honest way, sharing her bad decisions along with her triumphs. She writes much about the people she encounters -under good and bad circumstances, and shares a brief history by way of explanation of current events.

This particular book is quite horse focused - which should be apparent from the title. In the early 1980's Dodwell commences her travel in Eastern Turkey, enters Iran for a two week visa stay, then enters Pakistan for a short time to renew an Iranian visa, back in to Iran and then back to Turkey to complete the journey there. Her passion, experience and understanding of horses is obvious in her writing, but even for the horse novice it is still readable and non-technical for the most part.

She covers a lot of ground, meets a lot of people, the vast majority friendly and helpful. She does pass through the occasional village where she doesn't receive hospitality, but these are the minority by far. Dodwell is a brave traveller, and even in situations where she is at risk she displays no fear, which does her well in bluffing her was past trouble. The police in Eastern Turkey and in Iran were a hit and miss bunch - some going out of their way with assistance, others arresting her for no reason other than their ignorance - she does manage to get arrested four times (that I can recall).

It would be interesting to determine how much things have changed in the places she visited between the late 80s and now. She was in quite rural and remote areas, well away from base tourism, and in many of the villages it seemed like they were living no differently from a century before, so it is quite likely they have not changed much at all. other palaces have changed significantly - such as the Bam Citadel in Iran, which was totally destroyed by earthquake in 2003. This dated in parts over two thousand years.

Overall, a good relatively quick read. 4 stars.

Some quotes:
P55 in Kerman, Iran

We had lunch with some of Issa's cousins. A big family, their daughters gave me a lesson in Persian dancing, disregarding the fact that this is illegal. Music is also banned, so we kept the volume low in case any of the neighbours reported us to the Revolutionary Guards. The dance was a hip-flicking, shoulder shaking effort, which made me feel stiff and inflexible. But as one of the daughters, a heavy lump of a girl, began dancing, she was transformed into a light-stepping image of gracefulness, dancing from feet to fingertips, swaying and shimmering as her shoulders flicked to and fro, both shoulders at once. She said it had taken her years of practice to learn that movement. It seemed a shame that to display such grace was now a crime.

Another visitor to this area had been Dame Freya Stark. Louise had met her a couple of times, and so had I in England. One piece of her philosophy that has impressed me was when she said, “The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one will be surprised.” This is a technique which has helped me out of a number of tight corners in different parts of the world from China to Africa, but it seemed not always to be working in Iran where the Revolutionary Guards tended to be even more stupid themselves!