An Interview with ‘The Slow Road to Tehran’ Author Rebecca Lowe

In 2015, Rebecca Lowe mounted a bicycle in her native United Kingdom and began to ride. She had never done any serious bike-touring before, so her ultimate destination seemed far-fetched: Tehran, the capital of Iran. She wouldn’t even ride there directly; her trans-continental route would include side trips to Egypt and Oman, as she zigzagged through that amoebic cartographic concept, the Middle East.

This journey resulted in a book, The Slow Road to Tehran. Her premise is familiar to any Momentum reader: Bicycle travel is perfectly paced for exploring places and peoples. Over the course of the book, Lowe winds her way along 11,000 kilometers, taking in the full cultural spectrum of the Muslim world. Tehran is full of surprises — and delightful bursts of humor — as Lowe interviews strangers, pedals along every quality of road, and nearly succumbs to heat stroke in the middle of the Sahara desert. Lowe makes her way through teeming cities, remote villages, and forbidding wilderness, bonding with locals along the way. Her reportage challenges countless Western presumptions and vividly illustrates such off-limits places as rural Iran.

We recently corresponded with Lowe about The Slow Road to Tehran, her ongoing relationship with cycling, and how an eventful few years have shaped her perspective.

One thing I couldn’t tell from the story was whether The Slow Road to Tehran had been commissioned before you left. Did you expect to turn your journey into a book from the start?

Good question! No it hadn’t, and this was one of the reasons the book was so challenging to write. I never set off with the intention to write anything more than articles and blogs, with the aim of finding some good human interest stories and kicking off my freelance journalism career. I only changed my mind when I was approached by an agent after my return who asked if I’d considered writing a book. I then endeavoured to transform a year-long series of eclectic, jumbled experiences into a cohesive whole with a strong narrative thread – and it turned out to be a far bigger challenge than the cycle itself!

You describe yourself as new to cycling, and the early chapters of The Slow Road to Tehran are self-deprecatingly funny. How would you describe your transformation as someone who rides a bike?

Well, I wasn’t entirely ‘new’ to cycling as such. I had always enjoyed cycling, and had cycled everywhere in London for many years, including commuting to work and back every day. But you’re absolutely right that I was new to tour cycling. The longest trip I’d done before this journey was a four-day charity ride from London to Paris, which I did alongside 30 burly policemen and a support vehicle that carried all our luggage (I was in the slowest group, the Rhinos, who were rechristened the ‘Winos’ halfway through the trip for reasons I found deeply unfair). The day I left to ride to Iran, I had clocked up precisely zero hours of training – why waste time trying to get fit in advance, I reasoned, when I had a whole year to do so once I was on the road? – and had never cycled with panniers. In fact, I’d never even cycled on that particular bike before (the tantalisingly named ‘Kona Sutra’), which was generously donated as sponsorship by Kona but only arrived the night before departure. For all these reasons, I admit I felt a little unprepared for what the journey might hold in store – and I wish I could say that I breezed easily through those first days and weeks as my fitness and aptitude grew. But sadly I can’t. It was extremely tough. I would sometimes cycle wildly circuitous routes to avoid even the slightest of inclines, and my rock-hard Brooks saddle never ‘softened up’ into the cloud of sunshine and fairy dust I’d been promised. I’d also made the rash decision to take a ukulele with me, imagining myself as a kind of romantic latter-day Laurie Lee, but in the end it proved to be a terrible millstone around my neck – getting in the way and forever clattering off the back of the bike into the undergrowth – and I never played it once. By the end of the journey, I was a far happier, more confident cyclist, but I have to admit I never developed the love affair with hills that I’d hoped!

A lot of people take long bike tours, gain notoriety, and then never so much as look at a bicycle again. Have you continued to ride following the release of The Slow Road to Tehran? Do you anticipate another cross-country trek in the future?

I have, and I intend to continue riding until I’m too old and wizened to stay upright. Despite what I said before, cycling is a wonderful mode of transport and a truly fantastic way to see the world. Two hundred years after their invention, bicycles remain the most popular form of transport in the world, and I can absolutely see why. Slow enough to be immersive but fast enough to be exhilarating, they allow you to really embed yourself in the communities you’re passing through while also covering a decent amount of distance in a day. They feel almost magical, weaving gold from straw in a bewitching form of alchemy as you put in minimum effort and get propelled across almost every type of terrain without any kind of motorised assistance (hills notwithstanding). I’d truly love to do another big journey by bicycle, though sadly it could never be as long or self-indulgent as my cycle to Iran as I am now a mother to an energetic, attention-seeking toddler, and expecting a second in December! I may consider taking the young cherubs with me in the future, but not until they’re large enough to be pull their own weight – ie be harnessed like huskies or go foraging for food. And leaving them at home would almost certainly spell the end of my relationship. So I think it will have to be shorter, sharper adventures in the near future (see answer to Q6 below).

In my own experience in economically disadvantaged regions, bicycles can be (a) a symbol of freedom and empowerment, but it can also be (b) a mark of shame, indicating that someone is too poor to own a car. Did you observe ways that the use of bicycles represented social status in different regions?

Actually I never encountered bicycles as a mark of shame. This may be the case in richer Western societies, but in most of the places I was cycling through they were seen as a positive sign of freedom and progress. What was frustrating, however, was the stark gender divide in terms of who was able and willing to ride a bicycle. The further outside Western Europe I travelled, the fewer women I encountered on bicycles, due largely to cultural, social and religious constraints. In places like Upper Egypt, Jordan and Iran, female cyclists were almost unheard of – which is deeply troubling when you consider that the first woman to cycle around the world, Annie Londonderry, did so 129 years ago (and with three young children at home, no less, so perhaps I should take inspiration?). The lack of progress over that time is astonishing and heartbreaking. However, I was cheered by the fact that more and more women are cycling in urban areas in these countries, such as Cairo and Tehran, so things are at least moving in the right direction. Cairo had a surprising number of female cyclists, in fact, and in Tehran droves of women took to the streets on their bicycles after Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa in September 2016 banning them from cycling in public, under the hashtag #iranianwomenlovecycling. As we have seen with the widespread street protests recently, Iranian women are truly a force to be reckoned with.

Many cross-country cyclists—Alastair Humphreys comes to mind—talk about a kind of “breaking point,” where an uninterrupted bike-ride feels kind of arbitrary. (Like, why not throw the bike on a train? Or hitchhike? As long as you’re biking a lot of it, right?) But with extremely rare exception, you seemed very committed to your route. Did you ever face this breaking point? What kept you going?

I completely agree that an uninterrupted bike ride is arbitrary, and mine was far from a purist trip. While I have a degree of admiration for people who wish to cycle every inch of the way, this wasn’t a priority for me, and I felt entirely comfortable occasionally hitching a ride down the road. The bike was a means to an end for me – a way to meet people and have interesting encounters – and the ‘athletic’ side of the endeavour was less important. In the south of France, where I was still unfit and temperatures were hitting 38C, I even hitched a ride with a truck of topless farmers out of sheer exhaustion, feigning an unconvincing Keyser Soze-style limp to avoid embarrassment. However, I tried not to hitchhike too often, as this would limit my opportunity to meet people during that stretch of the ride, and also because it was often a challenge with a fully laden bike!

As a father myself, I found that parenthood radically changed my travel ambitions, at least in the short term, and maybe even changed how I looked at past trips. Has parenthood shaped your perspective about your journey at all, or future plans?

It’s an interesting question and one I ask myself constantly. Sadly I don’t have a good answer yet. On the one hand, I hope parenthood won’t change my overall thinking about these kinds of journeys, as I believe there is significant social value to a certain kind of ‘intrepid’ travel that pushes boundaries and attempts to challenge preconceptions. Having a family can make you extremely insular in outlook and close your eyes to the broader perspective, and it would be a great shame if everyone stopped taking (measured) risks simply because they had children to look after at home. On the other hand, there’s no denying that I feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility to my daughter, and daughter-to-be, and would never forgive myself if I took a risk that resulted in us being separated. For example, would I travel to Iran on a dodgy visa again, as I did for this journey, and risk injury or arrest? Perhaps not, although I believe there would be a broad public interest in doing so. It’s a dilemma, and not one I’m afraid I have resolved yet.

The UK—especially London—seems to be having a bicycle-infrastructure renaissance these days, which I gather has been met with mixed feelings. You mentioned you’re moving away from London, but how have you felt about this transformation?

To be honest with you, I haven’t personally experienced this renaissance. In north London, where I lived until a few weeks ago, I didn’t witness anything transformative, although I understand there are parts of London that are being improved. Overall, I think the city needs to up its game significantly where cycling is concerned, as it’s still lagging behind other European nations and far too few people are using bikes as their primary mode of transport. We need more – and better – cycle lanes, better parking facilities for bikes at train and tube stations, better driver awareness of cyclists, better cycling promotion in schools, and an overall shift in attitude towards the idea of urban cycling. I think a lot of the problem is perception: it’s true that cycling in London should be made safer, but I also believe that people see cycling in the city as more dangerous than it truly is, largely because a lot of the media coverage focuses on occasional horror stories of cyclists being killed on the roads. However, if you’re careful then the odds of an accident are low. Plus, it’s far more interesting and efficient than travelling by car, and far healthier, cheaper and better for the environment, too!

The Slow Road to Tehran is available at Amazon or your local bookstore. You can follow Rebecca Lowe on her Twitter and Instagram accounts.