Where in the world is John Henzell?

It was thanks to the vagaries of Iranian immigration policy that I got to be threatened by a sword-wielding (if somewhat camp-looking) gladiator.

And that the official two-person expedition by the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club to scale the highest peak in the Middle East ended with us in two different countries, establishing that Mt Damavand was more than 6000m above (Dead) Sea level.

But all that was in the future.

When the day I flew from Dushanbe in Tajikistan to Tehran turned spectacularly pear-shaped by me being refused entry and deported from Iran, I was still a little disorientated when I turned up on the Dubai Marina doorstep of my hospitable but perplexed friends Suze and Pete.

The deportation was galling but would not have been a big deal if not for Wendy, another climber from the Abu Dhabi Alpine Club who was about to fly to Tehran the next day to join me. So Plan B was to see if I could convince the Iranian embassy in Abu Dhabi to let me in so I could join her the next day rather than having her arrive alone in a country to which she’d never previously travelled.

A sharp rebuff from the embassy — “We will have to send this application to Tehran but you should know within three weeks” — saw me owing Wendy a dozen cans of cider by way of compensation and searching for Plan C instead.

And that’s how I ended up in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Of all the nations within a short flight of the Dhabs, this was the one I’d most wanted to get to before I left the region so I booked a cheap flight and landed in Amman, arriving on Independence Day when the populace were buying Jordanian flags to celebrate their independence from British rule.

Early on the morning after I arrived, I travelled to Petra, an ancient city which was the capital of the Nabatean empire 2000 years ago but which was overtaken by the Romans, fell into disuse and then effectively was unknown to the outside world until about 200 years ago.

Now it’s one of the world’s most impressive sights.

My introduction was via the Petra by Night tour, where you walk down the Siq — the canyon which restricted access to the city — by candlelight.

It was a full moon night too, which reduced the dependence on candles.

Then the Treasury, an iconic structure which is the first major monument seen on arrival at the site, came into view.

I went back in early the following day before the tour buses arrived. I thought the most enjoyable part of it is seeing people emerge from the Siq and see the Treasury.

It was still relatively cool so I made my way up via a mountain path to the High Place, where sacrifices were once made to appease whatever god the Nabateans believed in.

A special groove had been cut to channel the blood from the sacrifice.

(I suspect the choice of species involved operates on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy)

The views over the main valley of Petra justified the trip on their own.

The tourist vendors took a pretty laidback approach to their task. Sometimes literally.

But it was a nice change from the remorseless hassle of places like India or Morocco or Bali.

I headed down the far side, taking refuge from the heat in the middle of the day, using the thermal mass of the temple buildings.

A sandstorm rolled in as I walked down the collonaded street but I continued on to the Monastery, located up a side valley at the end of the site.

At the bottom of the route was a warning that it was dangerous without a guide. The only apparent danger I could see was to the locals’ earning capacity if tourists realised they didn’t need to hire a guide. The route itself was fine.

This vendor partway up to the monastery chose the edge of the cliff as his sleeping place, after a sisha session.

My guess is he isn’t a sleepwalker.

The monastery was worth the effort, particularly because of the cafe with oh-so-comfortable setees set up facing it…

I walked out at dusk, until I was called in by one of the Bedu and plied with tea once he’d completed the full maghreb — dusk– prayer.

He gently proselytised me about Islam, citing its benefits in good moral living and refusal of alcohol.

But I’d already promised myself a beer in the bar outside the entrance that’s set in a 2000-year-old cave.

By the time I arrived back at the Siq, the evening’s candlelight effort was underway again.

All this earned me a telling off from the head of security, who threatened me with jail. But it was worth it to see Petra by moonlight.

After a night (and the promised Cave Bar beer), I headed to Wadi Rum, where I joined a 4×4 tour in the world’s most decrepit LandCruiser.

After a tour of Arizona-style natural arches, sand dunes and some bizarre petroglyph-like rock formations, we arrived at the campsite set up to have a killer sunset view.

Then we headed into the Bedouin tent for dinner. Almost everyone slept inside the tent but I dragged my mattress out onto the dune to sleep under the stars. As ever, I woke up to find a series of animal tracks around me.

I moved on to an awesome 15th century village called Dana, located on the edge of the scarp leading down the Aqaba valley separating Jordan from Israel, then the next day five of us hiked down the wadi to an ancient copper-mining site that has been worked for 6000 years and was mentioned in the bible.

Towards the bottom of the valley, we began encountering Bedouin shepherds, who immediately invited us in for tea.

Unlike in the cities, we met the entire family rather than just the men.

The other four went back up to Dana with a car they’d arranged but I opted to hitch along the Dead Sea Highway.

Jordan’s proximity to Israel was usually apparent, notwithstanding the peace treaty between the two nations.

You can swim anywhere in the Dead Sea but most do so at the resorts on the northern end near Amman so they can use the freshwater showers to wash off the salt, because the water is nine times as saline as the sea.

The novelty value of bobbing a couple of inches higher and being unable to swim on your front lasted about 15 minutes before the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

But the most amusing part was learning on the beach here via text that Wendy made it to the top of Mt Damavand. The summit is about 5600m or so, but since I was currently more than 400m below sea level, our expedition had covered more than 6000m of height difference.

I headed back to Amman and for my last full day in Jordan, I went to Jerash, a town just north of the capital which has some of the world’s best-preserved Roman ruins.

And a local history group had created a centurion, gladiator and chariot experience to relive the old days.

But a childhood of being indoctrinated by Asterix and Obelix books meant I was incapable of taking the centurions seriously.

The gladiators were more impressive, in that Oxford Street way.

The chariot riding was a little cheesy but was done at a pace which showed that OSH hadn’t been consulted.

Then it was back for one last night in Amman before flying to Abu Dhabi then on to New York, assuming the American immigration officials were more amenable than their Iranian counterparts…

“No visa.”

The Iranian immigration officer was as gruff as he was direct.

“Can you tell me why?” I implored. “Am I not eligible for a visa? Or have decided I am a bad person? Do you know that Australians and New Zealanders, unlike Americans and Brits, can get visas on arrival?”

I silently cursed the Emirati habit of putting occupation on the UAE resident’s visa, so it was clear — in English and Arabic — that I was a journalist. Was it because I was on my second tourist visa in three months that they decided I wasn’t actually a genuine tourist?

But the only response was: “No visa.”

Then he told me I would have to get on the plane on its return flight to Dushanbe in Tajikistan. I was being deported.

“But why?”

No response, just a polite but firm insistence that I get on the plane. I didn’t have a return entry visa to Tajikistan so that was not shaping up as a very helpful option so instead I asked if there was a flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

There was, and two hours later I was enjoying the view over the wing of the Iranian Airways plane of Mt Damavand, a 5600m volcano that is the highest peak in the Middle East and which was the subject of my visit to Iran, the culmination of my get-fit trip to the ’stans to prepare myself for the CDT.

It was time to think up a Plan B…

For a day and a half, I was nowhere: stranded in no-man’s-land between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And in a blizzard.

I’d already gone through the Kyrgyz border controls and, with a single-entry visa, couldn’t return.

The Kyrgyz post had been located sensibly in the shelter of the valley at the foot of the Pamirs but the Tajik equivalent is on the actual border, 20km further on just over the 4200m pass crossing the mountain range that divides the two countries.

Unknown to me at the time, Kyrgyzstan had been running out of fuel, one of few negative ramifications of the short and sharp uprising which had overturned the government. What it meant was traffic between the southern Kyrgyz capital of Osh and Murgab in the eastern Pamirs trickled to a halt. And what that meant for me was I was stranded in no man’s land.

My arrival early in the morning had coincided with height of the fuel shortage. Several vehicles went north into Kyrgyzstan that day but not a single one went south into Tajikistan.

The soldiers and police at the Kyrgyz border were friendly enough and we whiled away the boredom with games of the central Asian version of backgammon. But they were equally adamant I couldn’t stay there overnight.

Fortunately for me, there was a Kyrgyz family living a short distance away in no-man’s-land took me in while I waited for a ride.

The enforced stay provided a wonderful view of life within a traditional family.

Not least of which is how much work the women do. Here, one of the daughters was milking a nak — a female yak, although I suspect it was actually a dzhou — during one of the regular snow storms.

A 4×4 Lada packed to the rafters passed southbound early the next morning and then an English couple, Charlie and Nina, arrived, having been told by the border guards — bribed by me with a pack of Chinese cigarettes — that I was stranded here.

Charlie was a banker in the City and was made redundant in the global financial crisis and they figured that with the job situation looking so dire for the forseeable future, it was time to buy a 4×4 and do a mammoth figure-eight loop from London via central Asia, the subcontinent, Singapore and China.

Besides the adventure, it was a wise call because some of their colleagues who stayed to search for work are still unemployed, more than a year later.

As they put it in their blog, NoJobWillTravel.co.uk: “Nestled in a rocky, snow covered valley at the base of the 4,282m Kizyl-Art Pass, the Kyrgyz border post feels like the remotest border point on earth. Certainly not a place we’re expecting to see foreigners.

“Having stamped us out of the country, though, the border officials tell us there’s an Australian” – I travel on my Australian passport – “hiker stuck in no-man’s land a kilometre on, waiting for a lift.

“We try to imagine what sort of tourist would knowingly find himself stranded within the 21km of no-man’s land between the two isolated borders…

“As we pull up to a solitary Kyrgyz farmhouse, an excited, bearded and bespectacled Westerner, in walking boots and a big jacket, springs from the house and walks towards us. No wonder John’s surprised to see us, he’s been here for a day and a half waiting for a lift of any description – the fuel shortage in southern Kyrgyzstan has decimated nearly all the border traffic.

” ‘You need a lift? Hop in!’ Soon John plus rucksack are loaded into the back of the car.”

And very grateful I was too, as only a day and a half in no-man’s-land can engender.

We drove on to the Tajik border, located in a series of former fuel tanks and shipping containers in as godforsaken a site as it would be possible to imagine. I had a mild altitude headache just from being there for the two hours or so of border formalities and couldn’t imagine being stationed there.

That pass proved to be mild. Another was at 4655m — a little lower than the summit of Mont Blanc or 900m higher than Aoraki Mount Cook — and all helped to make this highway the one with the highest average height.

The scenery had a stark beauty to it. Almost nothing grew here and after an hour or so along the crumbling highway, built for the Soviet military in the 1930s and 1940s and seemingly not maintained since, we arrived at the lakeside village of Karakol.

The lake, created by a meteorite, was frozen over and the town seemed to be too.

Just beyond in a site even more remote some poor soldier was stationed at a watchtower keeping eye on the border with China. This area had been the scene of the Great Game, a jostling match between imperial interests because this is where the Soviet, British and Chinese geographical spheres of influence intersected.

We changed money. Two US$100 notes produced this embarrassing wodge of Tajik notes.

After a night in the regional capital, Murgab, I went up to a hot springs while Charlie and Nina continued to Khorog.

I’d hoped to do some yurt to yurt hiking but a late and snowy spring left me about a fortnight too early because the nomads had not moved to their summer grazing in the high country.

But I got to sleep in a yurt, under a sky of swirling stars which I could see through the hole in the top of the yurt.

This was a slightly touristy yurt rather than the genuine variety as used seasonally in the high country.

The radiators kind of give that away, channeling hot water from the hot springs to provide a yurt with central heating.

By the time I returned to Murgab, the fuel shortage had been resolved so I booked a seat in a share taxi to the western Pamiri capital, Khorog. When I saw my mode of transport was going to be the mid-1970s Soviet-era automotive awesomeness that is a UAZ 3741, I had an inkling this was going to be very authentic, very local and very uncomfortable.

That initial impression was confirmed when the door creaked open and I discovered there as many trussed-up live sheep on board as passengers.

My pack was hoisted into the back, coming to rest on the topmost of eight of the live sheep’s less fortunate brethren, which had been slaughtered and skinned then ready to transport to the market at Khorog.

When we reached the first police checkpoint, instead of gathering our passports the driver got his knife out and cut off a chunk of mutton and took that in instead. And it seemed to work because we were on the road again in a flash.

Khorog had a nice and prosperous feel to it, which was a stark contrast to how it had been when it backed the wrong side in the brutal six-year civil war that wracked Tajikistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This chaikarna — teahouse — beside the river had been built in the local park where 15 years earlier, the economy had become so bad that money was abandoned in favour of a system of barter and local people ripped up the park to grow food.

After a day, I headed down to the fortnightly market at Ishkashim, which was held across the river in Afghanistan but could be reached without the need of a visa.

The drive along the Panj river that forms the boundaries between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was awesome. At first there seemed to be a millennium of difference between the two sides, with the Tajik one having a road and electricity and the Afghan one having little more than a donkey track.

But as we drove along, the Tajik side deteriorated and we ran into NGO-funded road crews turning the Afghan track into one fit for vehicles.

The next morning, I wandered over to the Afghan Bazaar, flanked by a mix of Tajik and Afghan soldiers who were mostly tooled up ready for bad stuff to happen.

The market was a fascinating mix of two cultures, even if Rambo movies are entirely cross cultural.

This was where the Persian and Indo-European worlds mixed with the Turkic and Eurasian ones, genetically and linguistically.

A coterie of Tajik women ran a chai and plov stall in the market but refused to charge me.

At this point, I had in cash on me about 10 years worth of their annual fiscal income.

I ran into Charlie and Nina again and scored another lift from them, this time heading up the Wakhan corridor, a valley split between Tajikistan and Afghanistan which was a Great Game solution designed to ease the tensions between the three great imperial nations at the point where British, Russian and Chinese interests met.

The people in this region are mostly Ismaili, a tolerant third strand of Islam compared to Sunni and Shia.

The Aga Khan, the Ismaili spiritual leader, had played a big part in this region and supported a series of homestays like this one.

This was classic Pamiri architecture. The reception room has five pillars — representing both the five main prophets and the five tenets of the faith — and the roof had four layers to represent the elements of earth, water, fire and air.

Our host was the grandson of a noted sufi, or mystic, and took us on a tour of the rebuilt home of his famous ancestor, including playing traditional instruments.

There had been new snow overnight but we pushed on, a little worried about the 4300m pass we had to cross.

But a quirk of geography and climate meant that although there was substantial snow here at 3400m, it was entirely dry nearly 1000m higher.

The valleys on the Afghan side were often kept perfectly, as you’d expect from an entirely autonomous subsistence farming operation.

There were still mines here from when this was the front line of the Cold War between Western and Soviet interests.

Another NGO was clearing the mines on the Tajik side, although the opiate trafficking from Afghanistan through Tajikistan to Europe took advantage of what was a pretty porous border.

And there were relics of the Afghan wars.

On what we thought was going to be our last day on the Afghan border, Charlie got down on one knee and proposed to Nina.

After 11 months on the road, they actually not only tolerated but actively enjoyed each other’s company, so marriage ought to be a breeze.

We toasted the engagement with Baltica Nine (anyone who has been to central Asia will know what this means!) then we all went back to the room we all shared, it being five days since our last shower… Yep, romance is alive and well.

There are two roads between the Pamirs and Dushanbe, the capital. One is really terrible and the other is even worse.

The terrible one was closed by landslides so we had to take the even worse one, which was clearly not long for this world.

The Pamiri part of Tajikistan had sided with the rebels in the ultimately unsuccessful civil war so the central government has been treating them like second class citizens ever since.

And I flew to Iran, getting an excellent view of Mt Damavand, the 5600m volcano which is the Middle East’s highest peak.

I was supposed to climb it. Supposed to…

The crucial moment in the spring uprising that overturned Kyrgyzstan’s government was when the police and the army realised that they liked shooting their own citizens a lot less than they liked the breathtakingly kleptocratic regime they were supposed to be defending.

Or so it was explained to me on a warm spring day on the one-month anniversary as I sat outside the battered gates of the Kyrgyz parliament, in front of an impromptu martyrs’ memorial which had bedecked the security fence and past which a steady procession of citizens walked and remembered.

A month earlier, I’d been sitting at my desk in the newsroom in Abu Dhabi. At first, I overheard the BBC World Service broadcast mentioning riots in Kyrgyzstan and didn’t pay a lot of attention to it but within a matter of hours, the broadcaster was reporting that the government had been overturned and Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev had fled.

Since I was headed to Kyrgyzstan, I began paying rather more attention, especially when Bakiyev retreated to his regional stronghold in Osh, in the southern half of the geomorphically divided country, and maintained his claim to power.

This was sounding like a a protracted battle between the northern and southern factions of the country but eventually Bakiyev blinked and took the offer of safe passage out of the country in return for renouncing his premiership.

By the time I arrived via a share taxi from Almaty, there was at first no sign of any violence. But then I noticed the burned-out building on the main square.

Closer examination suggested that this might not have been an accident…

Across the road was the museum, which had on the door the names of the 80-plus people who’d died in the short and sharp revolution.

Just outside was a little circle of rocks, a photo and some flowers showing where one of those names had died.

Two minutes walk away was the Parliament, where the gates still showed the scars of being rammed with a truck by the angry crowd.

In Bishkek and then later in Kyrgyzstan, I heard that the revolt was sparked when an already kleptocratic regime ramped it up by several notches, selling the utility companies to a Cypriot investment company when promptly raised heating prices by 60 per cent. Most people in the city have municipal heating for the five months of cold weather so they had no option.

Then they discovered the president’s son, who used his position to become the head of the local mafia and who took a cut on all imported items from Turkey and China, was behind the Cypriot shelf company.

That’s when the riots began. The army was sent to quell it but the protesters took over two army trucks full of weapons and ammunition, which might explain why the protest then moved to Bishkek and ramped up.

This store just off the main square was one connected to the son so it was looted and then set alight by the crowd.

The people were exceptionally friendly.

My first experience in the country (not counting the gorgeous Kyrgyz woman in short shorts who sat next to me on the bus) was the bus driver refusing to take my 60som (about $1) fare.

At the time, I was carrying all the money I’d need in Iran, where sanctions prevent the use of western bank and credit cards, so I estimated I had about 8-10 years of his salary in my pocket.

Then I went back to the state museum, which didn’t seem to have changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, other than they’d moved Lenin’s statue from the front to the back.

Lenin lived on in bronze. It felt like it’s not so much that they’re nostalgic for a return of the communist era so much as they haven’t found anything else to replace it. And it’d cost a fortune to make a new series of bronze effigies, and it would probably be of the current president who would be overturned by the time they were finished.

The top floor featured an awesome 1980s-era mural of Cowboy Ronald Reagan riding a Pershing missile.

Bishkek was nice enough but I pushed on to Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second city, which involved driving over a couple of 3000m-plus passes where the local nomad herders had set up their yurts.

Osh was located in the breadbasket of the Fergana valley. The main reason was to go to the bazaar, reputed to be one of the best in central Asia. And it was both interesting and very authentic, not to mention very photogenic.

In a riverside park near the bazaar, many of the soviet traits were still in full force, such as the chess players.

As in Bishkek, Lenin was still in situ. And as in Bishkek, it seemed that they simply hadn’t found something better to replace him.

With the red star, you’d swear it was still 1989.

The next day I took a share taxi to Gulcha, along the start of the Pamir military highway that was built in the 1930s to allow fast access to the region where the Great Game — as described in Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim — had been played at the crossroads of British, Soviet and Chinese territorial interests.

By chance, I arrived on Victory Day, celebrating the defeat of Germany in the Great Patriotic War, as the WWII is known here.

Almost the entire town had gathered at the sports field for the commemoration.

I spotted a sea of felt hats at one side, which on closer inspection proved to be Kyrgyz veterans of the great patriotic war.

They would all have to have been aged at least in their mid-eighties to have taken part.

A stirring martial tune — which I took to be the Kyrgyz national anthem, although I really have no idea — prompted some emotional responses from the veterans.

The younger Kyrgyz seemed to take it equally seriously.

The road quickly deteriorated then went over a couple of high passes to the town of Sary Tash, the last one in Kyrgyzstan on the Pamir Highway.

And it was the most godforsaken, frozen and windswept piece of tundra you would ever find.

I took a wander through the windswept and frozen town.

There were a bunch of bored kids taking turns to through rocks at a post, but my eyes were on the background.

This was the start of the Pamirs and tomorrow I was due to head into the range and into Tajikistan.