After an extra day in Dogubeyazit on which Mehmet the Kurd showed me all those amazing places like the remains of the stranded Noah's ark, and the crater where the meteor fell out of the sky one night in 1923 or so , and having picnic in front of an old, deserted police station for watching the PKK, I decided that it is now time to enter Iran.
As it turned out, there was no other transport from Dogubeyazit other than a taxi that was willing to take me as far as the border and drop me there, near no-man's-land. The last couple of kilometers of Turkey were green, just a lonely road among the meadows and the green, empty planes, with nothing clearly visible ahead of us. Then he stopped, and here I was- at the Iranian border crossing.
I did not speak a word of Farsi. This decision had been made at such short notice that I had had about one week to prepare, with the help of a volume of "Teach yourself Modern Persian" which was just enough to give me time to realise that Persian was related to both Arabic and Turkish which I knew to some extent, and that I could have learned it to some basic, somewhat passaable level, had I started maybe four months earlier. But not now. So all I knew was just "Khoda Hafez" and "Teshekur"which sounded like Turkish, and a few expressions ending in "mikonam", this was all I could master. So, my confidence of being able to cope in Iran was not very high and I felt somewhat faint at heart and braced myself for the experience of braving this country alone.
The trouble started at the border. As it turned out, it was the end of Bayram, and Bayram had given me, the lonely tourist, days of trouble already. No food, no open shops, no restaurants, people disappearing behind doors to celebrate with their invisible relatives, occasionally going for short walks on the few streets of Dogubeyazit, while I was aimlessly roaming around, in search of something to eat, and someone to relate to. Here was the next stage of Bayram: the Iranian relatives returning to their country. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and all at the same time. The busloads came first. Huge stacks of passports were handed to the immigration officers, while the rest of us waited outside. The doors to the immigration hall were kept closed, the gates before that were also kept closed, and they would only allow small groups of people inside, close the doors and make the rest of us wait. And wait we did. It took hours. The kids became cranky, the mothers nervous. This went on to the point where one woman got so angry at her wimpering little son that she kicked his feet and made him cry, because he would not leave her alone. People seemed at the end of their wits, with this border. The second time this mother kicked and screamed at her son, my eyes met with the ones of the Turk standing near me, our foreheads wrinkled in a frown, our eyes sharing concern for the crying child whose fault it was not that we were made to wait for so long.
We moved closer towards each other and started talking. He was a carpet dealer, who lived in both countries, alternating between Istanbul and Teheran, and he spoke Farsi. And Turkish. Thank GOD, I thought, finally someone who will be able to translate for me!
The door opened again and this time we were let in, but only to discover that inside it was just as crowded as outside, people were now waiting in front of two counters. Not in two lines. no, just as a crowd in disarray. Names were being called, passports passed over people's heads until they reached their owners. It took another two hours before it was my turn, and then I was made until the very last because the man did not want to turn on his computer. At one point everybody lost their patience, and all the people in the hall started shouting at the immigration officers. I had never seen anything like it and could hardly believe what I was witnessing. A whole hall of screaming, angry people who were almost ready to storm the booth of the border police if they did not hurry up processing their passports.
At last I got close to the officer's booth, and my Turk took my passport from me and stood on his toes and handed it over the glasswall to the officer. The man rolled his eyes when he saw it and stuffed my passport under his keyboard, saving it for later. And made me wait while he copied everyone's data by hand onto paper, with a fountain pen. When they had finally all been processed, including my Turk, he opened my passport. It turned out, his computer did not work. He angrily called over tp the man in the other booth, my passport passed hands again, was handed over the glass wall, and registered at last. I was almost amazed to see that they actually stamped it after looking at the picture of me wrapped in a black hijab scarf that the embassy has forever glued into my passport next to the entry visa. So here I was at last, with a permission to enter Iran. I walked out of the booth, met up with the Turk, and saw that there were only two taxis for these hundreds of people.
This meant that we had to walk to the first bus terminal inside Iran which was about 3 kilomters away. The Turk carried his bag and I rolled and pushed my suitcase down the street. After about 20 minutes I managed to stop an empty taxi which took us to where the buses were.
We bought tickets and got on the bus to Tabriz which would drop me off along the way and take him to Teheran, his final destination. How I wished, this quiet, gentle , unobtrusive Turk would be my companion for the next few days, accompany me, protect me, translate for me and show me the way- but it was not to be. The best he could do wascall a hotel and make me a reservation. It had taken four hours at the border, and the road to Tabriz was long and winding through the hills, so when I handed him my Lonely planet guide, it was already 10pm. The first hotel where I had planned to stay was full. He finally managed to get me a room, after about 3 calls.
I arrived in Tabriz when it was close to midnight. The hotel was in a dilapidated street, with crumbling walls and construction sites nearby and I felt rather unsettled. But I did manage to check in, and hand over my passport again. Everybody except me seemed to be male. An old man at the reception , a slightly younger man who took my up to my room in a squeaking, groaning old elevator.
I tried to ask questions:"Where are the towels? Is there hot water? Do you have internet? " The man kept talking and talking but he spoke only Farsi, all I could make out was words with lots of "aww" sounds in them, and I did not understand a word he said. He did not really understand me either. My Turkish did not work, even though they claimed to speak some sort of "Turkish" here. It was no good. But he kept talking, and I felt exasperated and was close to despair. How would I survive in this country? Not being able to communicate?
At last he left, and I discovered the white towels in the bathroom, and found out that what he had offered as "internet" for my computer was nothing more than a normal electric socket. Oh , well.
I climbed into bed, rolled myself into a fetal position on the huge, sagging mattress, and slept, my first lonely night in Iran.
The next morning I tackled the next, and just as vital problem of my journey: how to put on a headscarf. I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room, knowing only too well that I was not allowed outside my room, without a scarf on my head. But what to do? Suddenly the wrapping method did not work anymore, it kept falling off, it could not be too tight or it would be unbearably hot, and it could not be too loose or it would fall. I was wrapping and rewrapping and collecting the fallen scarf and starting all over again, arranging the folds, stuffing strands of hair into it, taking it off, trying again. I started to wonder when I would ever get out of my room, and would there still be any breakfast? After a full 45 minutes, I finally managed to get the scarf pinned into place, in some acceptable form.
Breakfast turned out to be a depressing affair involving stale bread, a small can of carrot jam and a butter knife made of plastic, like inside an airplane. I would soon discover that in all of Iran, tehre were almost no knives available, like in the 9/11 days on international flights, all we ever got was spoons and forks, and the knives came in miniature plastic versions of the real thing. Oh well.
The next thing I had to do was go to a bank and buy rial. The bank manager told me that he was offering me "his own special rate" (much later I found out that he took some unregistered commission this way) and I was handed an enormous wad of banknotes, with many many zeroes on them. Iran is suffering inflation, and they had not had time to redenominate their currency from rial into toman yet,. they juyst converted it inside their heads, which made the sums ever more confusing to the novice. One was expected to mentally remove 3 or 4 zeroes from the sum it said on the note, I do not remember clearly. So it was not 500.000rial but only 50 toman, or some such. I kept getting confused.
then I walked off, crossing from the Imam Khomeini street into the Ferdosi street (every city in Iran seemed to have one each of those) and trying to find a tea shop, but to no avail. As it turned out, all the same shops were gathered in one place. One street for sunglasses, one street for mobiel phones, one street for shoes and so on. I wondered how people shopped. It seemed to involve lots of walking. Someone sold me a pair of sunglasses, for a price fit for a movie star.
Then I was guided to an internet cafe, I had at last run into some people who spoke English. My next discovery was: the itnernet was censored. Instead of facebook, all I got was a message, in black script slinking across the screen, apparently saying that this website was blocked. I asked the manager of the internet cafe about this. All he said:"You want to use facebook? Just a moment!" and with a flourish, he made a few clicks, connected me to a proxy server, and voila, I was in. this was my first encounter with Iranian laws. The laws were there but people did not seem to take them all that seriously, and law enforcement seemed somewhat lax too, if internet cafes could just use vpn and proxy servers and bypass all the blockages in public?
I decided not to stay any longer in Tabriz, after it took me 3km of walking in oder to find the only cafe in the whole area, apparently, and eating my lunch out of transparent plastic baskets in a restaurant, that served food but no plates. And more plastic cutlery.
Good bye Tabriz, Roj bas, Kordestan!
As it turned out, there was no other transport from Dogubeyazit other than a taxi that was willing to take me as far as the border and drop me there, near no-man's-land. The last couple of kilometers of Turkey were green, just a lonely road among the meadows and the green, empty planes, with nothing clearly visible ahead of us. Then he stopped, and here I was- at the Iranian border crossing.
I did not speak a word of Farsi. This decision had been made at such short notice that I had had about one week to prepare, with the help of a volume of "Teach yourself Modern Persian" which was just enough to give me time to realise that Persian was related to both Arabic and Turkish which I knew to some extent, and that I could have learned it to some basic, somewhat passaable level, had I started maybe four months earlier. But not now. So all I knew was just "Khoda Hafez" and "Teshekur"which sounded like Turkish, and a few expressions ending in "mikonam", this was all I could master. So, my confidence of being able to cope in Iran was not very high and I felt somewhat faint at heart and braced myself for the experience of braving this country alone.
The trouble started at the border. As it turned out, it was the end of Bayram, and Bayram had given me, the lonely tourist, days of trouble already. No food, no open shops, no restaurants, people disappearing behind doors to celebrate with their invisible relatives, occasionally going for short walks on the few streets of Dogubeyazit, while I was aimlessly roaming around, in search of something to eat, and someone to relate to. Here was the next stage of Bayram: the Iranian relatives returning to their country. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and all at the same time. The busloads came first. Huge stacks of passports were handed to the immigration officers, while the rest of us waited outside. The doors to the immigration hall were kept closed, the gates before that were also kept closed, and they would only allow small groups of people inside, close the doors and make the rest of us wait. And wait we did. It took hours. The kids became cranky, the mothers nervous. This went on to the point where one woman got so angry at her wimpering little son that she kicked his feet and made him cry, because he would not leave her alone. People seemed at the end of their wits, with this border. The second time this mother kicked and screamed at her son, my eyes met with the ones of the Turk standing near me, our foreheads wrinkled in a frown, our eyes sharing concern for the crying child whose fault it was not that we were made to wait for so long.
We moved closer towards each other and started talking. He was a carpet dealer, who lived in both countries, alternating between Istanbul and Teheran, and he spoke Farsi. And Turkish. Thank GOD, I thought, finally someone who will be able to translate for me!
The door opened again and this time we were let in, but only to discover that inside it was just as crowded as outside, people were now waiting in front of two counters. Not in two lines. no, just as a crowd in disarray. Names were being called, passports passed over people's heads until they reached their owners. It took another two hours before it was my turn, and then I was made until the very last because the man did not want to turn on his computer. At one point everybody lost their patience, and all the people in the hall started shouting at the immigration officers. I had never seen anything like it and could hardly believe what I was witnessing. A whole hall of screaming, angry people who were almost ready to storm the booth of the border police if they did not hurry up processing their passports.
At last I got close to the officer's booth, and my Turk took my passport from me and stood on his toes and handed it over the glasswall to the officer. The man rolled his eyes when he saw it and stuffed my passport under his keyboard, saving it for later. And made me wait while he copied everyone's data by hand onto paper, with a fountain pen. When they had finally all been processed, including my Turk, he opened my passport. It turned out, his computer did not work. He angrily called over tp the man in the other booth, my passport passed hands again, was handed over the glass wall, and registered at last. I was almost amazed to see that they actually stamped it after looking at the picture of me wrapped in a black hijab scarf that the embassy has forever glued into my passport next to the entry visa. So here I was at last, with a permission to enter Iran. I walked out of the booth, met up with the Turk, and saw that there were only two taxis for these hundreds of people.
This meant that we had to walk to the first bus terminal inside Iran which was about 3 kilomters away. The Turk carried his bag and I rolled and pushed my suitcase down the street. After about 20 minutes I managed to stop an empty taxi which took us to where the buses were.
We bought tickets and got on the bus to Tabriz which would drop me off along the way and take him to Teheran, his final destination. How I wished, this quiet, gentle , unobtrusive Turk would be my companion for the next few days, accompany me, protect me, translate for me and show me the way- but it was not to be. The best he could do wascall a hotel and make me a reservation. It had taken four hours at the border, and the road to Tabriz was long and winding through the hills, so when I handed him my Lonely planet guide, it was already 10pm. The first hotel where I had planned to stay was full. He finally managed to get me a room, after about 3 calls.
I arrived in Tabriz when it was close to midnight. The hotel was in a dilapidated street, with crumbling walls and construction sites nearby and I felt rather unsettled. But I did manage to check in, and hand over my passport again. Everybody except me seemed to be male. An old man at the reception , a slightly younger man who took my up to my room in a squeaking, groaning old elevator.
I tried to ask questions:"Where are the towels? Is there hot water? Do you have internet? " The man kept talking and talking but he spoke only Farsi, all I could make out was words with lots of "aww" sounds in them, and I did not understand a word he said. He did not really understand me either. My Turkish did not work, even though they claimed to speak some sort of "Turkish" here. It was no good. But he kept talking, and I felt exasperated and was close to despair. How would I survive in this country? Not being able to communicate?
At last he left, and I discovered the white towels in the bathroom, and found out that what he had offered as "internet" for my computer was nothing more than a normal electric socket. Oh , well.
I climbed into bed, rolled myself into a fetal position on the huge, sagging mattress, and slept, my first lonely night in Iran.
The next morning I tackled the next, and just as vital problem of my journey: how to put on a headscarf. I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room, knowing only too well that I was not allowed outside my room, without a scarf on my head. But what to do? Suddenly the wrapping method did not work anymore, it kept falling off, it could not be too tight or it would be unbearably hot, and it could not be too loose or it would fall. I was wrapping and rewrapping and collecting the fallen scarf and starting all over again, arranging the folds, stuffing strands of hair into it, taking it off, trying again. I started to wonder when I would ever get out of my room, and would there still be any breakfast? After a full 45 minutes, I finally managed to get the scarf pinned into place, in some acceptable form.
Breakfast turned out to be a depressing affair involving stale bread, a small can of carrot jam and a butter knife made of plastic, like inside an airplane. I would soon discover that in all of Iran, tehre were almost no knives available, like in the 9/11 days on international flights, all we ever got was spoons and forks, and the knives came in miniature plastic versions of the real thing. Oh well.
The next thing I had to do was go to a bank and buy rial. The bank manager told me that he was offering me "his own special rate" (much later I found out that he took some unregistered commission this way) and I was handed an enormous wad of banknotes, with many many zeroes on them. Iran is suffering inflation, and they had not had time to redenominate their currency from rial into toman yet,. they juyst converted it inside their heads, which made the sums ever more confusing to the novice. One was expected to mentally remove 3 or 4 zeroes from the sum it said on the note, I do not remember clearly. So it was not 500.000rial but only 50 toman, or some such. I kept getting confused.
then I walked off, crossing from the Imam Khomeini street into the Ferdosi street (every city in Iran seemed to have one each of those) and trying to find a tea shop, but to no avail. As it turned out, all the same shops were gathered in one place. One street for sunglasses, one street for mobiel phones, one street for shoes and so on. I wondered how people shopped. It seemed to involve lots of walking. Someone sold me a pair of sunglasses, for a price fit for a movie star.
Then I was guided to an internet cafe, I had at last run into some people who spoke English. My next discovery was: the itnernet was censored. Instead of facebook, all I got was a message, in black script slinking across the screen, apparently saying that this website was blocked. I asked the manager of the internet cafe about this. All he said:"You want to use facebook? Just a moment!" and with a flourish, he made a few clicks, connected me to a proxy server, and voila, I was in. this was my first encounter with Iranian laws. The laws were there but people did not seem to take them all that seriously, and law enforcement seemed somewhat lax too, if internet cafes could just use vpn and proxy servers and bypass all the blockages in public?
I decided not to stay any longer in Tabriz, after it took me 3km of walking in oder to find the only cafe in the whole area, apparently, and eating my lunch out of transparent plastic baskets in a restaurant, that served food but no plates. And more plastic cutlery.
Good bye Tabriz, Roj bas, Kordestan!
