Whisky Good!

Our time in Iran is nearly up. The last week was spent in Tehran where a line of white mountains give false hope to the concrete-dwellers down below. Tehran is a vast grid of flyovers, cables and propagandist murals. The former US Embassy is rather tastefully daubed with images of a sick and dying West, the British Embassy still stands silent. These symbols do not however reflect the opinions of the people we have met.

We were walking through Tehran with Freddy, an Iranian friend of ours when he spotted the police up ahead. Freddy, unlike most Iranians, sported sideburns, long hair and  a rock T-shirt. As we approached the police he quickly and subtly removed his earring.  I asked if they would they take the earring if they saw it, 'No' he said 'they'd take me.' He wasn't joking, friends of his had been arrested for less. One friend, a black-clad drummer with a mane of curly hair, had been arrested for little more than being with his girlfriend and for being a 'satanist' i.e. having long hair. He faced a 6 month jail sentence but was lucky enough to have an uncle in the police. It is these small things rather than grand ideals such as democracy that often get people most riled. Before democracy, before freedom of speech, people want personal freedom, alcohol and sex (or at least the right to hold hands with their girlfriend).

Amongst the hundreds of people we have met in Iran only two have had good words to say about the government, one was in his early teens, the other a touch unhinged. The rest have attacked the regime with unchecked vitriol and not just the regime, but Islam itself. Of course most of the people that speak to us do not represent all of Iran, they are the educated, the open-minded, but there are many such people. A majority say they to want to leave Iran, ask us how they can get to England. 

Plenty of things happen behind closed doors though. Freddy (he has rejected his Islamic name) and friends meet in a smoky cafe in Tehran, images of revolution and rock musicians on the wall. Here men and women with tattoos, piercings and dangerous thoughts smoke and talk. I was surprised then, to hear that they were playing inoffensive soundtrack music and soft jazz, 'We can't play vocal music' they explained 'they [the authorities] think it's satanist'. Elsewhere, one middle-aged man excitedly invited us to his hotel room where he proudly got out a bottle of homemade vodka and huge bag of weed. 'Whisky, good!' is a common refrain. Another man told me about his underground club who meet once a week to discuss Pink Floyd lyrics.  It is unbelievable that such a thing has to be underground and perhaps equally unbelievable that anyone can make sense of Pink Floyd lyrics.

Every time someone starts government-bashing (and this is very often) I ask what can be done, how it will change, but the answers are always pessimistic. There is no hope, they say, we just want to leave. Some blame the Islamic Revolution in 1979, some blame the coming of the Arabs, the coming of Islam. It  is so very sad. I have never known a country with so little hope, a country with such a broken heart.
The people here have been so unbelievably kind and hospitable I can't even begin to describe it, but being in Iran has been a sobering experience, a saddening experience. Perhaps what has made it so difficult is the fact that it is so easy to relate to the Iranians we've met because, like many of us, they are educated, worldly, modern people but they are trapped in a medieval prison. I don't want to put any of you off visiting, it is a wonderful place for a holiday and a place where hospitality and generosity take on new meanings. In the last few days we were given chocolates and a miraculously fast visa extension by an army colonel, given a free meal in a restaurant because we were 'guests' and a free lift to our homestay by a helpful passer-by. Miraculous acts of kindness by strangers have become the norm for us.

We've now nearly untangled the bureaucratic nightmare that is Central Asian visas (the Uzbek Embassy didn't even stock application forms) and will soon leave for the liberal paradise of Turkmenistan (well at least it's one place ahead of North Korea in the free media league).

We're now in the holy city of Mashhad, a kind of bottleneck for overland travellers to Central Asia. We stay in a sort of a home stay with a ragtag bunch that includes Dutch and Spanish cyclists and a French couple who drove here in a 2CV. We've all had enough of being stopped, greeted and questioned by well meaning but incessant passers-by twenty times a day. The finest variation on the 'where are you from?' question we've heard was the quite wonderful 'Made in?'

To Turkmenistan!

Castles Made of Sand

We were in a taxi hurtling into unfeasible blackness, the driver barking unintelligible pidgin over the blare of the radio, when it struck me that we were miles from anywhere, there  was not a single light on the horizon, not a sound but the roaring engine, the wailing radio.

It was a relief when we finally pulled into a mud-built settlement, lights glowing from behind ancient doors. A man waved from behind a mud wall, with his other hand he appeared to be feeding a baby camel. We had arrived in the oasis village Garmeh. Before long we were stretched out on carpets before a fire, drinking chay and listening to a shaggy-haired Sufi make miraculous rhythms on a pair of clay pots. This was Maziar, a kind of Iranian hippy (if such a thing is possible) who had renovated his rambling family home and opened it as a guesthouse. Everything was made from the desert, mud brick and adobe moulded into a kind of intricate sandcastle. That night we stood on the roof and watched the stars, the only things that disturbed the silence were the yowling of jackals and a tiny stream gurgling a hundred metres away.

When morning came we realised how remote we were. The village was a cluster of mud houses and archways amongst a ring of green date palms. For miles around there was nothing but dusty plains and jagged brown mountains. Next door, a thousand-year-old fortress crumbled back from whence it came, rejoining the dust clouds that allowed one to look directly at the sun, a perfect silver disc in red-brown haze.

We climbed the mountain behind the village and, after surveying the absolute nothingness, realised what an unearthly paradise Britain would seem to these people. While stood on a high rocky crag I let out wolf-like howl (what else would one do on a high rocky crag?) and, a hundred metres away, Nic responded. Except, when I mentioned it to her, she said she hadn't made a sound, she had simply heard two separate howls. There was only one possible conclusion, the jackals had accepted me as one if their own. 

Resisting the urge to join my furry brethren, we travelled through sand and dust storms (at times it felt like a strange night was falling) to the village of Toudeshk. Our experience here was quite wonderful and I intend to write about it before long (somehow, despite doing essentially bugger all, I can never find the time).

As per usual I have got overexcited here and run too far ahead and must retrace our dusty footsteps south to the ancient city of Persepolis. It was from these parts that Persian armies blazed west to sack Athens and here, years later, that Alexander the Great retaliated by burning  the city to the ground. We have been following in his bloody footsteps since Greece, for it was he who blazed the path that made the Silk Roads possible (we try to avoid the raping and pillaging though- it doesn't seem to go down too well). In Iran, Alexander was depicted as a horned devil, children were warned (and sometimes still are) that Iskender would get them if they didn't eat their greens.

I digress. Persepolis was wonderful and it is far beyond my literary powers to describe it adequately. Bizarrely, the thing that sent most shivers down my spine was the grafitti. Into a archway guarded by griffins, great explorers had carved their names (among them Henry Morton Stanley) and, ignoring the crowds and clicking camera phones, you could almost imagine yourself among them.

 We next went to Yazd, a whole city of mud architecture. Lane after beautiful lane of courtyards, caravanserais, tunnels and arches swarmed around us, as if it had grown organically from the desert floor. The roofscape was riven with badgirs, intricate chimneys that are designed to suck cool desert breezes down into the houses. Beneath the city ancient qanats still bring water from mountain streams. These are underground channels that were (and occasionally still are) dug by hand, carrying fresh water for miles and miles. 

In an old qanat cistern, now an empty dome of mud brick, we found the utterly bizarre Yazd Zurkhaneh Club. Zurkaneh is the ancient Iranian practice of mystic body building. In a circular space a group of sweaty men and boys perform ritualistic feats of strength to a throbbing drum. As the men heft huge weights, swing chains and whirl like dervishes, Sufi prayers and poems are sung. As the rhythms quickened and the exercises grew more intense, I found myself with the peculiar sensation of being rather moved by the sight of a fat hairy man in absurd trousers making himself dizzy. 

Though there's much more to say, I cannot ask of you any more of your time (and perhaps some things are best said when outside these borders). We're now amongst the wayward traffic of Tehran waiting for Uzbek visas, planning the next stretch of the journey east.

Thanks for reading and I hope you're all well out there.

Welcome to Iran

This comes to you via a top secret source (code name: my brother). The Iranian authorities had clearly got wind of the dangerous nature of my prose and blocked this website before our arrival.

Leaving Turkey by minibus, we were dropped at a dusty road, Iranian flags fluttered on the hill before us. Traversing trucks and oversized hessian packages, we arrived at a desk serviced by a stern moustache. Attached to this moustache was an even sterner looking man who began thumbing through our passports in painfully slow motion. I was beginning to think about a different route to China when, STAMP! We were waved through to come face to face with the glowering twin portraits of Khomenai and Khamenai and the grinning faces of black-marketeers. We were in Iran.

Hiring a taxi to the nearest town, we sped between craggy brown mountains and the sun-bleached posters of Iran-Iraq war martyrs. The first women we saw were swathed in black chadors (the black sheet that only shows the face) but soon we were seeing girls with Bollywood make-up, skinny jeans and headscarves clinging precariously to absurdly bouffaned hair. The men, an extremely gentle lot, responded to such a show with faded denim and gallons of hair gel.

Arriving in Tabriz, we stood on a street corner dazed and  culture-shocked as neon buzzed to life in every shop window and traffic honked and screeched around us. The comforting Roman script used in Turkey had dissolved into disorientating Arabic squiggles. Before long, the map we had been examining had been whisked away by helpful hands and a gaggle of men swept from the pavement and a nearby electrical shop to spirit us to our hotel. You are never lost for long in this country.

'Hey Mister! Where you from?'

'Engilistan'

'Engilistan? Very good country! You are welcome in Iran!'

This is the conversation we have ten, twenty times a day, once accompanied by a kiss to my head (an old man who sold, and perhaps was,  nuts), twice accompanied by offers to dinner and, more often than not, followed by long conversations as we stroll the bazaars or amongst the shadows of heavenly buildings.

The heart of Tabriz was its bazaar, a 7km square labyrinth of vaulted brick that was begun a thousand years ago. We tumbled through its ornate arches to occasionally find ourselves in cathedral-like halls where beams of dusty light shone on piles of gaudy fabric, or caravanserais awash with Adidas shoes. Though ancient, the building still lives. With a shout of 'Yalla! Yalla!' cart-pushers shove their wares through forests of chadors past spices, cow's feet, and 'Louis Vuitton' bedspreads. Faithful spill from hidden mosques into the snow-flecked city.

Then to glorious Esfahan where we saw some of the most magnificent buildings we will ever see, architecture that brings a lump to the throat. Watching the sun set over the blue domes and palaces of Naqsh-e Jehan Square was special (even when distracted by a hundred  shaking hands and offers of tea). Esfahan even had that rarest of things,  other travellers! We hadn't seen any in weeks.

We're now in the poetic if disappointingly unwiney city of Shiraz. At the tomb of Hafez, a saint-like hero of Persian poetry, people gather to pay their respects, recite poetry and lay red rises on the marble. Nic, clearly feeling the mystic vibe, started reciting a poem that began 'Pick-a-nose Pick, picked his nose and made him sick'. Really, I do try to culture the dear girl.

Tomorrow we're off to the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis! That's about the most exciting sentence I'll ever write.

Note: In a previous post, I mentioned a lake of 'scared carp', this was supposed to read 'sacred carp'. I neither take part in nor condone the frightening of fish (or any other aquatic creature) and apologise for any confusion this may have caused.