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Published: July 12th 2006
Tabriz
Statue of famous 12th century Azeri-Iranian poet Shiroani Khaqani, in front of the blue mosque.I knew nothing about the Islamic Republic of Iran before this trip, and although Robin knew a little more the country was largely a mystery for both of us. It was also something of an enigma - we knew one story about the country based on news, history and political impressions from the west. We had already learnt from our experience in Syria and other countries not to trust these however. The stories from other travellers and Iranian people themselves, i.e. people who had actually been there and didn’t have a political axe to grind, painted a very different picture. This was partly what made us so keen to visit the place, to find out what the real Iran was actually like.
We had been given a 1997 guide book and I was a little apprehensive about how I would manage with the hijab (headscarf and over-shirt). Our book informed us that only traditional classical Persian music was allowed, that playing cards were banned and so were short sleeves for men. However this book was well out of date, and much seems to have changed in the last ten years. Short sleeves abound, on the men at least, and music
Mountains and Mosques
No so different to the Turkish side of the border...... blares from every car - a lot of it not Persian at all and even less being classical Persian.
The Islamic nature of the country has not really been so in my face as I expected. Yes some Iranian women wear a chador which is a kind of cape. Not all of them do however, and one girl described the women that do as "more Islamic than Mohammed". The quotations from the Koran that adorn the government buildings are actually quite nice. Official charity boxes are everywhere, since ‘zakat’, or alms-giving, is one of the tenets of Islam. The country is still an ‘Islamic Republic’ however, although many of things I had imagined would be associated with this either simply do not exist, or are much less obvious and prevalent in Iran than in other, supposedly secular, countries such as Syria and especially Egypt. If you thought that Iran would be a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism then forget it - Egypt is much more like this. But we will come to all that later.
Iran is certainly one of the most interesting countries we have been to on this trip so far. The people, whether they be Azeri
Martyrs Memorial
Alright so this is definitely different - every small town has board or mural depicting its dead from the Iran-Iraq war. Turks, Kurds, Lors or Persians (and there are many others) have been the most courteous and polite people we have ever met. Iran is a calm and chilled out country. One Iranian girl said that Iranians “take things as they come” and that they “believe in fate and that our fate will be a good one”. It is a very attractive mindset - why worry about the future when it causes so much wasted energy.
I am surprised to feel very at home with Iran and Iranians, I think it is because European culture has in fact learnt/taken a lot from Persia over history and is much more closely linked than the Arab or Turkish culture that we had been familiar with over the last few months. Indeed, as Iranians will be quick to tell you, they are the original Aryan peoples who left India, and therefore a lot of Europeans are possibly descended from them. Their language and culture is recognisably European compared to the rest of the so-called Middle East.
We could write and write about general thoughts, observations and feelings about Iran. Initially we had only 21 days on our visa and this, coupled with
Open Steppe
Long, flat, boring, stretching on forever. Azerbaijan, Iran. unfounded paranoia about the government spying on internet use, put us off writing any blogs while we were here. We have now been here for nearly 2 months and have so much to write about, it’s hard knowing where to start. I guess the most sensible thing is to start at the beginning and let the story unfold the way it happened. Warning though - this will be a very long blog…….
We arrived at the border and passed a long line of trucks on the Turkish side before entering a compound surrounded by high fences and armed guards. It took 5 minutes to get stamped out of Turkey and then we cycled on up to a large building and gate with the Iranian flag next to huge portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. The border is notorious for lengthy delays but we had our passports checked quickly and were shown through the gate. In fact the border crossing was very simple - most of our time was spent with a tourist guide who wanted to practice his English on us, but he did give us a free map of the country in Farsi, which would come in useful. He also
Revolutionary
Typical Revolutionary Statue in a town square. helped the police translate our names phonetically into Persian script, our passports were stamped and that was it. We changed our last Turkish lire with an illegal money changer in the middle of the customs hall, right next to the border police. There didn’t seem to be any actual customs officials around so we pushed our bikes straight through the hall and out into the Iranian sunshine, the whole thing took less than an hour and half of that was taken up drinking tea while the tourist guy kept asking us “how can I improve my English?” and telling us that “you have freedom in Iran”.
Elated we headed down a steep hill into Iran and the border town of Bazargan, where we hoped to change some dollars at a good rate. Unfortunately we did not accept the rates the many exchanges were telling us in Bazargan. Based on our out-of-date guide book we thought that you could get about 1/3 more rials for your dollars if you used the black market. The old guide book implored you to do this, so we set off from the border thinking that there would be a better exchange at Maku, the
first real town inside Iran.
Still wearing my long sleeved shirt I was quick to notice that most of the men in Bazargan were wearing short sleeves - something we had thought was illegal. As it was pretty hot my sleeves soon got rolled up too. No such luck for Erika though, long-sleeves and headscarves were definitely still the rule for women.
The road to Maku cut through similar country to that on the Turkish side, wide valleys between steep, high snow-capped mountains. The town of Maku is strung out along a road between two huge rows of towering cliffs, and we had trouble trying to find the centre of town, it just seemed to go on forever. A man stopped his car and asked if we needed help, and he gave us directions as well as welcoming us to Iran - a phrase we would soon hear a lot of.
We spent an unfruitful time in Maku trying to change our money. Although there are lots of banks in Iran few will change your foreign money and the one that would was shut for siesta. The hotels in town were offering terrible rates and phoning round ahead of
Hijab'd Cyclist
During a breif respite from the flat steppe. I think you might even be able to see some trees...amazing! us to other hotels to make sure we did not get a better rate elsewhere. In disgust we cycled off, with about $3 on us in rials and a good supply of food that we had bought in Turkey we thought we would manage. The road was a nice gentle downhill ride or flat, but the scale of the landscape was simply huge. Beyond Maku the hills became lower and more spaced out and we entered big areas of wide open steppe. One notable feature that was different from the similar volcanic steppe of eastern Turkey was that that were trees here, not many maybe but there are absolutely none in eastern Turkey. I had thought this was a natural phenomena but the conspicuously lower number of sheep and goats on the Iranian side may be something to do with it. We pushed on quickly, as we wanted to try and reach Tabriz, the first major city, as soon as possible and find out the score regarding getting visas extended. Before entering Iran we had promised ourselves to accept every offer of hospitality as this would be the best way to learn as much as possible about the country -
Porridge!!
Despite the long hard days and early mornings Erika is very happy indeed. we failed on this before leaving Maku as a guy invited to stay at his house that night - we simply had to get much further into Iran before the sun set. We left Maku without buying any fuel for the stove, convinced there would be petrol somewhere in the next 50 miles.
That night we managed to buy some vegetables in a very small town and asked where the petrol station was, to our dismay they said 30 km more. We were exhausted and had been used to Turkey which has the most plentiful petrol stations of anywhere on the planet I am sure. We managed to beg a small amount of petrol from a car workshop and found a good camp hidden in small hills just beside the road. We could still see Ararat back to our west and we prepared for an early start and a long cycle the next day.
We made it to Tabriz in 3 days but they were really long ones about 80 miles then 90 miles and 40 miles to the city. I did not really enjoy these first days in Iran the days were long on the bike, but
Blue Mosque, Tabriz
Our first glimpse of Persian architecture and mosaic work. Sadly not much of it here as the mosque was badly damaged in an earthquake. our distance covered on our map of Iran was tiny and this was really disheartening. Our second day seemed to comprise of endless bits of steppe between isolated ridges of hills, which we then had to climb over, and again finding petrol and supplies was hard - the distances between villages and shops were just so much bigger than what we had been used to. In fact everything just seemed so huge. The road surfaces were better than in Turkey though and despite having been told the driving was terrible in Iran it didn’t seem so different. The roads are full of the national car - the Paykan - which is actually the old British Hillman Hunter. Around the same time we stopped making them in Britain they shipped an entire factory over from Australia and started making them in Iran, changing the name but little else.
We managed to change some dollars the next day in a small town - again no joy at the bank but while Robin was waiting outside he got an invite from an old guy called Ghoram to come for tea at his gold shop across the road. Of course - a gold
Iranian Landscape
Did I mention they have trees? Look, I'm definitely not imagining them....!! shop is also a money exchange so we swapped one 50 dollar note for an enormous bundle of rials. He pointed to the picture of Khomeini on the back and asked did we know him? We said yes “Ayatollah”, and then admitted we had no idea who the old US president is on the $50 note - they thought this was hilarious. He gave us a lesson about Iranian money; with 9,000 rials to the dollar nobody talks about rials, instead they use tomen, with 1 tomen equalling 10 rials. Of course 1 tomen is therefore still a useless currency unit so everything is discussed in terms of hundreds or thousands of tomens! Then 1 thousand tomen/10 thousand rials is also sometimes called 1 Khomen, because the 10,000 rial note has Khomeini on the back - as does every other note….. Hmmm, I still can’t figure this logic but you get used to it pretty fast, and learning to read the Farsi words for rials or tomen is pretty useful as no two places ever quote prices in the same units! Ghoram got his son to escort us on our shopping trip for food supplies, and encouraged us to tell people at home how nice Iran and Iranian people are - “they should know the truth, not what America says…” This a request we would hear again and again, and still do.
After crossing a range of hills covered with lush green orchards (trees- I still cant get over them all) we are back in open and hot steppe for a long slog towards Marand. We have lunch in the shade of a roadside kebab shop and cycle on and on. We stop to buy petrol but the petrol station has no petrol !?! Robin goes to use the toilets out back and returns saying he can wait - he reckons they haven’t been cleaned since the Revolution. In the mid afternoon, hot, tired and thirsty we are passed by the convoy of French camper vans from Dogubayazit, they wave but don’t stop to offer any water etc. We are miles from anywhere. An Iranian truck pulls up and asks if we need any help - water? We ask. Yes he has a huge tank under his trailer and a refrigerated box. Lovely. We pass 2 major accident scenes later, one involving a head-on collision between 2 articulated trucks and think maybe Iranian driving is bad after all. We arrive at the town of Marand late in the day, hoping to quickly buy supplies and leave town looking for a camp. It takes an hour just to buy some beans and vegetables. Happily though porridge oats are everywhere and we look forward to a good Scottish breakfast the next morning.
We are guided out of town by a friendly guy in a car, but also accompanied by a dozen or so less friendly guys on motorbikes. As in Syria there are lots of young men cruising around on cheap, locally made motorbikes and they often ride alongside trying to chat. This was our first real experience and we heard stories of big groups of them causing other cyclists problems. These guys weren’t really that unfriendly, they were just overexcited, there was too many of them and a couple at least were just being bloody dangerous. I tried to force one of them into a parked car just to get him to back off. We were just too tired to deal with them. Fortunately, like dogs, there seems to be an invisible line marking their territory and we left them somewhere near the edge of town. It was now pitch black and the road was climbing up into the hills. We managed to find a rocky camp spot and just about pitch the tent in the wind without using any pegs, before eating a late meal and collapsing into the tent and to sleep.
We were surprised in the morning to wake up and see hundreds of people who had got up to see the sunrise from the top of the hill we had camped beside. We were happy to see that Iranians love hill walking; even women in full chadors were up striding up the steep hill. We were delayed that morning by realising we had left our Farsi phrasebook in the shop back in Marand, it took 2 hours to go back and retrieve it, though the shopkeeper had kept it and had even phoned the police in case they could help return it to us. Not that it had been much use thus far - this part of Iran is called Azerbaijan and it is populated mostly by Azeris, who speak their own version of Turkish. While we could barely understand them we quickly realised that they understood our “Istanbul” Turkish better then our attempts at Farsi/Persian. On the other hand it was quick to learn some basic Persian as it is so similar to the Kurdish we had learnt in eastern Turkey.
The road to Tabriz crossed a small range of hills before descending into a wide plain which we crossed on a busy road towards the huge, sprawling industrial outskirts of the city. A car with 2 young guys pulled up and asked where we from and if we liked Iran etc. “Iranians not terrorist, not Al Qaeda” one of them kept yelling, even as they sped off again.
Azeris have a bad press (undeserved I would say) in Iran as being mean and the least hospitable people in the country, especially so for Tabrizis. We were very happy then when on the way into the city a car stopped an a Tabrizi man invited us to come and stay at his house, “eat good food, meet my family, take you around the sights of Tabriz”. Well we couldn’t refuse, but he had problems explaining where his house was. We agreed to follow him in his car; I added that he would to make point of driving slowly as obviously we were on bikes. Yes, he says, as if this was stupid thing for me to say, and drives off. We managed to keep him in sight for all of 20 seconds before he disappeared. I assumed he would stop before the next big junction but we never saw him again!
We resorted to our original plan and found a good hotel in Tabriz, Guesthouse Darya, it was cheap and clean and had a very friendly owner who put our bikes inside his own home for security. We stayed a day in Tabriz, enjoying a lie-in since we were exhausted and planning our route onwards. We liked Tabriz, although not a very beautiful city it was a lot more chilled out than any other city of that size we had been used to from Turkey and the rest of the Middle East. We wandered around seeing the blue mosque and the bazaar and I managed to find a new pair of shoes. We were happy to discover that a lot of the things we expected in Iran were different; girls spoke to Robin and would even shake his hand, and guys were happy to talk to me. We saw men and women holding hands in the street. There were Bollywood VCD’s for sale in shop windows complete with scantily clad Indian women on their covers. Pop music was blasting out of music shops.
At the tourist info we met a guy who again was keen to ask us to tell the truth about Iran to people at home - “we are not terrorist, not Taliban”. He is Azeri but also definitely Iranian, when I mention Turkey he say the Turks look down on Iran, before slagging the Turkish off for being too obsessed with “football, popstars and dancing”, saying that Turkey owes the US lots of money and their youth are no good, being obsessed with football and dancing! Iran is not in debt to the USA and their young people want to be “doctors, lawyers, nuclear scientists!” and are not going out dancing etc. (which is only because its illegal…..)
We decided to skip the Caspian Sea, Alborz mountains and Tehran, and head southeast through the Zagros mountains towards Esfahan. It would be tight schedule but we should mange to get there to extend our visa with some time to spare.
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Kate Hildebrand
Kate Hildebrand
Ulysses S. Grant- Union general of the American Civil War.
Interesting blog! I'd like to go to Iran in a year or two provided that things don't get all "War On Terror"ed.