Cross Cultural Matters

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Cross Cultural Matters

My trip to the far Northwestern region of Iran was a great experience. After wandering around many small and big towns east of the Caspian and meeting with many ethnicities, I was able to enter Turkmenistan, but not for too long. I was banking on visa-on-arrival but he border passport office, which is a few kilometers inland, required an advance visa and an invitation from someone in Turkmenistan in order to let me enter the country. Even though my objective was to get to Tajikistan but I had to go through Turkmenistan, to get there. My expectation was visa-on-arrival like in many other countries in the region.




It was arrogant of me to think that these small and almost unheard of countries do not require a visa for American passport holders to get into. I am learning and witnessing hands on that US is losing it's grip in the Middle East. There are a lots of restriction on ground movements around the region. This was not my experience a couple of years ago when I was in Egypt and Jordan or even Israel.

It became more complicated as I needed a visa for every country along the way to Tajik including Uzbekistan, and of course it was so because I was traveling by ground not by air. I attempted to go there through Afghanistan but the same conditions applied. They all required detail and long process of visa application and medical clearance which I do not have the time or the patience of standing in lines and going through the bureaucratic red-tapes of administrative work in Iran. I decided to return to Tehran. The best way would have been to obtain the visa to these countries in the US and from Washington by mail. Not from Iran!

I arrived back in Tehran two days ago and planing on seeing more of Iran instead. We’ll see where the road takes me next.

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Comments

[gorbe]

So good to hear from you azizam, I totally hear you about not wanting to deal with paper work. Enjoy your adventures in Iran...