Couchsurfing in Iran Read online

  THE PERSIAN GULF

  MASOUD AND I gather our jackets and a bite to eat, then go with Saler to the main road to wait for Masoud’s “fishing buddy.” I suddenly notice that I’ve forgotten my headlamp, and Masoud gives me the keys to the apartment. I walk back, knock briefly, and enter to find on the spotted sofa a strange woman, in jogging pants, very pretty, and with the opulent hairstyle of a 1970s soul singer. She looks shocked, and in a split second I realize that I’m looking at the unveiled version of Mahbube 2. She looks totally different. I quickly duck behind the door. “Come in,” she says quickly, and I apologize profusely. She doesn’t seem very happy, and I hope that, at least partially, it is because of our fishing trip and not just my stupid faux pas.

  Masoud’s friend Darius arrives somewhat late, with a backpack and fishing rod. He is roughly in his mid-fifties; has white hair, a white mustache, and black eyebrows; and can say guten Tag in German. We take a cab to the fishing port, driving to the end of a long pier. The man behind the steering wheel keeps asking whether this really is our destination. We climb over a few rocks, and Masoud and Darius prepare their rods.

  “Bring a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” announces Masoud.

  So he proceeds to teach me how to fish. Well, at least partly. My task for the night consists, after baiting the hook, of attaching a clasp with two small bells to the fishing rod. The ringing of the bells signals that the rod is bending significantly, indicating that a fish has probably fallen for the bait. Sometimes, however, a gust of wind is enough to create the sound.

  While the two rods are jammed between rocks, and we wait for the jingling of bells, I ask Masoud where his perfect American accent comes from. “I’m a great fan of the American motivational speaker Anthony Robbins,” he replies. “Once I searched for his name on Skype and actually found someone. Not the right one, but I still wrote to him. Now we are friends, and I’ve practiced a lot of English with him.”

  I’ve always understood night angling to be an activity where men keep the conversation to the essentials, contemplate the stars, the waves, life, and death, all while nipping at a hip flask every now and then. None of this applies to our first hours on the shore. Initially, I had considered Masoud to be not all that talkative, but now he opens up.

  He tells of his half-hour online session that he booked with one of Anthony Robbins’s assistants. “He asked me what my aim in life was, and I said I wanted to be a millionaire. He said: ‘That’s the wrong approach—simply formulating an aim. You have to focus on yourself first. Do you know any flight dispatchers or part-time English teachers who are millionaires? No. Then you have to change something in your life, found a company, for instance.’” Masoud already has an idea for a business, and soon he is planning to move to Shiraz to set up a language café for Iranians and foreigners.

  “And become a millionaire—with a café?” I ask.

  “No, not with that. But it’s all about having an aim in life. For example, my grandma is eighty-five and buys enough stock of some provisions for ten years. She will probably live that long simply because she is firmly convinced of it.”

  Masoud recommends some books to me: Think and Grow Rich,1 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change,2 and Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!3 He has absorbed many of the principles described in them and uses them daily.

  There is a sound of jingling, almost imperceptible against the noise of the breakers but unmistakable. Masoud grabs the rod and begins to reel it in. The line becomes taut, the rod parabolic; he purses his lips with the strain. On the surface a wild splashing of something-or-other can be seen, certainly longer than a couple feet. But then the rod springs back. “Damn it! It’s escaped,” curses Masoud. “Haven’t got a clue what it was; something big. But that’s what’s great about fishing—you don’t know what you’ve got until the last moment.”

  “Bit like couchsurfing,” I add.

  On the horizon are the lights of hotels and construction sites, and here, the lights of our headlamps. We nibble at some tochme (sunflower seeds), pistachios, and dry lemon cake. And that’s the only nibbling that goes on for a number of hours. It’s already 2:30 AM, and gradually I am the one who needs a motivational trainer to stop me suggesting that we give up and go to bed. But who needs a coach when you have Masoud?

  “Mistakes are good, as they are the chance to learn something,” he says, and we change position and go some 150 feet back toward the pier. A good decision, as within a few minutes the bells are jingling.

  Darius reels in a roughly twenty-five-inch-long sea catfish. Saler stomps on it and hits it on the head with pliers until it stops floundering. A few minutes later Masoud gets lucky and after a short tug-of-war lands another catfish on the stones. Now we’re in business!

  By first light, a milky, blurry sunrise, we have caught four catfish, a Hamour (a kind of grouper), and a bream.

  We walk a few minutes to the fish market nearby and have our catch filleted. The man is particularly rough with the catfish, deliberately cutting off large chunks and throwing the rest into a container outside as if disgusted with it. “Fish without scales are not halal according to Islam, and believers are not allowed to eat them,” Masoud explains. The bag with filets he passes on to Darius; he’s not such a strict observer.

  After staying up all night and with just a few hours’ sleep on the carpet, the best place to recover on Kish is to have a lazy day at the beach. After all, the island is supposed to have the prettiest beaches in Iran. Masoud has to work, so I travel alone to the northeast. I need caffeine, so I order a ZamZam cola, made in Iran, which tastes like Coca-Cola but with more sugar and less fizz. The moniker is interesting, as Zamzam is the name of a holy well in Mecca. A strange idea to give such a name to something as all-American as cola.

  On the bike path girls pedal past on bikes with low-slung seats. Here girls don’t have to worry about getting into trouble with the moral police. On Kish the regulations are more relaxed than elsewhere in the country. Female vacationers stroll barefoot on the beaches, wear sandals or skin-tight leggings. I even spot one without any head covering at all, which would be unthinkable in any other Iranian city. Motorboats pull rubber dinghies full of screaming tourists through the surf, a couple of girls and boys play beach soccer, and cameleers wait for customers. In a wooden pavilion a musician with a goatee finds a groove on his daf, a flat, round drum, but when a patrol car stops nearby he quickly packs away his instrument.

  Sitting two tables away from me is a fifty-year-old lady with a light green hijab, a leopard-print silk scarf, and a huge silver wristwatch. She is listening to “Wind of Change,” her cell phone resting against her sunglasses case so that the speaker is directed toward her ears. There is a bowl of chips, a pack of Kent cigarettes, and a plastic beaker of tea on the table. Klaus Meine sings about hope, about a better future. More bikes roll by, and the palms bow to the quite respectable breeze. Kish is well known for its winds. Catamarans are often forced to beach because of the choppy conditions.

  Then we get talking. Her name is Afsaneh. She moved from Tehran to the island seven years ago.

  “I love the fresh air, the sea, the relaxed atmosphere,” she says. Twice a week she takes a walk to the beach. “I enjoy walking a lot—Tehran’s too dirty, too much smog.”

  As if this were a keyword, she lights up a cigarette. Women aren’t permitted to smoke in Iran. More “Wind of Change” emanates from her cell phone, words about the wind of change blowing into time’s face, the same way a stormy wind would ring a bell of freedom, and I’d love to believe it. But Kish is hardly the moral laboratory for the future, rather a temporary place of escape, an isolated exclave of small freedoms, like a vacation with grandma and grandpa, where the kids can run wild and are allowed to eat more candy, but tougher rules apply as soon as they return to their parents.

/>   So that the Iranians don’t notice that the additional freedoms are the best thing about their Kish stay, there are shopping centers, motorboats, ghost trains, and a seventy-hectare amusement park, complete with a bird garden and a dolphinarium. I ask Afsaneh about the dolphins cleaning their teeth.

  “Yes, it’s true, and one dolphin can paint. The pictures cost between US$1,000 and US$8,000,” she says.

  Impulsively, I play with the idea of buying a dolphin. How much would you have to pay for such a creature?

  “A million American dollars,” she replies.

  Okay, at an average of US$4,500 per painting, I would have almost redeemed my costs after two hundred paintings. I dismiss this business idea and buy myself an ice cream, instead.

  Then I go and take a look at some world-famous soccer players. The road leading to the beach is flanked by larger-than-life plastic caricatures. The FIFA World Cup is soon to begin, and Iran has qualified for the first time in many years. Messi and Neymar have a lot of hair and little face. The athlete marked Mesut Özil, however, with a small tuft of hair, a gigantic nose, and huge bulging eyes, resembles something you might encounter during an excursion in a glass-bottom boat. Maybe the dolphins painted him.

  • • • • • • • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING I’m awoken by Pitbull and Masoud, a marriage made in hell. My place to crash was on the carpet directly beneath the TV, and at 7:30 AM my host has the brilliant idea of playing a music video of the American rapper at nightclub volume. Like an aerobic trainer with ADHD he dances through the apartment, singing along to Pitbull’s “Rain over Me” at the top of his voice. With that din you could probably raise the dead—and a sleeping tourist, for sure. In the clip a BMW Z4 hurtles through a desert landscape with more than a little likeness to Kish.

  “It’s time for breakfast and Nature Day!” Masoud bellows cheerfully. In contrast to me, Masoud is obviously a morning person. By “Nature Day” he means Sizdah Be-dar, the conclusion of the two-week Nowruz festivities, an Iranian public holiday when everybody spends the day outdoors and picnics.

  Mahbube 1 and 2 quickly spread a plastic sheet on the floor and deck it with pita bread, goat cheese, and homemade carrot jam. After a quick breakfast we fill the picnic hamper with a few items from the fridge and go down to the street to find a cab. A Toyota instead of a Z4 roadster, but the driver knows a thing or two about racing. We stop at a section of the shore with a rocky beach and wooden pavilions with solar panels on the roof—they are already occupied; we are too late. So we spread our picnic rug on a stretch of sand, and Masoud places a few pieces of chicken with a saffron-lemon marinade on the grill belonging to the nearest pavilion.

  Children are the best language teachers in the world. I get involved in a game of pointing to objects and naming them in Persian and English with Saler and Saba. The kids enjoy it so much that they don’t want to stop. We repeat the terms until I can say: sea (daryâ), sky (asemân), cloud (âbr), fish (mâhi), sun (chorschid), apple (sib), ear (gosch), nose (bini), eye (tscheschm), and auto (mâschin). Our strolling along the shore does Saler’s language skills some good, as up until now his English repertoire has only consisted of the perfectly pronounced “How are you?” and “Get out of my face, asshole!”

  Exactly a year ago, on my first trip to Iran, I also celebrated Nature Day, but with Yasmin and her family. Roughly fifty people had gathered together in a garden surrounded by high walls outside Tehran. We played volleyball and danced forbidden dances to Persian pop music, and inside the house there was whiskey. The streets outside the capital were completely covered by picnic blankets and tents—every piece of derelict land became an outdoor feasting area. When 30 or 50 or even 60 million people leave their secure homes and party just for one day, a state of emergency reigns in Iran.

  I was expecting a greater degree of excess on the paradise island of Kish than in Tehran, but Masoud has to work, as airplanes also fly on public holidays. So, we nibble at our saffron chicken, look at the waves, and pack everything together just after midday and head home.

  My time on Kish is coming to an end. On my last evening, star chef Mahbube 2 prepares another feast: self-caught bream and grouper with rice.

  LOST IN TRANSPORTATION I

  THE POPULAR TRAVELER’S game of ticket window ping-pong goes as follows: the tourist (mostly equipped with a heavy backpack and minimal language skills) tries to mime his wish to buy a ticket for a bus or train, a ship, or a plane and is sent somewhere else. On reaching this place he/she is directed somewhere else, where he/she is again passed on to someone else. This can take up a fair amount of time, but not an eternity, as no terminal in the world has an endless number of ticket windows.

  When all the legwork is over, and the tourist has a ticket in his hand and can depart, he wins. As soon as a contact point is mentioned for the second time, he loses. Continuous loop, game over. Variations of this game can be found in tax offices and telephone hotlines of Internet providers.

  My round begins at the entrance to the futuristic boat terminal, where the cab driver dropped me. A little man in a blue uniform points to the right: “Old terminal,” he says.

  I walk five hundred feet to the right, where a soldier uncomprehendingly shrugs his shoulders and points to two wooden huts, one blue and the other red, which can be seen some six hundred feet way. According to the pictures next to the sales windows, it’s small boats to the left and large boats to the right. The left side of the counter is closed, so I join the line to the right window, where six people are already in the line. Judging by the length of time they spend at the window, they appear to be paying for their tickets by giving an extensive update on the state of health of their extended families. After what feels like an eternity it’s my turn.

  “You cannot get ticket now,” says the ticket seller. In my defense I tell him that I was sent here.

  “No. Passport first, passport,” he says, pointing toward the terminal from which I had come.

  Damn it! Third contact point, ping-pong game over. But I don’t give up so quickly. Back to the soldier. “Passport, passport,” I say, while waving it around. On my surprise return he looks at me as if I were an alien, hunching his shoulders even more than the first time. He points to the two wooden huts behind me. Both of us spend the next few moments thinking about how stupid the other person is.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a chubby port employee appears from the darkness of the old terminal.

  “Mister, come here.” He leads me to an office, where there are two other men in shirts and suit pants, one of whom fetches me a glass of water. “Passport, please. Where do you come from? Are you enjoying yourself in Iran? Sit down. Would you like a tea? Where do you want to go?”

  “Germany.” “Very much.” “Yes, please.” “Charak,” I reply. That is the nearest town on the mainland, and according to the guidebook, a roughly forty-minute boat trip.

  “And where are you going after that?”

  “Bandar Abbas.” About four hours from Charak by bus.

  “A big ship is going to Bandar Lengeh in three hours; it’s nearer than Bandar Abbas,” he says.

  “How long does it take?”

  “Four hours. And from there it’s two hours to Bandar Abbas.”

  “Then it’s still quicker to go via Charak. Is anything heading there soon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  One of his colleagues is better informed. “Charak now,” he says, taking my passport from the photocopying machine and beckoning me to follow him. He walks briskly through the hall to the quay just in time to see a sailor releasing the bow rope. The small ship chugs off so slowly that with a spirited jump I might just about have caught it. The colleague waves and shouts, but the boat doesn’t turn back.

  So, back to the new terminal, which is ninety feet high and finely decorated in silver, gray, and beige. Flat-panel displays show advertising spots for condos and tourist attractions, for the ancient city of Harireh, Underwater World, and a horse race
. I have missed most of the attractions on the island, but the hours spent with Masoud and his wonderful family were better than any dolphin park.

  The waiting room is full of passengers, and the detour via the quay meant that I bypassed all the security controls.

  “The next ship to Charak departs in twenty-five minutes,” says my helper before disappearing, never to be seen again. All the other passengers are holding tickets in their hands, but I still don’t have one. Eventually, the departure for Charak is announced, a line forms in front of the ticket control at the exit to the quay, and, sure enough, I’m able to pay cash there— 27,000 toman, which is around seven dollars. I don’t get a ticket for it, though. The employee just pockets the money and waves me through.

  No ticket, one double visit to a contact point, and I still reach my destination. This bout of ticket window ping-pong is mine.

  From: Kian Qeshm

  Good morning Today I will arrive qeshm at 3 p.m. Unfortunately because I live in company’s accommodation I can’t host but maybe we can meet.

  ARYANS

  IN CONTRAST TO the terminal, the Pelican is anything but futuristic. Tatty upholstery, threadbare Persian carpets, and a motor that sounds like a dying jackhammer. Just as I’m wondering whether it will make the twelve miles to the shore before giving up the ghost, as if on cue, the motor chokes. An angry-looking giant tries to heave his heavyweight-boxer body up the steel ladder to the bridge. His two companions are luckily (a) of a similar bouncer-like stature and (b) of the opinion that beating up the captain will not relieve the technological problems. With a united effort they manage to hold him back.