Couchsurfing in Iran Page 6

  “Arabs,” says my neighbor scornfully. He, too, is well-built. In comparison, my shoulders seem meager and my biceps modest. “Alamâni: high; Irani: high; Arabs: low,” he declares in broken English. I had already told him that I was German. He points, first to me and then himself, and says “Aryans,” then plumps his thigh-sized upper arm round my shoulders.

  Within a second I can think of three hundred reasons for which I would rather be liked. But the Aryan topic is a big thing in Iran, and even the country’s name is derived from Aryan. Here the word isn’t associated with racist ideologies and the Holocaust but used as naturally as if you were calling a Chinese person an Asian, or a Croat a Slav. Thousands of years before dubious European scientists thought up attributes like blond, blue-eyed, and Nordic type, the Iranians were already known as Aryans. To this day they are convinced that they share a heritage with Germanic and Indian peoples, which is why they are the only country in the world where Germans are still respected as Aryans.

  After a ten-minute break the motor indignantly splutters to life, and the decrepit Pelican renews efforts to reach the gray cliffs of the mainland. My neighbor introduces himself as Nader. He comes from Kerman. His two friends with almost identical T-shirts bearing a huge Abercrombie & Fitch print, one in gray and the other in white, are Moshtaba from Bandar Abbas and Ismail from Isfahan. All three are wearing very new sport shoes and have very new cell phones in their hands. None of them speaks English well, which is why I use the best small-talk-despite-language-barrier trick in the world and change the subject from ethnology to soccer. A verbatim transcript could never do justice to the emotional intensity of the conversation. It goes something like this:

  “Mehdi Mahdavikia!”

  “Ooh, good!”

  “Ali Daei!”

  “Ali Daei! Bayern Munich good! Schwains-Tiger! Ballack! Lahm!”

  “Yes, very good players!”

  “World Cup! Brazil!”

  “Iran against Argentina, ooh!”

  “Messi! Ooooh no!”

  After this exchange we are best friends. The three guys ask whether I need a lift to Bandar Abbas. The ship docks at Charak, and soon we are sitting in Ismail’s age-worn white Peugeot. We crunch away at nuts, listen to the Gypsy Kings and hurtle eastward. Foam dice swing back and forth beneath the rearview mirror.

  There is a strong resemblance between traveling and a game of dice. Had I caught an earlier ship, or sat somewhere else once on board, I wouldn’t be sitting in this car. In Tehran, if I hadn’t contacted Yasmin but one of the thousand other potential hosts, I wouldn’t soon be visiting the battlefields on the Iraqi border.

  From the window a shimmering desert landscape flashes by, with wind-formed sand dunes and signposts warning of camels. Conical cisterns look like the tips of buried stone rockets. Having done soccer players, other sports stars become our next topic. “Ismail Schumacher,” says Nader, grinning and pointing at his friend behind the wheel, who drives as if Mika Häkkinen and Damon Hill are in hot pursuit.

  The racer poses would be perfect, were he not a chainsmoker and therefore only has one hand permanently on the steering wheel. At two of the speed bumps our car almost takes off, with the consequence that at the next bump our driver is more cautious, braking directly beforehand and causing our suspension to screech. I know no other country with so many speed bumps. Iran is speed-bump country, and I’m sure that’s a metaphor for something.

  Recently, a statistic was published claiming that 25,000 had died in the previous year in traffic accidents; that is 68 a day. The government now aims to reduce the number to 20,000.

  At any rate, gas prices don’t deter people from speeding. We fill up for 140 rial per gallon, which is all of twenty cents. At the halfway mark we stop at a beach to drink tea with hot water from a thermos. I drink it without sugar, which earns me three puzzled looks.

  Nader looks miserably at his tea bag. The tag reads Ahmad Tea London. “English bad!” he says, crossing both index fingers. “English against Iran.” The British had made a killing with Iranian gas and oil in the first half of the twentieth century by duping the shah into exploitative contracts. I feel Nader’s hand on my shoulder. “Hitler good. Hitler help Iran.” Hitler never wanted oil from Persia in the Second World War because they were allies. This is turning into quite a challenging conversation, given our language barrier.

  I babble in broken English: “Hitler not good!”

  He asks: “Merkel good?”

  I deliberate briefly before saying: “Hitler bad, Merkel good,” which admittedly is a gross simplification but, in this comparison, not wrong. The rest of the journey we don’t speak much, but I wish that I could say more in Persian than fish and sun.

  In the port city of Bandar Abbas we say our goodbyes, and I catch a boat that is twice as big and three times as modern as the Pelican to the island of Qeshm. I had hoped to have a host there, but Kian had texted me to say that unfortunately his apartment belongs to his company, and they don’t allow visitors.

  To: Kian Qeshm

  Hey Kian, no problem, would be great to meet! Can you recommend a hotel to stay?

  From: Kian Qeshm

  Ask the taxi driver for Hafez guesthouse, its not expensive but I m not sure if it’s clean

  From an open deck I view the huge oil and gas tankers of the Persian Gulf. Many are old and barely seaworthy. It’s difficult to see whether they are moving without looking for the anchor line in the water. The whims of traveler’s dice have placed a family behind me with a daughter who I guess to be about twenty and two sons, maybe six and eight. The younger son is staring at me with huge dark brown eyes. I leaf through my Persian phrasebook and read the sentence “Esme tan tschi ast?”—What’s your name? The parents are named Reza and Ehsan, the girl, Mobina, and the family comes from a place near Yazd. The rest of the conversation consists of “Welcome to Iran” and “Do you like Iran?” And, above all, plenty of friendly and curious looks. Mobina asks for my cell phone number. We wish each other a good time on the island, she takes a picture of me, and we go our separate ways.

  A cab driver, in a prehistoric Toyota Corolla, drives through featureless streets with endless rows of stores to the Hafez Guesthouse. On telling him about my home country he stretches out his right hand and screams, “Heil Hitler!” and laughs amicably. Somehow today’s jinxed.

  QESHM

  Population: 114,000

  Province: Hormozgan

  THE GENIE

  AT THE ENTRANCE to the Hafez Guesthouse a few teenagers are hanging out. As I enter they seem amused that at last something is happening there. Using sign language, I communicate to a young man behind the counter in a Barcelona soccer shirt that I’m looking for a room. He looks at me somewhat quizzically.

  “Double room forty thousand, no single room,” says a man without a single hair on his head but an abundant growth on his chest that couldn’t be missed, as he is only wearing scruffy track pants and sandals. He, too, is only a guest, which doesn’t deter him from going through the check-in formalities.

  “Don’t eat here; the food’s no good,” he adds. But the rooms are safe. Mine is exactly as wide as two beds, and I don’t need a tape measure to establish this, as there are two beds placed next to each other, on top of which are two stained bed covers with Cinderella motifs. A tube, looking as if it were made shortly after the Industrial Revolution, runs from the air conditioner through the middle of a frosted glass pane to the outside. Someone seems to have used a hammer to make the necessary hole for the tube, and at one point the gap is so big that it allows a single shaft of sunlight to enter the room. The metal double doors to the hall also have a window, which has been covered by a poster advertising Deluxe Diamond T-shirts. There is precious little else deluxe here. The furnishings consist of a tiny CRT TV (broken), a Super General fridge (loud), and a blotchy carpet.

  After a few minutes, someone knocks at the door. The bald-headed guest again, whose sudden appearance reminds me of a good-nat
ured genie in a bottle. He hands me a hotel business card, on which he has written his name, Mehran, and his cell phone number. “If you need help, give me a call.” Maybe it’s not as safe here as I thought.

  He then shows me the washroom, which can only be reached via a small courtyard. The light doesn’t work in the men’s shower. “You can use the women’s shower in the morning,” he says.

  “Would you like a drink,” he asks. “I have some Iranian vodka. Absolutely forbidden!” He signals for me to follow him and explains how he got the stuff. “I combed all the pharmacies and said I needed ethyl alcohol for insect bites.” After a few attempts he was successful; the assistant asked him whether he wanted a large or small bottle. Small, he said, so as not to raise suspicions, and then inquired about the price. Of course, the larger ones were cheaper. He pretended to ponder the options before deciding to take the larger bottle. Twenty thousand toman, five dollars. “That’s what I always do. Come in.”

  He opens the door to his room; it has the same prison-cell dimensions as mine. A small boy is sleeping on the bed. From the floor next to the fridge, Mehran picks up a heavy two-pint flask with a round belly and short neck that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an apothecary museum. Ethyl Alcohol 96% is written on the label next to Highly Flammable. The amount would be enough for quite a number of insect bites. “We can mix it with water or Pepsi,” says Mehran. “At home in Tehran I drink a bottle in five days. Don’t worry, you won’t be arrested. This stuff is good. After all, it comes from the pharmacist—medical quality.”

  The term brings back memories; I remember it from last year’s trip. “Medical quality,” said the student Samira from Tabriz as she fetched a bottle of ethanol from a cupboard almost exactly a year ago. Alcohol content 70 per cent, a demon’s drink. Mixed with orange juice it still tasted like hard candy dissolved in gasoline. We lay on a rug on the floor of her student digs and watched The Exorcist on a laptop. Three long days we traveled through the wilds of Kurdistan, getting drunk on long drinks from hell and smoking melon-flavored shisha. We spoke much of freedom, which meant we spoke of the chances for her to leave the country.

  Of course, I wanted to meet up with her again, but a couple weeks ago she contacted me to say that she had made it. Samira is now studying engineering in Shanghai on a scholarship and doesn’t plan to return.

  Taste and smell are more deeply embedded in memory than experiences. Memories of the hard-candy taste flood back, and I even believe I can feel a slight rasping in my throat. And anyway, the experiences connected to the memories weren’t that good, so I turn down ethanol and cola or ethanol soda or whatever else Mehran is planning to serve up today.

  The next morning the light in the washroom still isn’t working, so I creep off to the women’s unit. What on earth happens in Iran if you are caught in the women’s washroom? I think I would have simply said that the genie in the bottle sent me there.

  Couchsurfer Kian can only meet me in the evening, so I explore the island with a cab driver. Qeshm is notorious for its smugglers, who transport cigarettes and gas canisters to the Musandam Peninsula or to the United Arab Emirates in wooden boats. But it is also famous for its canyons and sandstone mesas, which you would think you were more likely to see in Utah as the backdrop to a cowboy movie. Apart from that, plenty of dust, a couple of chimneys burning gas, and mangrove wood on the shore. Unlike the fifteen-times-smaller Kish, Qeshm isn’t geared toward mass tourism.

  But, as Kian explains over an evening meal of fish stew in an austere restaurant with wobbly tables and designer lamps, that is all about to change. He is a pleasantly chubby guy, 6’2”, red Nike polo shirt, and rimless glasses. Two new five-star hotels are being constructed, as well as four shopping centers, he explains. As far as hotels are concerned, in my mind there’s room indeed for improvement. The state is creating the prerequisites for the boom—contractors pay no taxes, the same applies for employees like Kian, who works as an engineer for a gas power plant.

  He tells me that today is an important day for Iran. As part of the nuclear negotiations, sanctions against Iran have been relaxed. From today, for the first time in thirty-five years, airplane parts can be imported from the U.S. On top of that, Iran can again export oil, and 4.9 billion of a total 100 billion U.S. dollars frozen in foreign accounts has been released. “We have had two hundred plane accidents in recent decades, with more than two thousand deaths, which were mostly down to the lack of spare parts,” explains Kian. Supplies of medication have also been affected by the sanctions and caused many deaths in Iran, among cancer patients, for instance. “It never hurts the government but always the ordinary people.”

  In the summer Kian plans to travel to Europe. First to Italy, because he’s heard that it’s the easiest place to get Schengen visas. From there to Disneyland, near Paris, then to Germany, where an uncle lives near Stuttgart. His uncle has already taught him three words, which he proudly recites: “tschüss” (bye) and “guts nächtle” (good night in the Swabian dialect).

  BAM

  Population: 77,000

  Province: Kerman

  LOST IN TRANSPORTATION II

  THE NEXT MORNING I take the ferry back to the mainland. In the bleak bus terminal of Bandar Abbas I ping-pong from counter to counter until eventually a giggling woman in a chador sells me a ticket to Bam. She asks for my passport so that she can enter my name on the ticket. While I’m rummaging through my backpack, she has second thoughts and simply writes “Mr. Price” on my ticket. Allah only knows how she chose that name. From the poster on the wall behind the counter, Ayatollah Khomeini looks down on me probingly.

  I have an hour to kill before departure, so I buy myself a kebab: burnt chicken bits, black-red tomatoes, and onions in pita bread.

  “Where do you come from?” asks the vendor.

  “Germany,” I reply.

  “Alamâni! Germany, Aryan! Klinsmann!” he says

  “Ali Daei! Mehdi Mahdavikia!” I reply.

  Soccer Esperanto always works. We both laugh, but I feel a bit like a dumbass everybody is nice to because they all think that the poor old guy hasn’t got it easy in life, so we may as well be friendly to him. It’s high time I learned Persian.

  Of course, with these thoughts I’m being unfair to the cheerful vendor. But everyone who travels extensively knows you make a fool of yourself three to ten times more often when you’re away from home. Buying fruit, at the ticket window, asking for directions. When routine situations that at home come naturally suddenly require a creative solution, then it’s a good experience because it teaches you humility and to laugh at yourself. You can be a five-year-old child again on a dare buying a strawberry ice cream with your mom’s money. Simple exercises, with failure and tears not excluded. Sometimes at an interview they ask applicants more personal questions, such as: When did you last push yourself to your limits? I think it would be much more revealing to know when someone last made a complete and utter fool of themselves.

  Possible answer: while looking for the right bus at the huge bus terminal at Bandar Abbas. The fact that I’m having difficulties is mostly to do with the name of my intended destination. I approach a driver and a porter and ask: “Bam?” and they reply, “Bam!” and “Bam!” and nod and point and take me by the hand, and soon I’m sitting in a blue bus, the Bam bus. Allah is written on the back and Adidas on the sides, so you can choose your God.

  Bam doesn’t seem to be a particularly popular destination. Apart from Mr. Price from Germany there are five other passengers on board. They are all wearing loose-fitting white smocks and wide pants, and they look more Pakistani than Iranian.

  The farther the bus travels north, the greener the landscape and the higher the surrounding mountains. Palm trees and greenhouses line the road, and many fuel tankers are traveling today. I read my phrase book and murmur Persian sentences. My cell phone rings. Unknown number with a 0098 code, so it’s Iranian. The reception here is terrible—a female voice, but I don’t understand a si
ngle word. At some stage I imagine that I might have heard “I love you!” but it was probably just the wishful thinking of a lonely bus passenger on a hot, sultry day of travel. Busy signal. Then a couple more calls from the same number, but as soon as I answer the caller hangs up.

  At a police checkpoint a soldier with a bulletproof vest and machine gun gets on the bus. He ignores all the other guests, but he asks me for my passport and signals me to follow him. On a platform between the barriers separating the traffic lanes, the crushed remains of a wrecked car are displayed like a piece of art. There’s hardly anything left of the hood, the windscreen and other windows are all smashed, and parts of the chassis are burnt black. The vehicle must have crashed against an obstacle at high speed. Now it is being used as a warning to other speedsters, a metallic equivalent to the pictures of lung cancer patients on packs of cigarettes. The soldier, watched by two curious colleagues, leafs through the visas of a number of countries that I’ve visited. Apparently he’s fascinated by how much I’ve been getting around.

  “China?”

  “Yes, kheili khub,” I say—very pretty.

  “Nepal?”

  “Kheili khub.”

  “Ghana?”

  “Kheili khub.”

  He hands back my passport and wishes me bon voyage. I’ve survived my first official questioning. On the way back to my seat I feel the looks of my fellow passengers. The driver puts his foot down, but half an hour later the bus stops again. A couple of swashbuckling guys with beards and long hair embark. Strangely enough, apart from small handbag-sized bundles, they don’t appear to have any luggage, although it’s still hundreds of miles to the bus destination, Zahedan, on the Pakistan border.

  From: Number Unknown

  Hello, where is you? I want. Telphon nambr almani please you calling now. I am mobina