Couchsurfing in Iran Read online

  To: Mobina

  Hi mobina, i m on a bus to bam, tomorrow kerman. Are you still on qeshm? Have a nice day!

  I had almost forgotten about Mobina, the girl on the ferry trip to Qeshm. Her number, however, is different to the earlier one, where the phone call came from.

  From: Mobina

  Yes. I have a nice day. Can you speak pershin? I want tell phone.almani you

  Shafa please.cam yazd

  It’s not too easy to guess what she wants. Okay, first of all: stay polite, somewhat distant, noncommittal but not unfriendly.

  To: Mobina

  Sorry i dont speak persian. I dont use almani phone now. I will go to yazd in 3 days

  Another phone call from the same number as before. The thought of a laid-back backpacker slouching around in a bus seems to have a magnetic effect on the ladies, but come to think of it, the ladies can’t even see me. This time the lady at the other end of the line doesn’t hang up. Again, I think I hear “I love you” and “Where are you?” I break the connection after two minutes because of the interfering noises and send a text message.

  To: Unknown Female Caller

  Hi, how do i know you? I m traveling to bam and kerman now

  From: Unknown Female Caller

  Hi. Iammina.myfriendseeyouinbander.iamiran. plese come hear Harat.icannotmanyspeakenqlish

  She seems to have an extreme aversion to spaces. The only people I met in “bander”—so, Bandar Abbas—were Ismail Schumacher and the Hitler friends (which actually sounds like a pretty crappy band name). Strange. But her “I am Iran” appeals to me so much that I store the number under “Iran.”

  From: Iran

  ILoveyou. Whataboutyou?

  Anyone have any more questions about the laid-back bus slouching poses? Iran loves me, although she hardly knows me. Now, no mistakes. Keep a cool head. I wait half an hour before texting back. Not too emotional with the answer but also not too cool. Bear in mind the absurdity and the playfulness of the situation. Whatever you do, don’t leave the impression that you’re easy game.

  To: Iran

  I think i love you too

  In the meantime it’s become dark outside. The signpost reads Abareq, and a second sign says that Bam is twenty-four miles away. The bus slows down, turns into a side street, then a small parking area, where the driver maneuvers it back and forth until it is correctly parked. The driver turns off the motor and the lights; it is pitch black and silent.

  In such situations I’ve become accustomed to carefully observing the reactions of the local travelers before getting nervous. No one’s swearing, no discussions with the driver, no one seems surprised. There doesn’t seem to be any cause for alarm. After a few minutes, a pickup with two spotlights and a large tank on its bed draws up and stops next to the bus.

  The man who gets out looks like an Afghani version of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean but with a turban instead of a pirate’s tricorn hat and looking even more gaunt. At a casting session for an al-Qaeda movie he would have been guided to the front of the line, just out of fear that he might turn nasty. He rummages around a bit behind the bus, and it smells of gas. Okay, so we’re refueling. It does seem to be taking a while, though—twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Still, no one seems surprised or alarmed.

  I go outside to take a leak. Some of the passengers are sitting in a circle on the ground, smoking and waiting. Some men are wandering around with headlamps. Next to the bus there is a wooden crate containing rusty old tanks, a kind of pump, and some thick pipes. I almost bump into “Johnny Depp,” who says, “Chetori?” (How are you?), to which I reply, “Khubam” (Fine), which isn’t quite true because, according to the timetable, I should have reached my destination three hours ago. Then he continues fiddling around with his pipes.

  It takes an hour until finally the motor starts and the lights are switched on. The bus interior stinks so pungently of gas that two women clasp their veils to their noses. The signposts show Bam 9 miles and Bam 3 miles. Everything was going too slowly before, and now everything is happening too fast. The bus fails to stop, although I told the driver my destination before we started. So, up to the front I go.

  “Bam?” I inquire.

  “Bam!” says the man behind the wheel, while making a semicircle sign with his hand, which, due to his relaxed tone of voice, I interpret as he will use the next opportunity to turn back. But in the ensuing minutes he stubbornly continues to drive straight on. I try to make him realize that I have to go to Bam, and he points backward. He chats a bit with his co-driver. Both seem to be inappropriately cheerful and not in the slightest affected by my fate.

  The security advice of the State Department states that there is a “serious risk of kidnapping” in the east of Kerman Province and its neighboring province Sistan and Baluchestan. Even before my departure, I pondered just how far I would go to get my story of Iran. I decided to risk trouble with the authorities up to a certain point but to be overcautious as far as the dangers of kidnapping were concerned.

  I say: “Stop here, please.” No reaction. I try to remember where the next scheduled stop is. We are about to cross the Dasht-e-Lut Desert, and the next large town is Zahedan, 150 miles away.

  At last the bus slows down and stops. The door opens, and the driver points to a restaurant on the opposite side of the road. His co-driver fetches my backpack from the luggage compartment.

  I’m exhausted. I have a headache from the gas fumes and have been on the go for ten hours instead of six. Slowly, I trudge toward the restaurant. All I want now is a bed and some peace and quiet. I open the door. And then: streamers, tin whistles, balloons, paper hats, and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” “All just a bit of fun, Mr. Price. Ha-ha-ha, dumb name, ha-ha-ha,” as the TV show presenter from Candid Camera emerges from the kitchen and points at a hidden camera next to the Ayatollah Khomeini poster.

  That at least is how I felt on experiencing the sudden change in atmosphere. From the moment I cross the threshold I am surrounded by people who want to snap souvenir photos, welcome me, question me about my state of health, Iran, Europe, and the whole wide world. I am more interested in how to get to Bam, as it is almost midnight. But okay, first of all, sit down, drink a Hoffenberg lemon malt beer on the house. Welcome to Iran. More group photos, more good wishes.

  And eventually a bus emerges from the darkness that really does go to Bam. It, too, smells as if someone has spilled a couple of canisters of diesel in the aisle. But that doesn’t worry me anymore; it drops me at my destination, and I don’t even have to pay.

  EARTHQUAKES

  “OH, SO YOU have been on one of the stinky busses,” says Akbar Panjali jovially, as he places a late-night plate of rice and chicken in front of me. “They are diesel smugglers; they put tanks where the luggage usually goes, even under the seats. They can carry up to five hundred gallons.” In Pakistan they pay seven times the price for Iranian diesel, and there have been no strict controls up to now. Business also flourishes in the other direction. In Bandar Abbas goods are smuggled in from the Gulf states. The villages around Bam are well situated as fueling stops for smugglers, as they are roughly halfway between the coast and the border.

  “At the border you can see how the bus drivers quickly drop in on the police chief to deposit a couple million rials there,” says Akbar. “Many of the passengers aren’t even travelers, but accomplices.” A couple weeks prior to my episode, an Iranian smuggler bus crashed into a truck in Pakistan. A huge fireball and thirty-eight deaths. But criminals are willing to run the risk of traveling hundreds of miles on a bomb on wheels because it is still considerably safer for them to earn money from fuel than heroin or opium. Iran’s border guards act with utmost severity against the transport of drugs. The death penalty awaits those arrested, which is why there are often gun battles at the border.

  Akbar is seventy-one, a cheerful soul with laugh lines and unkempt hair. He studied Persian literature and worked as an English teacher, which is why everyone
here refers to him as “Akbar English.” Nowadays, he runs Akbar’s Tourist Guesthouse. The Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa are pictured on his sign outside, which seems a strange choice of inducement, considering one of Iran’s most famous monuments is only a couple minutes away by foot.

  I contacted two couchsurfing members in Bam, but neither replied. You always need a Plan B when looking for places to stay for nothing, and Akbar was a very good Plan B. I feel this every time he says, “You’re veeery welcome,” extending the “e” almost excruciatingly. He’s been officially providing rooms for sixteen years, previously offering them on the quiet and relying on word of mouth recommendations, as he had no license. “Now I’m famous,” he announces. “It helps being in the guidebooks.”

  At the moment, his fame doesn’t seem to be helping him much. I am the only guest, and the place seems to be half construction site, with the rest pretty run-down. “In earlier days, 70 per cent of my guests were car and motorbike tourists on their way to India, but there have been problems with Pakistan over the last couple of years, and not so many people pass by these days,” he adds.

  I inquire whether it might have something to do with the dangers of kidnapping. “Bad things can happen everywhere, even in Hamburg or London,” he replies. People who run hostels in this part of Iran need to have a more relaxed relationship to danger than someone in, say, Normandy or New Hampshire. Akbar tells me that the last kidnapping, a Japanese man, took place three years ago. “They held him for a month, and I will never forget what he said on release: ‘I had a great time. There were endless supplies of hashish for nothing.’”

  To: Hussein Kerman

  Hi Hussein, how are you? Would it be possible to host me from tomorrow for one or two night? Would be great!

  From: Hussein Kerman

  Yes you can sleep, no problem

  From: Mobina

  Hi. Where is you? Please cam citi Harat. When cam back to alman?

  To: Mobina

  I will be in yazd in a few days. Where exactly is Harat?

  From: Laila Hamburg

  Hun! Hurraaaaah, just a couple of days now! How’s the trip been? See you very soon in Yazd!

  Maybe the fears of tourists have so little effect on Akbar because he already has experience with an apocalypse. Because there was one event in his life that changed everything forever and split his life in two, into a Before and an After. Deep below the bed, with its somewhat hard mattress, on which I am now spending the night, the Arabian Plate is forced beneath the Eurasian Plate. On December 26, 2003, at 5:28 AM, there was so much pressure that the ground shook—6.5 on the Richter scale, a catastrophe that happens once a century. More than 26,000 people died in twelve seconds when half the city was flattened.

  “Luckily, I was at my parents’ house, ten minutes away from here, when it happened,” says Akbar. Otherwise, he might have been killed, his Akbar Tourist Guesthouse collapsed. Two guests and his son’s best friend died in the rubble.

  Even today, more than thirteen years later, traces of the tragedy in Bam cannot be missed. Not only in my accommodation, where renovation work is still incomplete. In the middle of town there are still the ruins of a mosque. Some rows of houses are broken by heaps of rubble, and in the ancient bazaar there are piles of debris, while the remaining bazaar units are still bare.

  But the true memorial is the historical center with the citadel, Arg-e Bam, the largest adobe building in the world. Most of its light brown walls and watchtowers had withstood all kinds of weathers and battles for more than a thousand years, until an earthquake destroyed one of Iran’s greatest tourist attractions.

  On a tour of its walls, which appear to have been made from compressed straw, you get the impression that the catastrophe not only robbed the city of its citadel walls but also of its soul. Despite this, it is a phenomenal location on the edge of a desert, where the midday heat with no shade can finish you off, and the dust leaves you clutching your throat. On the horizon, the snow-laden peaks of the thirteen-thousand-foot mountains loom.

  Many buildings have already been restored. But even today, constructors clamber over the distinctive wooden scaffolding. The UNESCO World Heritage Foundation is helping finance the reconstruction. But this mixture of spotless reconstruction and total chaos, although impressive enough in its dimensions, fails to solve other problems. When you look at the pictures showing the same locations before the earthquake in the evening light, as romantic as One Thousand and One Nights, you cannot help feeling melancholic. There is a hushed atmosphere about the historical center of Bam, like a cemetery, with only the hammering of the laborers and the buzzing of flies breaking the silence.

  KERMAN

  Population: 734,000

  Province: Kerman

  ART

  TRAVELING TO FAR-FLUNG places is the status symbol of my generation. In the olden days you used to park your sports car in front of the garage to make the neighbors envious. Today you can achieve this with a six-month backpacking tour of India or a trip through New Zealand in a vw motorhome. Among experienced travelers, however, there is a ranking in the destinations thats affects the amount of admiration and attention you receive on reporting your adventures. A solo tour of Iran is, at the moment, pretty high on the list and gets you more credit than, for instance, Albania, Mozambique, or Cuba and roughly the same as North Korea or Tibet. Only war-torn regions and countries with travel warnings—places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia—can trump the prestige of an account of backpacker haunts in Iran.

  But traveling here is relatively tolerable. The roads are well signposted, and buses are usually punctual (with the notable exception of smuggler buses). You can travel from A to B with fewer problems than in many Asian or South American countries. The locals, too, are willing to help as soon as they see someone in a public place standing around or seeming to be a bit lost.

  The afternoon journey to Kerman in a savari, a shared taxi that takes a specified route as soon as there are four or five passengers, takes two hours. It is a little more expensive than the bus but much quicker and more comfortable. So much quicker that I arrive an hour before my planned meeting with Hussein, who is still at work. I put down my backpack and settle on a park bench in Tohid Square. In front of me is the entrance to the bazaar of the city with a population of 700,000 and a monument that looks something like an eighty-foot staple made of marble.

  From: Iran

  Tomorrow come here in yazd. Harat

  Finally the penny drops. “Iran” and Mobina belong together; they come from the same place—Harat. So Mobina from the ferry was meant by “my friend in Bander,” not one of the three Nazis. According to the map, Harat is some seventy-five miles from Yazd and not too far off my planned route to Shiraz. Might be worth considering. Not because I feel flattered and I’m getting silly ideas because of a flirty text message, but because I intend to keep my promise to myself about being flexible to other suggestions when traveling. Flattered? Nonsense! But how do I explain this to Laila?

  To: Laila Hamburg

  Hi Sweetie, everything’s going fine up to now, experienced sooo much:) And we meet up soon, can’t wait! Kisses from Kerman!

  I have a stomachache and am feeling dizzy. Not from love but probably from the kashk-e bademjan, a delicious eggplant mush with yogurt that I ate for lunch in Bam. Was there something wrong with it? Accordingly, the soccer chat with three engineering students trying to convince me that Persepolis is awesome and Esteghlal is crap is decidedly lacking in passion, and within minutes I’ve forgotten their rationale. My host, Hussein, calls me and suggests that I take a cab to Azadi Square, and he will pick me up at the corner of Shariati Street.

  At the busy junction, waiting for someone I know only from a credit card-sized photo on the Internet turns out to be a difficult task. Every other car halts and wants to give me a lift, all pro or opportunist cab drivers. (In Iran it’s perfectly normal for people to earn a few rials, even without a license, by t
aking passengers, which is actually very practical, as no one in cities has to wait long for transportation.) Of course, they are all totally confused, as I don’t give any clear hand signals but scrutinize them for similarities to the photo.

  Twice I have to ask if the person behind the wheel happens to be called Hussein, and both times they speed off without a backward glance. I’m looking for someone who looks like a cross between a Bedouin and Jesus. The couchsurfing profile photo shows Hussein as a stern-faced, bearded man, with a heavy piece of cloth wrapped around his head and upper body. It is a highly aesthetic picture, worthy of National Geographic but not necessarily inviting. Apart from that, I know that he teaches graphic design at the university, is thirty years old, and dreams of traveling around the world taking pictures.

  At long last a white Saipa stops, and the driver, with his jeans, shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses, although not Bedouin-like, does look very much like a designer. At least he’s bearded.

  “Stephan, hop in,” says Hussein, while shoving some files and plastic bags to the side of the back seat. A young woman is sitting next to him. “We’re on the way to a party. Is that okay with you?”

  “Sure!” I reply.

  He explains that he is going to see his friends for the first time in two weeks because they have all only recently returned from the end of Nowruz vacations with their families. Until he collected me he had been at the university, where this term he is lecturing on logos, the history of design, and poster design. I ask him for his thoughts on the Saipa logo on the steering wheel, which looks similar to the inside of a Mercedes star, with a few additional lines.

  “It’s really good, the concept of a famous Iranian designer. He discovered the symbol in a mosque in Shiraz,” says Hussein. “Do you feel like going on a tour in the desert tomorrow? A friend of mine could arrange it.”