Couchsurfing in Iran Page 8

  We drive to Anis, one of Hussein’s artist friends, who lives in a trendy, newly built neighborhood. The apartment consists of a large living room, with a kitchen niche, wooden blinds at every window, and a washroom. Large-format pictures of sad, twisted figures hang on the walls, and earrings and hairpins made of copper wire have been arranged on the kitchen table. There is so much handcrafted art that I have the impression of being at a private viewing and not an evening meal among friends.

  “Willkommen in Kerman, wie geht es dir?” inquires a radiant Anis in fluent German, while pouring me a cup of chamomile tea. “I’ve been learning the language for eighteen months. I plan to join my husband in Austria soon and study art there.”

  I give Anis a pack of Lübeck marzipan, and she wants to know whether Lübeck is near Lüneberg.

  “Yes, not so far away. Why?”

  “I’ve got a few pictures hanging there.” On her tablet she shows me some Facebook photos of her exhibition in Lüneberg that opened a few days prior. “I know an artist in Germany who arranged it.” She would have liked to travel there for the opening but couldn’t get a visa.

  Despite the chamomile tea, my stomach is still feeling peculiar, and after being welcomed I have to make a dash for the washroom. On my return, Hussein opens a Persian-English translation program on his iPad and points enquiringly to the word “diarrhea.” I nod unhappily. More and more guests arrive: Anis’s husband, Reza; Mina and Taher; Moien, Hamed, and Nazanin, all designers and artists. The women wear wide pants and wide short-sleeved shirts, and they take off their veils as soon as they cross the threshold. Iranian women become prettier on entering a room; Iranian men become less handsome. The former because they take off their veils, the latter because they frequently swap their smart jeans for comfortable track pants or lurid Hawaiian shorts.

  Anis makes me a tea with cinnamon, which is supposed to be good for the stomach. Then Hussein passes me a guitar—my online profile includes my love of guitar playing.

  Apart from playing a few classical Spanish pieces, I don’t contribute much to the entertainment this evening. I’m still suffering from outbreaks of sweat and stomach cramps. I have to rush to the washroom a second time no less quickly than the first time and spend four times as long there as usual. The same procedure on my return: Hussein with his translator program and serious face, and this time he has “Vomit, throw up” on the screen, and the picture of misery formerly known as Mr. Price nods resignedly. Mina rings her sister, a doctor. “She says if you have a temperature you will need an injection.” Taher feels my forehead and announces that there is no fever. All around me a feast of potato pancakes, yogurt, salads, and homemade cookies is served up; for me there is cinnamon tea, cola, and an apple of which I can only manage half.

  Anis turns on the TV and selects the German ZDF news program. Jürgen Klopp is talking about the Champions League second leg soccer match, Dortmund against Real Madrid. “Sometimes we watch German TV to learn the language,” says Anis. The weather forecast for the coming days is sixty to sixty-eight degrees Farenheit and then an ad for a laxative—very funny, TV channel ZDF.

  Plates clatter, people laugh, and I am the only person comatose and most of the time unable to communicate. I feel like one of the sad, lonely, suffering figures in the paintings on the wall, with my head propped up against my hand. On top of everything, on clearing up I stumble over a glass on the floor, breaking it. What a troublesome guest I am. And Anis? As a parting gift she gives me one of her necklaces, with a blossom-shaped bronze ornament and a red wooden bead. “I hope you enjoy your time in Iran,” she says.

  THE DESERT

  IWAKE UP ON a hard living room carpet, a neon light flickers lazily, my feet almost touching the gas oven on the wall. The room decoration is a battle between black-and-white photos, paintings, and objects that you might find in an anthropological museum. The alarm clock rings at seven, and Hussein makes a tea and hands over his keys.

  “Get ready, Nasrin is coming to get you soon,” he says.

  Nasrin is a friend of his who, together with her two couchsurfing guests, is planning a trip to the desert. What I planned as a backpacking tour is becoming more and more an all-inclusive trip with pickup service and round-the-clock mentoring.

  The doorbell rings, and I go down to a dusty parking bay surrounded by six-story apartment blocks. For the first time I see the dull facades in daylight. Nasrin is a spirited, tall and slightly rotund woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a black chador, white gloves, and blue sneakers.

  Two Australians, Richard and Sally, who I figure are around fifty and thirty, respectively, welcome me from the back seat of Nasrin’s Peugeot. They have been traveling around the world for four years, having spent most of the time in Southeast Asia, very frequently couchsurfing. Nasrin’s seven-year-old daughter, Kiana, is huddled between them. Nasrin teaches computer courses at the university and also works as an English teacher but has called in sick today so that she can show her guests the famous Dasht-e Loot desert. Such are the priorities of Iranians, the world champions of hospitality.

  She speeds down the freeway between snow-capped mountains, with Michael Jackson and Beyoncé blaring from the radio. A driver, who hasn’t realized that there is another highway ninety feet to our left for drivers going in his direction, speeds toward us. Nasrin gives a short lecture on men behind steering wheels. “They all think that they’re the best drivers in the world. And when they see any female drivers they tailgate just to show them who’s the boss.”

  On entering a tunnel, Nasrin tells us of a custom typical of the country: “In Iran we scream in tunnels.” She starts shrieking, and three foreigners and a small girl join in. In a contest for the loudest scream, little Kiana is way ahead, so far ahead that I’m relieved not to be sitting next to her.

  We leave the main road and meander through the mountainous landscape, passing through a couple of small villages. Soon the road straightens, and the route takes us through the increasingly barren steppes, which only seem a bit friendlier through the presence of isolated palm trees. We see dunes that are stabilized by highly resilient tamarisk plants, which can find enough nutrition in the sand to survive.

  Nasrin knows the area like the back of her hand; she worked for a long time as a tourist guide, until her license was revoked because she was hosting couchsurfers. “It’s illegal because the government is scared that we are hosting spies,” she explains. Two years ago she took exactly the same route with guests from China, France, and Poland. After stopping at a salt river the car refused to start, and it was getting dark. “So I called the police, who said they couldn’t send anybody. A couple truck drivers stopped every now and then, but nobody could help us.” So she called the police again. “I started yelling at them: ‘If I had said that there were a couple of young people drinking alcohol and dancing about you would have been here in minutes! But you won’t lift a finger for a breakdown!’ Then at least they gave me the number of a breakdown service, who eventually got us going.”

  Ultimately, however, the police were interested in what Nasrin was doing with the tourists. When it emerged that they were her guests, they withdrew her license as a tourist guide. “A friend of mine had it worse. He was a soldier and took guests to his military camp. He was caught and had to spend two months in prison.”

  Just after these remarks, Nasrin has to stop at a police station in Shahdad. “We have to register here,” she says. “In case they ask who you are and how you know each other: you met, by chance, in Bam, and I’m your tourist guide,” she directs.

  The police, however, are less inquisitive than feared. As Nasrin shows them our passports, five heavily armed men in camouflage uniforms joke about what such an old man is doing traveling with such a young woman, that he is just trying to recapture his youth. Richard doesn’t have a hair on his head, and you can certainly see that he has a twenty-year start on Sally. With all the excitement and banter about poor old Richard’s adventure, they fail to notice that Nasr
in’s guide license hasn’t been valid for two years. They ask her how much she is charging us but don’t really believe her answer—nothing at all. However, they allow us to continue.

  Adventurous Area appears on a traffic sign, and as if to underline this, shortly afterward another sign stating: Nehbandan 170 miles, the next town. “Actually, it’s just three houses and a gas station,” says Nasrin.

  If you drive there, the only signs of civilization on the way will be the straight road, where you can see the oncoming traffic several minutes before crossing, and a power supply line. The tarmac shimmers in the heat, the ground appears to be covered by water, but on approach it just turns out to be a mirage. The perfectly straight desert road is like a metaphor for travel—when you reach a certain point that had seemed so alluring, then the next tempting stretch opens up just in front of you.

  The sand formations all around become more and more bizarre—mountains towering ever higher at the roadside, the sand castles and rounded cupolas of the Dash-e Lut desert. “Reminds me a bit of the Outback,” Richard remarks.

  Another traffic sign announces: Welcome to Gandom Beryan, the hottest area of the world. The words hottest area and world have been erased, so presumably there is somewhere else that is even hotter.

  “Over 158 degrees Fahrenheit has been measured here. We say that you can fry an egg on the ground,” says Nasrin.

  We soon reach the Shur salt river, the site of the bad memories of the breakdown two years ago. It is some fifteen feet wide and at no point deeper than a few inches. Salt forms in clumps, looking like slushy snow on the banks. A little farther away, in the sand crusty white plates have formed, and tourists have left footprints or messages in Persian, and a truck driver has left a huge tire. The thermometer in the car registers nearly 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, it’s windy today.

  On the trip back, we stop at a particularly spectacular sand mountain, with vertical walls that seem to have grown out of the ground and not been formed by centuries of wind and erosion. We can only see a fraction of the natural sand mountains; they stretch ninety miles from north to south. The biggest ones are as high as ten-story buildings. On the horizon of this desert wonderland you can see a snow-capped peak. Below, one of the two or three hottest areas of the world; above, ice cold—an “Adventure Area” that is pretty rich in contrasts.

  While taking a stroll in the sand, Richard remarks that one of the disadvantages of couchsurfing is that you never have time for yourself and always have to arrange yourself around the plans of others, which is why they sometimes stay in hotels. “But the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages,” says Sally. She recommends a host in Chabahar, in southeast Iran, if I am ever in the area. He has very few guests, which was why he looked after them so impressively. He even took the Australians to a traditional Baluchestan wedding. “Colorful robes, complete segregation of the sexes, and an exuberant rifle salute,” says Richard.

  Back in Shadad we buy some ice cream and Istak apple malt beer, and Nasrin adds some delicious kolompeh (date cookies) that her sister baked. Then back to the police station to deregister. The second contact with the authorities is also very different from expectations. First, they rummage through the trunk of Nasrin’s Peugeot. “They are looking for alcohol and opium,” our nonlicensed guide explains.

  But maybe they just wanted to check how much space was free. A policeman asks whether it would be a nuisance to take a few things to the next police station in Sirch. A short while later, five heavily armed young men load up the car with canned vegetables and large cartons of chicken meat. We deliver the goods ten miles down the road to a young policeman whose sluggish movements imply that we have disturbed his siesta. Or is he simply a typical Kermani? “People here are considered to be especially lazy. We blame the lack of oxygen; the city is 5,500 feet above sea level,” says Nasrin. But there could be another explanation: in Iran they joke that so much opium is smoked in Kerman that airline passengers get high just flying above the city.

  Nasrin has two more highlights for us—a hill with a sign stating that one of the Supreme Leaders of the whole Islamic World, Ayatollah Khomeini, walked up here and sat on a boulder. Allah, bless the stone. And a store that sells vanilla ice cream with carrot juice, which tastes much better than it sounds.

  Back at Hussein’s home I treat myself to an afternoon nap. Afternoon naps are something very Iranian. Normally, I never sleep at this time, and the fact that I’m so tired must have something to do with the low-oxygen air of Kerman.

  From: Hussein Kermanv

  Hello Stephan, I’ll come home late, a friend had an accident

  Hussein gets home at 10:30 PM. He has bought mushrooms and ground meat, and makes a sandwich filling. “I’m so sorry everything took such a long time,” he says. “A friend was run over by a cab in Azadi Square and broke his leg. He had to have an operation, but he’s doing all right now. Would you like a beer?”

  Hussein gets a pint bottle of Delster malt beer. He opens it, and there is a loud hiss of escaping gas. His homemade brew is frothy and pretty sweet, but it’s not too bad. “I add yeast and 3.5 ounces of sugar per bottle. I leave it for three days next to the gas oven and then decant it into bottles. Every now and then I let the gas out of the bottles, and after a couple more days I have my beer,” explains the man whose profile photo looks like Jesus and who can turn fizzy drinks to beer. “But I have to be careful; if I’m caught, I get eighty lashes.”

  BUREAUCRACY

  THE NEXT DAY, on my way to the Management of Foreigners Affairs Office, I ask myself how many lashes I would get for deception on a visa application. If I don’t want to fly back soon, I have to extend my visitor’s permit. In the consulate in Germany they only gave me twenty days. A line has formed in front of the green steel door leading to the office, but one of the employees beckons me to follow him. I have to leave my cell phone and camera at reception and receive a brass token with a three-figure number and a picture of a cell phone on it. A soldier leads me via an inner courtyard to an office, where there are a few mounted seats and a wobbly metal fan as a cooling system. Behind a wooden desk, two employees, a man and a woman, receive visa applications and passports.

  The visa form requires my profession and my address in Iran. I fill in “website editor” and “Omid Guesthouse, Esteghlal Lane, Kerman.” If I had written journalist, I could forget about a visa extension, and a private address would have raised suspicions. I feel like I’m taking an exam at school, with the difference that instead of getting bad marks, I would have to leave the country earlier than planned, or even risk getting into trouble with the Iranian justice system, which is well known for not being squeamish in the handling of offenders. Under “reasons for travel” I fill in “tourism.” My guidebook says that one applicant had foolishly written “to visit my Iranian girlfriend”—his visa was declined on moral grounds.

  “You have to deposit thirty thousand toman at the Melli Bank and return with the receipt and two passport photos,” says the official. “The bank is just around the corner, Edalat Street.” He waves vaguely left and gives me a handwritten note with the account number 217 115 395 5007.

  How to ask for directions

  •Look for pedestrians between twenty-five and forty-five (the younger they are, the greater the probability that they speak English).

  •In case no English speakers are available, repeat the sentence: “Salam, Melli Bank kodja ast?” Instead of Melli Bank, you can insert any preferred place or street name.

  •The passerby will gesticulate in a particular direction. You can be fairly sure that plus or minus ninety degrees the direction is right.

  •After five hundred feet ask someone else; he will probably put you on a slightly different course (possibly a better approximation).

  •Always remember that Iranians prefer to give a wrong answer to no answer.

  •By the third to fifth helper you should have a fairly good indication of where to go. By the way, cab drivers use exactly t
he same strategy—they never trust the first source of information.

  • • • • • • • • •

  AT THE BANK I have to collect a number tag and wait for an LED light display to show my number. I give the clerk the note with the handwritten account number, give him thirty thousand toman, and then he passes me the receipt. On the way back I go to the photo store. The examples hanging on the wall, portraits of people resting their chins on the clenched fist of their left hand, leave no doubt about the photographer’s specialty. They all look a little like mediocre crooners. Luckily, I’m allowed to keep my arms down. I return to the visa building with my photos and receipt, hand in my camera and cell phone and then the necessary papers and my passport. “Come back at twelve,” says the official. It’s only just ten.

  “Come back at two,” she says at twelve. “My boss is at a meeting, and he needs to sign the document.” This means more time to find out that I’m a journalist by a simple process of googling. The guidebook says that the visa offices sometimes use Google. As a distraction, I wander through the bazaar. Describing a Middle Eastern bazaar in every detail is like carrying cumin to Kerman—there are an incredible number of stores, goods, aromas, and sellers. And in this case a charming teahouse based on the old Hamam teahouses. The smell of hookah smoke, a fountain, ornate columns, and a man playing a santur, a kind of hammered Persian dulcimer. As I enter, he glances at me and begins to play a melody from The Godfather—I assume because it has a European feel to it and not because he is implying that there is something criminal about me.

  Shortly before two: a renewed trip to the visa offices, hand in cell phone and camera, get my brass token, all routine now. After a few minutes “Mr. Estefan” is announced, and I get back my passport, with a new stamp: The visa is extended up to 17.5.2014. I’m as happy as if I’d just won a four-week dream vacation, which in some way is true. But of course you wouldn’t know it—exuberance and dancing about would be considered improper in the Management of Foreigners Affairs Office.