Iran,
October 2002.
In my first fleeting contacts with deserts (in Morocco a quarter of a century before and in Israel
ten years before) I had felt intimidated. I had avoided venturing more than a
few steps into them. Although I did not feel overt fear, the feeling of being a
very small person next to a very big and dangerous desert was rather like the
feeling one might have next to a great sleeping beast.
This time I wanted to look the beast in the eye; I would
head out into the desert.
At least that had been the plan prior to arriving in Iran and experiencing its roasting heat. The constant thirst had
initially caused me to doubt whether a desert trek were feasible. My coach approached the
ancient city of Yazd, whose houses of baked mud
were barely changed since Marco Polo had passed through on his way to Cathay. During the trip I had latched onto an Iranian
academic studying a linguistics text. (“Hey, mate, are you reading Steven
Pinker there? Respect, dude!”) Bahzad pointed out through the windows the spooky fortresses
crowning the hilltops around Yazd.
In these “Towers of Silence”, he explained, the Zoroastrians used to lay out their corpses to
be devoured by the vultures.
Towers of Silence - where the Zoroastrians would dispose of their dead
Getting off the air-conditioned coach, such was the blowtorch
heat that my desert trek plan was well and truly binned for reasons
mathematical, or perhaps thermodynamic. If you have to drink ten litres of water a day and can only carry twenty litres (weighing twenty kilos) then a range of two days is kind of limiting. The hard facts devalue the noble word expedition into the mundane day trip.
When you are consuming eight litres of water a day, a day’s
supply weighs a ton. (Or, more accurately, eight kilos.) A desert trek worthy
of the name must last at least two nights. One night is a jaunt; two nights a
trek. (How should one categorise a week or a month? Sojourn? Oddyssey? Epic?)
With a safety margin, three days’ supply was a minimum. I can only carry thirty
kilos, so twenty four kilos of water was impossible.
And then, wondrously, after a week of being roasted my body began
to acclimatise! Like a desert plant whose leaves are not thin-and-rustly like
good old English leaves, but thick and waxy and clattery, my skin began to
harden up. Instead of sweating buckets all day long, it decided to just accept
the higher temperatures and stop leaking. From the outset I had deliberately
drunk as much as was necessary to urinate: when you don’t go all day and your
tiny trickle of urine is as brown as tea, you’re dehydrated. The water is so
rich in waste that it’ll bugger up your kidneys. So, drink! Even if you are not
thirsty, drink! And after a week of copious drinking, my output shot up and I
could moderate my intake.
And so, having resuscitated the desert trek plan, I booked a taxi to drop me off at a point on the map where the desert road passed closest to a place called Chak Chak, 26km away as the crow flies according to a wondrous little piece of technology, a GPS, a satellite navigation device to become commonplace a few years later. The driver looked quite concerned. He helped me pull my
30kg pack out of the boot (11 litres of this was water) and waved at me as I
crossed the road, burdened like a pack mule and trying not to stagger, and set off through the sandy scrubland.
The day was past its hottest, but I had several hours of yomping before
nightfall.
Iranians I had discussed this with were horrified. “Into the
desert? This is madness. It is too
dangerous!” “Oh, yeah? Well, precisely what are
the dangers?” “The dangers? Well there are snakes. There are scorpions.
There are drug dealers!” I told them that I didn’t believe about the drug
dealers, that even if there were such people in the desert they would be
unlikely to molest me. And as for snakes and scorpions, I would be tucked up nice
and snug in my sleeping bag without any trailing arms or legs to be bitten.
The first few miles were rather an anticlimax. The desert’s
surface was riven with great furrows a metre deep. Far from unspoilt
wilderness, this was the work of Man.
Iran is so parched that they have an ingenious way of harvesting the infrequent
rains. They plough immense herringbone patterns in the areas around the towns. Through perforated pipes trickles enough water to fill great underground holding tanks.
From time to time I would pass a boulder the size of my Mini that had been
scoured out of the ground.
Every now and then I would reach a wadi; a dried-up watercourse which would obviously flow during the
rains. Not surprisingly, vegetation would be at its richest in the beds of
these wadis. This is not “desert absolu” in the Saharan or the
Kalahari sense, but I suppose that the defining feature of a desert is the
absence of water. The next available water was 21km away. Barring hiccups, I
should be there the following night and with nearly three days’ supply, I had a
fat safety margin.
At sunset, I found a nice soft cup of land alongside a wadi and spread out my clutter. First
priority was a fire. There was enough dry vegetation around. Ten minutes of
foraging gave me a respectable pile, and I brewed up on my living fire. To my
surprise, some of the living shrubs were the fabled saffron! On the twigs of
the saffron bush grow little moist buds of an intense yellow. A fellow
traveller in Esfehan had paid about a tenner for a little glass tube containing
just a sprig of saffron. And I had a king’s ransom of the stuff on two or three
whole bushes. Unfortunately, Iran
has export controls on it. So instead of lugging two saffron bushes with me for
the next twenty kilometres…. I burned ‘em. In the world’s most expensive camp
fire.
[Update 2013 – saffron
doesn’t grow on bushes like this. Talking rubbish.]
Despite the distant lights of Yazd spoiling the sense of total isolation, I
went off to sleep as happy as a sandboy. God’s
in his heaven and all’s well with the world.
I was awakened by a shrill, chattering animal call just
behind my head. It sounded like a staccato series of sharp intakes of breath.
It put the shits right up me. Despite having over the years become God’s gift
to outdoor survival, I had - duh! -neglected to bring a torch with me. So at two
o’clock in the morning in the Dasht-e-Lut Desert of Iran, Brent was staggering
around in his Y-fronts flicking a cigarette lighter in one hand and shading his
eyes with the other saying in a wheedling weedy voice, “What is it?
Who’s there? Oooooh!”
In the morning, no footprints were to be seen. Months later
I concluded that this was a hyena.
During the night, I had drunk whenever I felt the need. It
was with some consternation that I then realised that a third of my water had gone
after only a quarter of the distance. I was working on the theory that you
cannot restrict your water intake; that depriving yourself will only make you
drink all the more later on; that a water-deficit is not sustainable. But most
of these first 15 hours had been immobile; the next 15 hours would be spent
chewing up the (huh!) sixteen remaining kilometres. A piece of cake!
Setting off at a brisk clip, by mid morning I found a ridge
of mountains was barring my direct route to my destination: a Zoroastrian Fire
Temple with the stunning
name of Chak Chak. I had previously visited the place and had carefully 'marked' it in the GPS's memory. (Chak Chak translates as “drip drip”. Catch ma drift?)
Look beyond Mount Brent. What do you see? Chak Chak - and its water - lies beyond it. These mountains are, within a sensible level of risk, an insurmountible obstacle.
And bang on my route, like an approaching whale, was the
most darling little conical hill. Although the “brisk clip” - keeping going at a good speed - was an essential
part of my water strategy, Mount
Brent just had to be
conquered. On the top (no, dammit, I’m going to call it the sodding summit) I posed for a heroic photograph
(for a heroic backdrop, the Hargreaves Mountain Range) and claimed it for Queen
and Country.
The mountains should have presented me with a nice little
pass. They didn’t. According to the GPS, the straight
line path to Chak Chak was over a row of mountains. The slopes looked plenty
feasible, but I had to be cautious. Any climbing accident would be very
serious. So I’d have to go around them, not over. From Mount Brent
I was obliged to do a right turn, skirting the lower slopes to my left like a
boat following a coastline. At each headland I expected to look left and see a
nice flat path – or more likely a roadway – heading straight for Chak Chak.
After all, when a taxi had brought me and a couple of other travellers to
Chak Chak a few days before, we hadn’t gone up any slopes.
Eventually, my compass course took me over a low ridge. On
the saddle-point, a delicious cooling breeze allowed my sweat-drenched clothes
to dry out a little. By this time of the day - early afternoon - the heat was
ferocious; furnace-like. Despite the need to keep clocking up the kilometres, I
was clearly going to have to shelter. The onward slope down looked a lot more
encouraging. To my left the sodding barrier of those mountains still barred my
way, but ahead was a flat expanse punctuated by scrub and wadis. Surely, the road was just over there, curving round to the
left and leading into the nice flat pass to Chak Chak. Heading down from the
saddlepoint, I chose a deep
little wadi for my midday pause. This course was still to the right of my destination; the intended 26 crow's-flight kilometres had risen to perhaps 40km: a bit worrying but still under control.
Working quickly I raised my shelter over the gully. On my
trips I take a poncho, which is much lighter than a tent. Shaped like a
lean-to, I pin down the low side, and then support the high side with tent
poles and elastic bunjees. This time I stood my tent poles in the base of the
gully to give headroom, and stretched out in the blessed shade.
Now, where do flies come from? Or rather, when there are no
European tourists to plague, what do the flies live on? My intention of
spending a serene couple of snoozy hours was thwarted by the first half-dozen
flies. As fast as I killed them, another half dozen of the bastards appeared. If I stopped
swatting them and tried to just endure them, they became a swarm. So, what to
do? Follow Hargreaves’ Maxim No. 176: “In
case of doubt, difficulties or danger…. Adapt, adapt, adapt!”
How to make a fly trap: Take one empty plastic bottle, cut
it in half, put some sugared water inside, and insert the top cone, reversed.
The flies, two appearing every minute, lost interest in me
and made their way in through the Cone of Death. An hour later, suitably
rested, I broke camp and pondered whether to release Gahd’s creatures back to
the wild. By this time, the bottle was audibly humming with hundreds of the
bastards. Nah, sod it, I thought, let ‘em fry, and walked off.
The water situation was becoming critical. I started on my
penultimate bottle and took the firm decision that the final bottle would not
be touched; it would stay in reserve. I set myself the binding rule that I
would take a mouthful every ten minutes. The bottle would last for a good two
hours, by which time I would be at Chak Chak where my empty bottles could be
refilled under the eponymous drip drip of cool… clear…water. For the first half
hour I maintained discipline, but by the fourth mouthful I was struggling;
clock-watching. By the fifth mouthful I was counting down the seconds as the
ten-minute mark approached. And as the sixty-minute mark approached, my left
hand came up in an involuntary action and placed the bottle in my mouth. As my
arm came up I was thinking, “No, no, you can’t do this. It isn’t time yet! No!”
Dasht-e-Lut Desert
Of course, this was just a little game I was playing with
myself, but one can well imagine how in times of stress our basic instincts
overrule the conscious mind; the thug of the hypothalamus calls the bluff of
the authority-figure cortex.
At last I found the road, and politely refused a kind offer
of a lift from a passing truck. The day wore on with my trudge trudge trudge.
Dusk arrived and I broke into my final bottle. It was now vital that I
replenish my supplies before halting for the night: at such low humidity one
has to drink during the night.
At last Chak Chak came into view. Although situated in
remote desert and perched on a steep mountainside, Chak Chak is a venue for an
annual get-together of Zoraoastrians from around the world. Zoroastrianism was
the religion of Persia for
millennia; the ancient kings such as Darius and Xerxes who attacked Greece were Zoroastrians. When
Islam began its expansion in the eighth century, they swept through Persia and
forced most of its people to convert. Some of the Zorros upped sticks and legged it
further East to India.
They are still there today, the Parsis.
Not all of those who stayed converted to Islam. A remnant of Zoroastrians
survive today, many in Yazd, theiir nimbers dwindling due to strict intermarriage rules, i.e., those who marry non- Xorros are expelled.
It was now fully dark. A light bulb shone, up on the
hillside. The path wound up to the monastery. As I arrived at the base of the hillside,
just to spoil the spooky approaching-Dracula’s-castle atmosphere, a pair of
French tourists hopped down the hill and drove away. I limped up the final few
hundered metres and met the indigenous Zorros, asking if I could fill up. To my
disappointment, there was no “Brother, we insist you share our humble meal and
sleep in our humble dormitorium,” and the monk chappie showed me a water tap with its liquid treasure.
I filled up and decamped back out into the desert. Water-rich!
Yeah!
-----------
In Yazd,
as I traipsed through the dusty alleys between sandy brown hovels, I came upon
Mohammed Reza and his mates in a blacksmith’s shop. The Ladz of Yazd exchanged a lot
of high-spirited crack (I mean craic) with me, and then flagged down a passing motorbike to
take me and my rucksack to the famous mosque.
Yazd lads - blacksmiths and Mohammed Reza, a 'looker-on'
The biker looked like a dark and
dangerous Mujaheddin, but as so often in Iran, people’s outward appearance
belies their nature and he was a pussycat. After a few days in Yazd,
I had got fed up with being glared at as I walked down different streets that I
decided to kick back. “Salaam”, I gushed to an old man frowning at me from his
squatting position in the gutter. He put his hand on his heart, cracked a
beaming smile at me and salaamed me back with great good humour. Just because
Johnny Foreigner has different rules about looking at strangers doesn’t make
him a bad person. No, let’s put it stronger: if a visiting Brit somehow thinks
that the foreigners are acting strange in their own country, well he’s the one with the problem.
I kept crossing Mohammed’s path as the days of
acclimatisation passed. A quirky, slightly batty man with a naughty grin, I
invited him for a cuppa, and asked where was best. He chose the poshest place
in town. Not only did my budget stretch to tea served by a flunky in a bow tie,
we would also have ice cream and a hubbly bubbly pipe. The posh place was an
old hammam, and turquoise pools were
set into the floor of this exquisitely tiled underground paradise. As is the
custom, I removed my scruffy boots, and we squatted on low cushions. Mohammed
was so pleased, so… tee-hee… thrilled at being here that he put his arm around
my shoulder. He carried on giggling, and then put his hand inside my shirt,
flesh on flesh. Nothing untoward here, you understand. Nothing ah… wooly woofterish. But I wasn’t very
comfy with that, and removed his arm from my shoulders.
Tea for two for Mo and me. Kind biker.
We went on to a mosque. A down-at-heel place, rather dingy
inside, rugs around the walls, three or four men and a couple of women sitting
there idly, “busy doing nothin’ “ as
the song goes. For all his quirkiness, when Mohammed entered the place he took
his religion seriously. He went all hushed and serious. In the middle of the
room was some sort of structure, reminiscent of the central washbowls in a
barracks washroom. Mohammed seemed to think that Allah lived in it. On the way
out, having had a good old chitchat, Mohammed explained that one does not
exchange goodbyes with one’s fellow worshippers; instead we say tarra to Allah in the washbowls.
Chilling in the mosque with a holy man.
Zoroastrianism is more spectacular.
I slept one night in a Tower of Silence.
Apparently, when the corpses were laid out as dinner for the birds, the feast
would be shared by vultures and ravens. Most of your muscle tissue would be
ripped away by the vultures. Until, that is, 1970, when the Shah of Iran got so
fed up with body parts being dropped on the tourists (what’s that just dropped
in the road? Yeuch, it’s somebody’s ear! How gross!) that he banned the
practice.
The Zorros believe that to bury a human corpse is to pollute
Mother Earth. Since the Shah’s interdiction, they place their dead in sealed
concrete coffins. Presumably, they are made to a gungeproof specification.
On my first night in Yazd,
before the desert trek, I yomped my way south to a pair of these Towers,
arriving at dusk. The final few metres were in almost total darkness, scaling
slopes on all fours, working up a good sweat and breathing heavily. It occurred
to me that if an old guy like me should have a heart seizure and pop my clogs
up here alone in the Tower
of Silence, the old birds
might have become a bit peckish after three decades without a good meal.
Zoroaster was a precursor of Jesus, a human blokie with a
good channel of communication to a god called Ahura Mazda. He is the subject of
the stunning Richard Strauss piece Also
sprach Zarathustra. In the temple at Chak Chak they keep an eternal flame
going. The roof of the cave is blackened by several thousand years of
smouldering logs. They claim that it never goes out, but who would know; what
does it matter?
Keeper of the Zoroastrian eternal flame
-------------
On my first day in Iran I was pick-pocketed.
Call me Mister Innocent, but I arrive in these exotic lands
full of open-minded bonhommie and expecting the locals to conform to my
preconceptions. My first act upon reaching Tehran was to leave it; I have an antipathy
to capital cities; capital cities are always atypical of a country. By midday I
was at the splendid river-bisected and mosque-infested city of Esfehan. Surrounded by a boisterous troop of
schoolboys taking Mighty Mints off me as fast as I could click the little
plastic dispenser. (This is one of my ice-breaking tactics – a low cost low
weight freebie for the locals.)
But somebody was rummaging in the side pockets of my
rucksack as I doled out the Mighty Mints with a big stupid grin on my gob. By
the time I discovered the theft he was long gone. The little bastard had stolen
three things held together on a nylon lanyard: Swiss Army knife, compass and
red plastic whistle. I started ranting at the remaining kids, and one of them
suggested who the thief might have been, and where he lived.
So, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, I am traipsing through
the streets of Esfehan surrounded by a gaggle of adolescents. We reach his
house. We bang on the sheet-metal front gate. He comes out. He denies
everything. But in his hand, which is
in his pocket, is my whistle. “Oi, you little bastard! That’s my whistle. Give
it back!” Despite this piece de
conviction he claims only to have picked it up after the real thief had
discarded it. He denies having my compass and knife.
At that moment a car stops, and the driver asks just what
the hell is going on in this riotous assembly on the street. He is dark and
intense and deadly serious. When we tell him, he turns on me. “You should not
be here. This place is dangerous. Go away. Now. Leave Esfehan. Leave Iran.”
I squeak up: “OK!” and leg it.
But the next day I get an attack of righteous indignation.
Sod this. Why should I walk away from this? I’m going back there. I find the
house. The mum is there with the thief’s little brother. I explain as best I
can with my Lonely Planet Phrasebook. I have been robbed by a duzd. Her son. She calls her hubby.
Hubby looks embarrassed. Says to come back at midday. I expect him to get his
son from school and force him to grovel to the poor English tourist. But when I
return at the appointed hour, there’s nobody home
After banging like hell, I buy a bottle of pop in the shop
next door. The shopkeeper takes an interest in me. I ask about the neighbour. I
sketch the articles I am missing. I do a body-language demonstration of
yesterday’s theft. He calls his son out, explains the story, and then sonny
climbs the front gate. I am crapping myself in case the family come home to find
us burgling the place. Two minutes later, sonny comes back out. He has my knife
and compass! I mumble my thank-yous and then get the hell out of Dodge.
As I leg it down the road, a voice calls out, “Hello,
Mister!” After my bad experience, I am tempted to put up my defences and reject
any approaches. But I tell myself that the plan was always to be open and
receptive; that a single bad experience must not be allowed to ruin the whole
holiday. So I hello him back.
The guy is a soldier on leave. He lives two streets away. He
wants to invite me home for dinner with his family, named Bakhari. I leave my boots downstairs
in the hall. Upstairs we all squat on the carpet. The soldier has a pretty
young wife and a baby daughter. There is a younger brother and an old hag of a granny
who brings me tea and food, all placed on the carpet. “How old do you think our
mother is? Go on, take a guess!” I think that seventy is probably too high.
Maybe just sixty, but to get it wrong would upset them all. This game isn’t
worth playing. “Oh, I have no idea. You tell me: how old is she?” “She is forty
eight!” This toothless old crone is younger than I am! What a ginormous faux pas that would’ve been. Iranians
all look older than their age. Another family who invited me in were the Ruzbehs. I had met their son Martin, who had proudly explained that his father was a retired colonel in the army which had repelled Saddam's attack on Iran's oilfields at great cost. These are proud and educated people. It is foolish to attempt generalisations on such fleeting glimpses, however my glimpse was of kind, open, hospitable people.
Kind family who invited me in: The Bakharis
Another kind family who invited me in: the Ruzbehs
Near Shiraz lie the
magnificent ruins of Persepolis.
Persepolis or Takht e Jamshed
If the name Shiraz
sounds familiar, it is: The grapes which originated there make a splendid wine,
made all over the world but not not in the Islamic Republic of Iran which is
dry. I am told that there is a booming trade in grape juice; now, home brew
being illegal, why would anybody want large quantities of grape juice?
Written on the walls of Persepolis are cunieform texts by Xerxes,
Artaxerxes, Darius…. names to conjure with indeed. In the bible “Darius the
Mede” was the man who conquered the competing empire of the Babylonians and
released the captive Jews from their enslavement “by the rivers of Babylon”. I slept on the rocks just above the tombs of these great kings. Up there were some form of workings: nothing spectacular, but they ould have formed part of the winching mechanism used whilst the tombs were cut into the cliff face below.
On of my early formative experiences was watching “swords
and sandles” film epics such as Three Hundred Spartans in which the
clean-limbed and western-looking Spartans are beseiged by the scowling swarthy
black-hatted fuzzy-wuzzy Persians from the evil East. Of course, the Persians
were unfairly blackened. This magnificent city was every bit as elegant and
civilised as Athens.
Their kings were buried in rock-cut tombs in the cliff face that looks over the
gently sloping site. The view is stunning. The tombs of Artaxerxes II and III
were blocked off by scaffolding poles, but a crafty guide was making a bit on
the side using his little spanner. For a pittance, he let me into the cool rock
cavity and I hopped up onto the massive sarcophagus of a Persian emperor.
The Greek-Persian war was won decisively by the Greeks. Alexander conquered the Persian Empire. When he took Persepolis his troops burnt the place down, either accidentally or deliberately. The Iranians disagree that it is called Persepolis, a name Greek in origin. It's rather like Hitler had renamed Paris Frankstadt. It was called Parsa in the day (we're talking about 300 years before Caesar) and under the Muslims it is called Takht e Jamshed.
Magnificent Persepolis. Note the body language of the visiting surrogate king.
When I had arrived the previous evening, night was falling.
I decided to kip out in a stand of trees. After offloading all my clutter, a
couple of dodgy kids riding a horse came up to me and cadged a fag. They
started telling me a better place to camp, at the corner of a maize field which
was surrounded on three sides by plouged earth. Sure, I thought. As if I’m
going to give away my location to a scouting party for a band of brigands. They
proceeded to pillage the maize field, presumably for horse feed. As soon as
they cleared off, I headed in the opposite direction for some privacy. But from
time to time I would see a white trail appear in the semi-darkness, and realise
that I was being quietly stalked by these kids on their horse, whose hooves
were quietly kicking up the dust. Eventually, I found a little gully and
skulked down to observe. My little friends were carrying out a systematic
search of the area.
To keep my position secret, I had to camp in the maize
field. No fire. No torch. No noise. When I stuck out my head to observe the
corner they had proposed, a group of people were gathered there. But they
didn’t know where I was, even if they had any ill intent.
-----------------
Before founding the magnificent Persepolis, the rock-tombs of the kings were sited
in the nearby Naqsh e Rostam. Here lie Darius I, Darius II, Artaxerxes I and
Xerxes. Over every tomb, up over our heads, is carved a likeness of the king
and the winged figure of Ahura Mazda. Darius is referred to in the Bible as "Darius the Mede", the king who defeated Babylon and liberated the Jews from their captivity by the rivers of Babylon.
Tombs of the Kings of Persia
It got dark soon after I arrived, so I decided to leg it
round the corner and see if I could climb up to spend the night on top of the
cliff. When I got up there, there were rock-cut structures associated with the
building of the floodlit tombs below - some form of winch arrangement. I had to
be careful not to slip and fall fifty metres. In the end, I tired of trying to
attract the attention of my mate the security guard as he tatted around his
shack. He didn’t see my torch or hear my whistle. Next morning I appropriated
his washroom for a luxurious shave, and to replenish my water supplies.
It was time to head back towards Tehran for the flight home. I strolled to a
main road intersection a couple of miles distant to flag down a passing coach.
A traffic cop had a decent-sized shed there. He invited me over, made me tea,
gave me a cigarette. I then go to the roadside to await a coach, but he beckons
me out to his 4WD squad car, puts my pack in the back, and tells me to get in.
I… er… think everything is cool. I go to get in the front passenger seat (where
an equal sits) but he waves me to the back seats. Oh, dear. His colleague, whom
I hadn’t known about, gets in the front, and we head off north. I have
explained that I’m heading towards Esfehan (400 km away) and then Tehran. They surely are
not going to drive me all this way. We have a good old chitchat, with much
exchanging of cigarettes (God bless ‘em, the great tokens of laddish unity).
The body language signals are all on green. Gulp. After a few miles they pull
over. Gulp. We are on a dead straight stretch of road. A coach appears, and my
man stands with his hand raised, all cold supercilious authority. When the
coach stops, just past us, I make to run to the door, but he shooshes me to stop;
it’s undignified; we’re in control. The bus driver is furious that this copper
is trying to foist an infidel tourist on him, and drives off. The next coach is
similarly overcrowded, but the centre-man on the front seat gives up his place
for me, and stands the whole trip.
I get out my GPS and tell them how far we are from Esfehan.
(Word goes back along the coach… he has a wondrous little device.) People
behind begin to tap me on the shoulder. Where am I from? Ah, Inglistan! (Word
goes back along the coach.) Do I have family? Bale.. do dochtar. Stephanie,
hijdah, and Nathalie bist-o-se. (Word goes back down the coach: he has two
daughters….)
The Iranian people are the most hospitable on the planet. As
a shameless attention-seeker, to have people taking an interest in the petty
details of my petty life is most rewarding. They are piss-poor, but as friendly
and courteous as can be. Somebody asked me what we thought of Iran in the
West. I replied, “In England,
people laughed when I said I was coming to Iran. They said that Iran is a
dangerous country, a nest of terrorists; they would cut my throat and dump my
body in a ditch.” The person was appalled. “Buy why? Why do they say such bad
things about Iran?”
“The newspapers tell us this, that the people of Iran are all bad people.”
In an underground restaurant in Yazd, the place where Mohammad Reza and I had
shared a hubbly bubbly, I later had a meal. All alone at my single table, I was
called over by an English-speaking man, a tour guide, to sit with him and his
colleagues. As the conversation wore on, his driver leaned across the table and
spoke to me in Farsi. “What did he say?” “My driver said, ‘Tell Mrs. Thatcher
and John Major to send British SAS to come to Iran and kill the fucking
mullahs’.” I was appalled: “We must not speak like this! I did not come to Iran to talk
politics. It is dangerous. I will talk about football, about family, about
food, but not politics!”
Iran
is a young country. Unlike England
where the streets are full of old fogies, Iran has such a high birth rate
that there are young people everywhere. Twenty years after the fall of the
Shah, they do not remember the Islamic Revolution, and have a hankering for
western goodies, material and cultural. My tour guide confidently predicted
that there would soon be another revolution by the supporters of the popular
President Khatami, who was losing so many struggles with the mullah-dominated
courts.
With the exception of the pick-pocket episode, I never felt
in any danger in Iran.
Although they are repressed and poor, they have many values, such as family
values and sociability, which we in the west have lost.
An ancient form of air conditioning
We Europeans hear all the bad stuff about Iran; we are blind to the many positives. They have poets and philosophers on a par with our Shakespeares and Aristotles. In a queue somewhere I got into conversation with a dishy young teacher (in full burkah) trying to control a gaggle of unruly pupils. In my Lonely Planet was a passage from Hafeez or Rumi or Omar Khayyam. I asked her to read it for me. The mere sound of the words was hypnotic. It was almost mesmerising. Where poetry is concerned I am a barbarian; I just don't get it; I say brusque things like, "If there's any meaning there then why don't they just come out and say it rather than dressing it up in all these silly flowery rhymes?" Although I could not understand the words she spoke, this young teacher may just have helped show me that poetry isn't just frilly froth.
One small passage by Omar Khayyam goes:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Magic!
My Iranian holiday was a stunning, vivid holiday, which I shall look back on
fondly forever.
