Tag Archives: Iran

Yazd-Iran-London-Taxi

A London Taxi in Iran

Yazd-Iran-London-Taxi

It was barely 7am as we searched for our hostel on the narrow, dusty streets of old town Yazd. I was in a decidedly picture-no-sound mood – I’d discovered that sleeping in hijab on an overnight bus was my new high-water-mark of backpacking travel annoyances. The boys were hot, sticky and fractious, their Celtic disposition really not made for 40C in the morning. And then we came around the corner and walked slap into this London cab. CAM and BigB were enthralled. Why was it here? Where was it going? Who drives a London cab in Iran?

The friendly folk from itsonthemeter.com were staying in the same hostel, or at least some of them were. It turns out that driving a cab from London to Sydney comes with a fair share of visa and vehicle import/export rules (funny that!), so at least one of the crew was still waiting to get into Iran. But Hard-Hearted Hannah (the cab) was there and they gave us a tour, showing off the customized meter which my kids just loved.

All just goes to show that wherever you are, you just never know who you’re going to run into – and that’s part of the fun of it all!

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Persepolis-Iran

Persepolis Iran

Persepolis-Iran

Iran has been in the news quite a bit lately in a scary, sabre-rattling way. I’m posting this view of my kids up on the hill above Persepolis, the ancient capital of Persia, smiling in the sun. When we just hear the geopolitical opinions about any country in the media it’s easy to mentally flatten the diversity of people and history of place into a one-dimensional ‘good’,’bad’,’friend’,’enemy’ descriptor. Pictures like this help me remember that every country has it’s own history, something which is important to the people that live there and that those ordinary people live ordinary lives wanting the best for their children, to be able to work at their chosen profession and relax and have fun sometimes.

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Crossing the Iran-Iraq Border II: At the Border

Euphorbia, tenacious and growing recklessly on the lower reaches of the steep hillsides by the side of the road, leaves glaring green in this dry, mountainous desert heat. Allium, like over-sized purple dandelion seed-heads, a border of color looking completely out of place in this forbidding landscape. Nothing left in shorn fields of recently cut wheat or grass but a golden stubble. Every so often our bus passed a field where people were cutting their crop with hand tools, entire family groups, the women mostly in full hijab. We were on our way from Iran to Iraq but I felt as if our trajectory, though ostensibly west, over the Zagros Mountains, had also taken us back in time.

So this was the Iran-Iraq border. The pleasant bucolic, agrarian scenes outside my bus window so totally at odds with the sadness and death I associated with this area. Half a million people were killed in a six year-long war over this very territory, something which still impacts people’s lives in this area, and indeed, global politics to this very day.

The bus pulled on to the actual border crossing. We climbed out, blinking in the sun, our feet squelching in the mud from the construction site where the new, multi-lane border post was being built. We followed our bus-mates to the current border checkpoint. Ah yes, another addition to the “101 Uses of a Shipping Container” series. There was a door, firmly closed, and a young man in uniform at the single window on one side.

Reviewing our current situation: here we were, in Somewhere, Iran, hoping to walk across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan. We didn’t know if we needed visas. If we were turned back we didn’t know if we’d be able to get a bus back to Sanandaj. All four passports in hand, I joined the group of people crowding around the window, giving my husband one last “I can’t believe we’re doing this” eye-roll.

Murph was a minor celebrity among the jostling crew. There was a truck-driver from Azerbaijan who had some English and was full of questions about who we were and what we were doing right here, right now. Murph played to the crowd:
“We’re just passing through. Yes, we’re backpacking, yes, those are our boys. Yes, we just spent a couple of weeks exploring Iran. No, we’re not on a tour.”
 I was too preoccupied watching the border guard puzzle over one of our passports, making multiple phone calls (to whom?) to pay my husband’s camaraderie with random truck-drivers much attention – but it was a handy distraction.

Then one by one the passports were handed back over the heads of waiting locals and we were waved on. We walked through the concrete arch of the in-progress new construction to another steel box – this time with three windows – to have our passports and bags checked by the Iraqis.

Some bright spark had decided to put a plexi-glass cover over the waiting area on this side, obviously not realizing that in doing so he had created a sauna in the desert. If my children could have stripped to their undies I think they probably would have done so.

For some reason the atmosphere on the Iraqi side of the border was positively relaxed. People commiserated about the heat and stood in orderly lines. My kids were beyond any jovial chatter so I made faces at a little kid waiting with his parents beside us. His Dad, who we learned was an English teacher and a translator, pointed out that since we were in Iraq I could take my headscarf off now. I nearly kissed him.

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Crossing The Iran – Iraq Border: Leaving Sanandaj

Iran-Iraq-Border-Sanandaj-to-Suleymaniah

It was almost 11pm at night when Murph and I left the tiny ticket office on the main street in Sanandaj, Iraq. We walked back out into a throng of people still bustling about doing their shopping in the warm evening. (These things are related by the way, in Iran in July it’s so ferociously hot in the middle of the day that people shift their daily activities to much later in the day).

In such crowds you’d think we’d have had to push our way through and that conversation would have been impossible. That would be incorrect. On the streets of Sanandaj, in Iranian Kordestan, to be a Westerner walking down the street is so unusual that everywhere we went everyone stopped and stared. Where we walked the crowds parted in front of us and we got to keep on chatting normally. It made me feel like a movie star every time.

Murph was grinning in a way that would have put the Cheshire Cat to shame.
“It’s going to be great, I’m telling you. We’ll be fine. And you didn’t want to go back to Tehran anyway”.
“I can’t believe you convinced me to do this.”
He put his arm around me, “It’ll be fine. Trust me. What’s the worst that could happen?”
(Actually he didn’t put his arm around me at all. That would be a public display of affection, something which people just don’t do in Iran. And, like I said, they were all looking at us, so we had to behave.)
I started to mentally list the potential problems we could encounter on our way from Sanandaj to Al Suleymaniah in Iraq: we didn’t have visas for Iraq, we didn’t know the route the bus would actually take, we didn’t know anything about the border crossing, there was a war…. I stopped. Thinking about it was making my blood pressure go up. Just the very notion that we were going to take a bus across the Iran-Iraq border was stressing me out, that we were taking our children with us was another order of magnitude of stress in itself.

My charming husband was still smiling. He’d been hooked on this idea of cutting across Iraq (into Turkey) since the folks from itsonthemeter.com had described this route to us a couple of weeks earlier in Yazd. Initially, I’d said no. Flat-out, no way, absolutely not a chance. CAM, our very reluctant traveler had surprised us both with “Iraq? Now that would be a cool thing to tell my friends back home”. BigB was with me. He and I thought we’d leave Murph and CAM off on their madcap meander through a war zone and we’d just take the easy route to Turkey through Tehran. And now here I was, with four bus tickets to a city in Iraq I’d never heard of before in my hand.

So how had this miraculous transformation occurred? Firstly, there was the weather. I read a phrase somewhere which described Southern Iran in the summer as a place for only “mad dogs and Englishmen”. I’d change that slightly to all of Iran in the summer. Or at least all of Iran that I’d visited. It had been 45C in Tehran, almost 50C in Yazd and Shiraz. Irish people are not designed for such temperatures.

Secondly after nearly three weeks in Iran nothing, not even transiting through Iraq, seemed too outlandish any more. We’d done it. We’d ventured into this historic, enigmatic, vilified and feared country and found it all so very, very normal. OK, headscarves and fashion police excepted, but once I got used to the dress code it didn’t seem so important. From this perspective Iraqi Kurdistan positively beckoned: “Come check me out, you’re going to be even more surprised”.

Iran-Public-Bus

At 6am the next morning the taxi picked us up to take us to the bus station where we waited and waited and waited. We even wondered if we’d been scammed although that idea we discounted pretty much immediately since it was so at odds with the reality we’d experienced to date in courteous, welcoming, polite and safe Iran. We climbed onto a serviceable but not luxurious coach about two hours later. Us, another western-looking couple and about a dozen other people, mostly male.
“No going back now”, I thought.

On the outskirts of Sanandaj the engine started grinding as the bus began to climb up into the higher reaches of the Zagros Mountains. And then it just stopped. The driver disappeared outside. Finding out what was going on wasn’t an option so we just sat tight and waited. The locals got off and stood around smoking and watching whatever it was that the driver was doing. Cheshire-Cat-Man wasn’t grinning but was confidently telling BigB, “Not to worry, we’ll be off again in a moment”. In the realm of absurd and surreal family travel situations I was pretty sure this was in a special class of it’s own. I actually had to suppress nervous-Nellie giggles. But a rush of quickly stubbed out cigarettes from the peanut gallery told us that the driver was on his way back into the bus and then we were off again.

Next: Crossing the Iran-Iraq Border II At The Border

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women-in-tehran

Women in Tehran

women-in-tehran

“And she too?”
The taxi-driver chatting to Murph in the front of the cab barely inclined his head towards me, headscarfed and in the back with the kids.
They continued their conversation about where we were from and where we lived. I seethed, the knot at the pit of my stomach curling ever tighter.
Was this it? Would I be a nameless “she” in a black scarf for the next two weeks?
Remind me why I’d agreed to come to Iran again?

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travel-iran-birthday-photo.jpg

What Does A Travelling Mom Look Like in Iran

travel-iran-birthday-photo

“Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me!”
We spent my most recent 25-yet-again birthday in Esfahan last week. Murph reckons that this is the 20th birthday I’ve spent with him – how’s that for making a body feel old!! No matter, his observation prompted a conversation that lasted all day where we tried (and failed) to remember where we’ve been on each of those birthdays. I decided that from now on we should take an official “Birthday Photo” with a landmark in the background. Ta-Da: me and my boys with the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Esfahan, Iran with it’s glorious, intricate, Islamic tile-work behind us.

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