The most immediate thing on my mind as the plane touched down at Iman Khomeini International Airport was at what point were the other women on the flight going to don their hejab? The plane taxied to the gate and stopped. Only then did women start casually flinging on headscarves and coats. I did likewise but already felt both self-conscious and an amateur in the art of keeping a headscarf in place…
I needn’t have worried, of course, because after a few hours in Tehran it was clear that hejab was about as loosely observed by some as it could be given the circumstances – coats barely covering backsides; scarves so far back on heads that I wondered if it really counted as wearing one (and how did they keep them in position anyway?); women wore make-up; coats and headscarves were colourful; couples held hands, and things seemed relatively relaxed.
So, welcome to Iran. I was finally here after years of wanting to come, and months of planning. Having cleared immigration, I was soon in the front seat of a taxi whizzing through the dark and almost deserted streets of early-morning Tehran to the sound of Iranian pop music. The elderly taxi-driver slowed only to enthusiastically point out the huge green-lit mosque dedicated to Khomeini, looming up from the darkened suburbs like some sort of space-ship.
I had plans to spend only one night in Tehran before travelling on to Kashan but once here it seemed sensible to acclimatise a little first. My first major challenge was not the language or dealing with hejab but… crossing the road. Iran is infamous for its high level of traffic accidents, and in Tehran the traffic defines chaos. The road, Amir Kabir Street, off which my hotel was, looked and sounded like a constant motor-bike race and the only way to cross any road, as is common in some Asian countries too, was to set off taking on one lane at a time. In Tehran, however, they seem to specialise in having more lanes of traffic than actual lanes, and motorbike riders seemed to think it reasonable to use the pavement as another. I resorted to waiting until someone else was crossing and then to shadow them. By the afternoon, however, I had remembered how to do it and was almost sauntering across, dodging cars, motorbikes and everything else like a pro.
The other immediate necessity was changing some money. The friendly and helpful Mr Mosavi in the Firouzeh Hotel had given me instructions as to where to find official moneychangers. Since the rial was an amazing 49,000 to the euro, changing 50 euro made me a millionaire, for the second time in my life (the first was in Vietnamese dong in 1998). Mr Mosavi, on noting my passport was Irish, said I must visit a street near the, now closed, British Embassy compound, called Bobby Sands Street. This I had to see. For those whose recent history is a bit rusty, Bobby Sands was one of the IRA hunger strikers who died in 1981 in the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland (and, incidentally, because of a similarity in surname caused me hassle while I was at school in Dublin). Sure enough there was a sign, albeit spelt phonetically; it can only have been put up to irritate the occupants of the British Embassy. Unfortunately because of the proximity of the embassy, I could not take a photograph due to the large signs explicitly saying not to. Since it is something you can be detained by the police for, I wasn’t risking it, or at least not on my first day.
I spent the rest of that day and the following doing some sightseeing. Naturally I tracked down the ‘Den of Espionage’, aka the former US embassy and now a headquarters for a hardline Islamic militia. I didn’t get to go into the compound but did risk a quick photo of some graffiti graphically illustrating the general political attitude to the USA. I also paid a visit to the shop of Gita Shenasi, the Iranian mapmakers. I resisted the urge to buy a wall map of the Middle East in English that made no mention of Israel, marking only Palestine.
I did visit some of the more usual sites – the lovely National Museum with its pre-Islamic collections including material from Persepolis; the Carpet Museum, which was more of a gallery, housed in a specially-designed 1970s Modernist building. The carpets were gorgeous – wonderful colours and details, some hundreds of years old, and some were curious. One, for example, showing famous world leaders with George Washington taking the centre and even Queen Victoria getting a look-in; and there was one illustrating Shah Abbas with his unmistakable moustache – protruding dramatically straight out to either side as if it had suddenly got a fright; and was that a predecessor of Gollum hiding in a tree on the border of another …? And I took a wander in the Park-e Shahr, in which there is a memorial to those killed by chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and from where the mountains to the north of the city were visible, covered in snow and looking clean and calm in the sunshine above the hurley-burley and air pollution of Tehran itself.
So, it was a very pleasant few days in Tehran – I’d got the measure of keeping my headscarf on(though admittedly I’d quickly resorted to simply tying a knot under my chin) and learnt to resist the urge to take my coat off every time I went into a restaurant or museum, and I could cross the road without being killed. The only thing I’d failed to get was a train ticket. To get home in three weeks’ time, my plan was to take the train from Tabriz to Ankara and from there fly home. Thinking it would be easy enough, especially as I had the best part of three weeks to get one, and because of the sanctions, I’d left it until I’d arrived in Tehran. I went off to an agent recommended in the Lonely Planet but was told to come back later as their internet connection was down and showed no signs of returning. When I did return, I was told that there was no ticket for the train from Tabriz to Ankara. Unperturbed, and having read various bits of advice online before leaving London that suggested that some travel agents were more helpful than others, I reckoned I’d try a place in Esfahan when I got there. After all, I had time and I only needed one ticket…
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