Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, and fuck again! That was what I was thinking as we walked along the street to the Hotel Shalah on Khyabūn Dr Hussain Fatemi after our third trip to the Pakistani embassy. It was becoming a major effort in patience to get visas from there, and the complete lack of any form of organisation meant chaos was the order of the day.
The visas will be ready this afternoon, they had told us, but we are unsure of how much it will cost, and the rather sweaty little man who interviewed us for the visas intimated that it could be as much as twenty US dollars each: “Not too much,” he said obsequiously.
The Hotel Salah is typical of the seedy, ill-kept places that fat cats fed by revolutions stay in. The air conditioning in the lobby isn’t working, and we work up a sweat just sitting there drinking icy cold colas beneath a tiled slogan on the wall which reads, in rather bad English: DOWN WITH U.S.A.
We hold a council of war and decide to leave Tehran at whatever time we collect our visas. We have been broiled long enough in this huge city, and we need to get away, especially to a cool place which is what Chilas on the Caspian Sea is reputed to be. The hotel’s “Snack Café” has decor that only a person wearing a big tie could have designed, and fourteen years of dubious maintenance hasn’t helped.
The food, however, is very good, and we stuff our faces with cheeseburgers and chips, then settle down to write over steamy hot chai. Gradually, the number of diners begins to exceed the number of waiters, and the place becomes quite busy with small groups of bearded men talking, no doubt, about revolution and death to the great Satan. One man, in particular, catches my eye on several occasions, his wide eyes behind glasses typifying the type of nutter that flays himself on mourning days and rattles on about death to the imperialists, and so on.
I mentally run over the events of the previous day. We didn’t sleep very well on the floor of Mohammed and co’s flat, but it was free, so we couldn’t complain too much. Leaving the house, we’d walked up a quiet street to a corner shop where we all drank a bottle of delicious chocolate milk and talked over the price of saffron, which the shop sold for T250 for 1.5 grams. The journey into the city was fraught with the same headaches that face commuters in every city in the world—traffic jams, noise, pollution. But after about forty-five minutes, we were outside the Pakistani embassy, thanks to our friends’ help in not only putting us in the correct taxi but paying for it as well. They also gave us instructions, written in Farsi, for getting back to the office by bus from Iman Khomeini Square later on.
At the safārát Pakistani, I joined the sweating, jostling queue to hand over all of the application forms, photographs, photocopies, and letters, to receive a slip of paper saying, come back tomorrow at nine-thirty a.m. for an interview. I asked if there was any way that we could get the visas straight away, but the answer was, of course, no.
We took a shared taxi down to Khomeini Square and walked along to the post office, outside of which sits a man who engraves names written in Farsi on small brass stamps. Shahab had written us a letter to give him, and he quickly and deftly inscribed our names for us at a cost of 4,000 Rials. Linda took his photo, and he asked us to send him a copy. He surprisingly spoke a little English.
Back at the Hotel Kalstasi, we packed up and left, walking up to the square and catching a bus to Sahid Kandahar Bridge, near which the offices of our friends are located. We had to walk for about ten minutes and were very thirsty, so we paused for a rest at an eatery and guzzled down two colas and a can of Miranda each, along with a hamburger.
The office was busy, with people coming and going, and we spent the afternoon talking to them. One man, with short hair and a beard and strange staring eyes which typify the fundamentalists, talked to us at length in a hectoring tone about Iran and the hated imperialists of England. He spoke good English, as well as French and Russian, which he had told us he had learned while in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Iran-Iraq War. He claimed to have spent nine years in an Iraqi prison and had learned these languages from other prisoners. Linda and I repacked our gear into one pack, leaving one of our packs behind in a cupboard at the office, and taking only what we would need while we were up on the Caspian Sea coast.
That done, Shahab and I set off to visit a money changer, about thirty minutes’ walk away. He gave me a rate of T238 for two $50 bills, which is quite a wad of cash. On the way back, we walked into the compound of the Iran Telegraph Service to look at a small building which once housed Iran’s first radio station. The small brick building with a copper dome and a 100-foot wooden mast is now towered over by the huge brick edifice of the new Telegraph office, and a series of huge radio masts strung with a cobweb array of wires and discs. Back at the office, we sat and talked over cakes and tea, and then took a taxi to the house of Hamid Hussain, where we were to spend the night.
Tehran has several satellite cities, or mini-cities as they are known, and Hamid and his wife and son live in one called Ecbatan. It is reached by a freeway that is jammed with cars speeding along under an orange glow of sodium lights. To the left, Tehran stretches to the horizon: a glistening carpet of light beneath a sky of indigo. The city of Ecbatan consists of clusters of tower blocks, and Hamid’s house is on the second floor of one such block. It was reasonably cool inside, and both Linda and I showered before the meal, which again was a selection of rice dishes with salad and bread washed down with a lassi-like yoghurt drink.
After the meal, we talked for quite some time, discussing the finer points of English grammar and life in New Zealand. Occasionally, the conversation turned to politics and was carried on in Farsi, for which they apologised. Their feelings for this subject are obviously very strong. Eventually, we slept, again on mats unrolled on the floor.
In daylight, the full extent of the city of Ecbatan could be appreciated. The tower blocks are stacks of grey Lego, sitting in a sandpit among which other stacks of Lego are being built.
These ghettos are really no different to the housing estates of London, but I couldn’t help wondering, as we drove towards the city in Hamar’s little imitation Reno, if the government hadn’t built these places so it could contain all of the blue-collar workers in Tehran somewhere it can keep an eye on them.
Tehran roars as millions of commuters struggle to reach their place of work, and most of them seem to be on that particular piece of road along which we were travelling that morning. We were dropped outside the Pakistani embassy, said goodbye to Hamad, Mohamed, and Kanvar, and went in to queue for our interview.
CurseOfTheTraveller 