Iran 2017 - Part 2 - A walk in Tehran

I was in Tehran, physically beaten,  spiritually ecstatic.

 The sky hung above the courtyard, grey and tawdry, wind shook the tree in the corner, occasional drops of ashen rain fell to stain the page. I had set to writing, fueled with tea from a battered samovar, perched on a little table with insectile legs buckling; wrapped up in cling film beside it were flat bread piles and fig jam.  By default I was first to this breakfast buffet, others arrived gradually as the hour grew saner and before long I was scattily engaged in chat with a French student and an accountant from Amsterdam.

Idle pleasant chat watching bedraggled folk emerge from dormitories upstairs, they stumbled in turn over a large pool of shoes that spread from the door almost to the samovar at which they clutched, sleep feverish. All then sat, chewed and sipped - joined the growing chat. 

It was the simple ease of the hostel. All looked well traveled in well worn loose fitting woollens, faded t shirts, and that general chique of alternative life.  Threadbare and making do. They all seemed to be lawyers and accountants, civil servants and engineers, caught off guard by this moment somewhere far along their own unique wandering road.  Worn and woolly.  Unpretentious.  

Around eleven a group decided to head out, Johan, Ismail and Tom, with three hours to wait before I could get a bed I decided to join them. The chaos of Tehran quickly woke me up.

On foot Tehran seemed crazier then it had from the taxi.  There was an almost perverse lack of architectural cohesion with the upper stories of most buildings seeming to crumble in on themselves while the roads between filled themselves with an almost filmic chaos.  Most cars were clunkers, square and banging out smoke, many had been modified in some way,  out sized tarps pinned to their rears - The air through which these larger vehicles swerved was seemingly made up of motorcycles, inconceivable numbers of motorcycles - all  rustic looking, in a thousand different designs.  Attractive things in a rusty way.  How can there be so many people in Tehran that there can be so many motorcycles? I didn't know.

Like the cars, these mechanical hornets had been modified by their owners, almost all of them had a plastic rectangular windscreen stuck to the handlebars, oily with slicked on dust,- a clear oval porthole at face height.  Some had tarp roofs trailing back these shields, covering the driver's head.

They stood parked in dense rows under every flyover. They bracketed the sides of most streets. They wound up and down every sidewalk.  Everywhere one could conceivably fit one there was a row of motorbikes.  

They were dense on the road, whizzing and weaving, up onto the pavements to suddenly erupt beeping from behind or from around the corner you were about to turn. Some loaded up so far with parcels as to risk wobble as they went, surely to topple around the next bend.  It was like the set of a farce from the 1920s.

Tehran seethes. It throngs. It spins about itself like it is constantly the final 5 minutes before curtain up on opening night - continual rush hour.  Men flew about, fixing, buying, shouting, selling, pushing large carts loaded up to twice their height, carrying pipes and baskets and any old thing.  At sight of us they burst into smiles of stunned amazement; motorbikes would suddenly divert from their course and pull onto the pavement in front of us, their riders beaming, "How are you sir!"they shouted, from the road, from the pavement, from the grey dusty shops.  This was the fanfare of Tehran.  Children and adults and old men, beaming heads swiveling to watch us pass with a child's smile, pure unfiltered delight at us as we walked by smiling back befuddled.

It was through all this we walked; Tom, our leader, had been travelling for a year and exuded a casual confidence as he strode long limbed through it all, I hurried along at the back, snapping photos and gazing around around like an idiot, I was for me not for one moment following our route.  I felt almost conservative, I was the only one in our impromptu group not in the middle of, or setting out on an adventure of three months or more. I only had a few weeks.  I felt a bit of fraud. 

My gang

And so I kept falling behind, my curiosity bringing me frequently to a halt as I spied a hundred new and wonderful things; Colourful murals of the Ayatollah, The Centre for Iranian Office Furniture, Giant bill boards bearing Anti American propaganda, mysterious photos of men's faces plastered on street corners.  I found myself entranced by a thousand new things, a thousand new answer less questions. 

 At one point we were walking down a particular street - this one selling expensive televisions I think - when from behind came shouting and the sound of haste, a group of men in uniform were running towards us down the street and gesticulating wildly, they caught up to us and began urgently miming. It seemed, from what we could interpret, that we were forbidden to walk in front of a building that lay a few doors down from where we stood, apparently, we gathered, it had something to do with the President.

We would have to cross the road and pass on the opposite side.  We did not understand but we followed their advice.

The men hadn't been angry, indeed they seemed genuinely concerned that we might commit this mysterious gaffe.  They seemed to only have the best of intentions towards us,  like everyone else, these men in military uniforms seemed almost absurdly non threatening, again they seemed delighted to see us, western folk striding with purpose.  What had happened was simply another mystery to add to the growing pile.

We were heading towards the bazaar, it was some distance away.  The city of Tehran is very large and seems to have little in the way of grand boulevards like Regent's Street or the Champs Elysee, or at least it doesn't seem to from what I encountered.  Most of the streets seem pretty nondescript, with a thousand random shops and a drain running down the middle.  They criss-cross back and forth, intersection following intersection, with very little in the way of memorable landmarks.  As I said, I had no idea where we were going, but I was content to follow, which really isn't like me at all.  I was aware we were headed south east -  all I knew was that in Tehran, if you were you were heading up hill you were headed North, and so it followed that as we were heading down hill, we were headed South.

At one point we passed through a park.  It was arranged in concentric circles, was intensively manicured and seemed almost Greco Roman in its easy meditative style.  Old smiling men in grey suits played around on yellow metal exercise machines; a group of black cloaked women sat in a band stand and listened to a talk delivered by a sharp suited man standing in their midst, all was at peace.

It was an abrupt park, it seemed as though the chaos of Tehran had been simply switched off, the motorbikes and cart pushers suddenly expunged, and instead there was quiet and calm amidst the leaning curving trees that criss crossed each other in the grey light.

 Over at the far side we came across an area that was cordoned off by what looked like police tape, inside 20 to 30 men in orange dungarees and green shirts were at work with shovels and hoes, it was gardening en masse,  were they working off a debt to society? Or were they simply a platoon of professional gardeners? Nevertheless, in their colorful conformity Oompa Loompas came to mind. Like everyone else they turned and waved and smiled and called "How are you!?"

Crossing roads presented to us yet another challenge, that is, until we cottoned on to the strategy employed by the locals - trust - one simply had to take a leap of faith and walk into the maelstrom, trust that the drivers will avoid you, that the sea of whizzing vehicles will part as you stride through it with purpose.  In its own way it seemed a lot easier then actually having to think about how you were going to cross, however the downside of this strategy was that if you stopped for a moment to think about you'd realise that it was completely insane.

So it took much faith and much leaping, but eventually we arrived at the bazaar.