Iran 2017 Part 4 - Journey to Isfahan

Breakfast was easy:  cheese wrapped in flatbread.  Paying my bill was complex.  So devalued is the Iranian currancy that 1000 has its own shorthand, 'Toman' this mixes freely with other forms of standard and unspecified monetary slang and it was something I never really came to a full understanding of.  Here, on my first morning, I was at the beginning of that particular doomed ascent into comprehension and so for the first time of many, thought I understood it all completely.  I nodded  "Ah Yes, of course!" and strode out into the dusty alley.

With only the tiny map on the back of the hostel's business card to work from I headed first away from and then towards the Metro.  It was still busy and it was still confusing.  At one crossroads I encountered a contented looking mime, while I glanced, alarmed at his static smile, a lady, half glimpsed, brushed close and left me with a bunch of white flowers.  She was gone before I got a chance to ask her why.  I stood a moment at the crossroads by the mime, bemused and faintly honoured.   I carried them upright before me like the olympic flame for the hour it took to cross Tehran via Metro to the bus station and then threw them in a bin.

As soon as I emerged from the concrete tunnel into the bus station's car park  I was grabbed by a tout.  I protested half heartedly as he dragged me the station where I was presented to a large grubby looking man in a captains cap who stood behind one of the desks that lined the circular space.

Surprisingly enough, this was no scam, but precisely the man I was looking for.  I bought a ticket and he pointed off behind me, passed me a ticket, said some things I didn't quite catch, sat back down picked up a paper and got back to his life.  I nodded and smiled.  I'd probably figure it out.

Anti US Poster on the Metro

The station was shaped like a concrete circus tent.  Tickets on the edge, shops and toilets in the middle.  I spent the 15 minutes til my bus stocking up on provisions and visiting the facilities.  It is often true that the further from home you stray the more fascinating the toilet arrangements turn out to be, these ones didn't disappoint:  Here was a low roofed concrete corridor,  both sided lined with powder blue doors of somewhat crumpled sheet metal. Square windows had been cut into the doors at head height. Inside the cubicle was a cell in which bare dirty white washed walls surrounded a brackish hole in the floor.

I enjoy squalor.  Always have, these toilets weren’t the worst I’d seen, far from it, but there is a romance to such places, a reality not to be found in airports and Hiltons.  Toilets in London are rarely worthy of comment, but often, in railway stations and bus stations and the little shacks one finds ones self stranded at just off jungle highways, they can be the most evocative of places.  It’s probably just me, but I enjoy horrible terrible toilets.

With my business complete I looked with renewed agency at my ticket, tickets are always confusing, they almost always present one with the unneeded and this one was no different.  I stared at it and tried to decipher its griddle of blue lines ranged about in rows and columns, its roving farsi sliding around, breaking in and out of boxes and grid lines, either by design or printer error.  Looking up I noted that none of the signs above any of the doors dotted around the curving walls seemed to line up with any of the roving symbols on my ticket and so I squinted and picked one that might have but of course this didn't work either.  There were no buses at the bottom of the stairs my door had led to and so there was nothing left to do but do what I usually did in unfamiliar bus stations: waft my ticket into strangers faces and make that mewling plaintive noise universally preferred by the confused tourist (Unless that tourist is English, in which the mewling becomes barking)  This, I find, almost always works; contrary to what the majority of elections tell us, most people, within reason, are kind;  simply present them with a confused, overburdened and murmuring soul and they will rush to take them by the arm and lead them to where they need to be led.  Tourists, if they’re canny, can come across as lost children, let the right person see you lost and your troubles are over (This also works for the wrong person seeing you lost, but with somewhat different results)

Soon enough I was being led around to the exact opposite side of the building and my bus

Tehran Southern Bus Station

 The bus was VIP, this meant the chairs were orange and comfy and that we got free snacks. The  only non Iranians were two German men several seats back.

If I had briefly panicked about getting to my bus in time, then that panic had been in vain. There had been no rush and there was quite a wait of about 40 minutes before we left. In the interim the driver handed out boxes, two per passenger.  One appeared to contain peach juice, the other, larger and with a map of Iran sketched across its top, contained a plastic cup, something called  a strawberry toffee, a cocoa and vanilla cake, a 'Yoka Royal' cake, and some  sort of date cookie.  While puzzling over this unexpected haul a man in red sitting across the aisle from me  handed me something.  It was a mystery vegetable.  It may have been a type of gherkin.  I’m still usure. I smiled and thanked him for  his uncommon generosity.

Bus Food package (Plus Gherkin)

Finally we began to move off, as we did an attendant took his place in the open door and began calling out 'Isfahan, Yelli! Isfahan!'  Clusters of people appeared from nowhere and began running at us from across the station expanse, they rushed the stairs with a clamour of shouts and climbed aboard the accelerating bus as we cleared the yard.  Perhaps this had been planned in advance, a sudden rush onto a bus 40 minutes delayed, a theatrical flourish to lend the bus romance and drama as it got underway. Loved ones were left in the bare concrete yard as we left them behind, hands clasped to their faces, tissues dangling from their clenched fists. We cleared it all and began to pick up speed as we meandered to the distant edge of  Tehran's urban sprawl.

Iran is a very large country and any journey of note across its mostly flat expanse is a long one.  I've never really taken to buses, there is a train network, but the one time I tried to book a train on it, towards the end of my stay, I was unable to. 7 hour bus trips would punctuate my trip like loading screens in a 90's adventure game.

We left before noon but it was dark by the time we got to Isfahan.  Our one intermission was at a rest stop half way selling carpets and music.  The latter was presented in big rectangular boxes with perfectly coiffed artists staring seductively from their glossy covers.  Here, as I wandered aimlessly, the man in red who had proffered me the mystery vegetable before, now offered to share his family's food with me.  They all sat in at a large window and so were framed by a view of baking concrete and arid land, their picnic sat before them on a white vacu formed table, from where they smiled up at me in expectation; I felt pinioned by their smiles.  I didn’t know it then but I was still afraid to engage, still shy and out of my element, still in a London mode.  I declined politely and wandered the random wares and the vast toilet outside - snug under its yellow sandstone monolith until it was time to board the bus again.

We continued endlessly across Iran: across landscapes beautiful and inhospitable: monument valley cliffs and dark red sand mountains giving way to vast mudflats; muddy scrublands rising to hills before collapsing into seemingly endless sand, table flat; featureless except for the many white plastic bag glistening from their scrubby enclosures on the roadside.  When the sun eventually set at the other side of the bus it was spectacular and all about me was red and impossible.

From it all I felt detached, so vast was the flat expanse all round, so unknowable, that it was impossible to contextualize: in my diary I linked the feeling to sitting with my back against the Rock of Cashel,  the green flat of the golden vale before me; air in my lungs; air in my brain; forehead open to the huge.  But this didn’t seem enough.  Windows and their frames surrounded me, their blinds in my foreground; a featureless landscape beyond;  It seemed two dimensional, flat foreground on impossible depth.  Like sitting inside a zeotrope.  2 days before I had been in my life.  The worries and stresses of the commute and the 'what to do with the future' now I was in the vast expanse of the now, drifting in and out of consciousness, alone with my thoughts in the blank desolation.

All of a sudden after an endless while, Isfahan was upon us. Before the bus had even reached the station the man in red had already organised a taxi for the two Germans and myself, and so, five minutes after being awkwardly bundled off the bus I found myself speeding through the vaguely European streets of another place in the passenger seat of a little square car.

After 7 hours of not speaking to anyone I learned that the Germans were all chat, they had noticed a seemingly homemade gas tank in the boot of the car (a common feature of Iranian motor vehicles it would seem) they were trying to ask the driver about it.  He didn't speak any English and in an effort to explain whatever it was he thought he was being asked, he rifled through an impressive string of ID cards and handed me one.

The man who sat beside me stared back at me from the card, clean cut, shaven, perfect hair.  He wore what looked like an Air Force uniform.  The Farsi was still indecipherable.  He pointed and said 'Autobus Driver'.

By now he had slung his taxi into an alley between mud brick buildings and we were pulling up in front of the 'Sunrise Hotel'.  In a flash he was out of the car, manhandling my bag from the trunk.  I opened the door and began to step out to help, but before I could he had somehow swept me into the hotel itself and had confirmed with the hotel receptionist what I felt I already knew but hadn't had the chance to tell him.  This was not my hotel.

Back into the taxi, he waved his hand in the air in a series of circular motions then drove with alacrity into another confusing set of winding mud walled alleys.  Though we found the hostel I still felt lost, I waved as the driver sped off into the night and fumbled my way through a moorish looking archway.  Inside, a large echoey central foyer stood beyond the distracted night receptionist.  My room was on its right hand side.  Its door a lurid, crude, colourful painting,  every other door here was the same, even the one to my en suite.

The Foyer itself stretched up a floor or three and from above the sound of birdsong echoed. The floor was of wooden tiles, the walls, adobe in red and yellow, and though the foyer was empty now,  a large crowd of men would gather before long and begin to shout over the sound of the massive TV that dominated one end of the space.  There had been an anti US protest in Tehran earlier on that day and this seemed to be dominating the news feeds and so footage of chanting, screaming protesters would play on loop throughout the night, the volume turned up to eleven.

All of this,  (The protests and the foyer crowd)  was perfectly audible inside my room, there was a large window set above my door, it was about half the size of the door itself and was fixed open.

Overall, the hotel that the hostel was set in had the feel of place half finished, the hostel was seemingly the only one in Isfahan, so my dorm was apparently the only dorm room in the city.  I came to the conclusion that the dorm room WAS the hostel, and the building outside its colourful door was all hotel.  In addition it was possibly unique in the international canon of dorm rooms in that it had only two beds.  The only other features apart from the continually clogging en suite was an excessively high ceiling and the constant sound of running water from behind the wall at the head of the bed.

Home Sweet Home

There was a bag of provisions by the nearer bed, ergo, I had a room mate.  On the floor by the bag was a jar of Pate, and from this I deduced that it was an individual of possibly French descent.  I dumped my bag on my bed, and for a minute or so sat idly and wearily pondering my unseen dorm buddy before returning to the lobby.

First order of business: investigate the birdsong.  The twittering led me up a flight of blockish stairs and onto the roof, here a large space with rows of couchettes was set out and right in front of the door was a big cage of cockatoos and budgies.  There was a partial roof of square wooden beams, and beyond an open balcony and the sky.

Second order of business: Food.  I passed the diffident receptionist and wandered back through the alleys and out onto the main road.  I turned left and followed it all the way to the motorway, then crossed and walked back.  This took about an hour and a half.  I learned that this was a street of  clothes shops and little else besides the one mosque, which I passed about half an hour in -  chickens scratched outside on the pavement.  There seemed to be only one place to eat, and I passed it quite early on: an empty glass fronted place that looked too expensive, but on my way back an hour and a half later, I realised that I could probably afford it. It was as expensive and as average a place to dine as it had looked.

I got lost in the pitch black alleys on my way back, they ran in an eccentric manner around my hotel, and it took some time before I could extract myself from their abstract course.

Back in my room,  the other occupant was present.  He as indeed a Frenchman.

Sunburned raw and with a bushy beard, he seemed a taciturn fellow, quickly disappearing up to the roof garden to sit alone and be away from me; but the next day over breakfast he opened up.  He was cycling to Singapore, worked in optics, and seemed fascinated when I let slip that I was an actor.  We spent some time discussing Godot, of which he had never heard.

But that was the following day, and I will end this belated entry to my blog here.

Isfahan itself I will speak of soon.

Hopefully