Police Academy Iran Style

If you travel, especially if you hitchhike and especially in countries where people are not much used to see foreigners, sooner or later you come across cops. Sometimes they want a bribe because they believe that foreigners poop a gold egg every morning, sometimes they come to tell you something you are doing is forbidden, sometimes they bother you because they think you wear not enough or too much clothes, and sometimes they just come and you don't really know why.

In Iran, most of our encounters with cops fell into the last category. They were usually fun. In a way. 

Agent 007 and a grandpa with eggs

We had our first encounter with police (if I don't count the nice police guy who gave us a ride when we were going to the Persian Gulf and who later even invited us to his place) after more than a month in Iran. We were thinking it was about time. But it was still quite unexpected. And creepy. 

The outcome was a bag of candies, so I'm not complaining, though.

It started in a rather unsuspicious way. 

We are walking along a street to get at the end of the village so that we could start hitchhiking, and cars are stopping next to us. We always give them our hitchhiking sheet and it always reveals they are cabs. With one exception; this time it isn't a taxi, it is a plainclothes cop. 

He tells us he is a cop and asks us if we need anything. We tell him we need nothing and he drives away. 

A couple of minutes later, another car stops. It is another plainclothes cop. This one also has a badge and cool black glasses. He wants our passport and asks us what we are doing. We show him the passports and tell him that we are walking along the street.

He says hum and drives away. 

As soon as we made few hundreds meters, he comes back. He is telling us something that isn't on our list of Farsi sentences and that we, therefore, don't understand, so we tell him Iran is kheili khoob, very nice, and he goes away again.

Two other cars stop to tell us hi and ask us where we are from. 

Then the cop comes back. 

He doesn't ask us anything and gives us a bag of candies. (My mum would always tell me I shouldn't take candies from strangers, but this guy isn't that much of a stranger as it is the third time he stopped, though.)

It is weird but I think that will be it. 

Except that it isn't. The officer just turns around somewhere in front of us and then behind us and then comes again and tells us things in Farsi again. I am getting a bit paranoid and am imagining a police convoy rushing from the closest city at our cop's order to put us in jail or to gulag or wherever you put arrested people in movies.

In that moment, a guy comes running from a garden nearby and offers us eggs. Before I even have time to say hi and politely refuse, he stuffs five raw eggs into my bag with camera, and runs away. (It probably means he isn't taroffing and is dead serious about the eggs.)

We politely, but assuredly tell bye to the cop and keep walking, faster than before. The village seems endless. The cop drives past us again. This time he doesn't stop, though, but goes to a roundabout we will have to go through and is parking there. We walk past his car very quickly and start waving at drivers. 
Very soon we hitch a ride and a family drives us away from the wicked cop's territory.

So we still don't know what was the cop's plan and what was he actually doing. No police convoy caught us and we didn't go to jail. 

We managed not to break the eggs and after offering them to two of our drivers (they refused, surprisingly), we gave them to our next host. We ate the candies.

Troubles with Latin alphabet passports and illegal immigrants from Europe

When we are hitchhiking back north a couple of weeks later, we have to cross several road checkpoints. The crew of one of them finds us interesting and decides to keep us.

I show them the very page with the Iranian visa in my passport and the extension stamp. They don't find it cool enough, take our passports and disappear in their building with them. 

This doesn't make our driver particularly happy. He is in a hurry (at least I suppose so since he has been driving like crazy and once he almost got ejected from the highway. He also is carrying weed but we only learned that later.)

Then the cops come back and involve the driver. After a lot of pantomime we understand they want our Farsi letter we use for hitchhiking. When we give it to them, they are staring at it, looking important, and they take it along with the passports. 

I want to help them, so I show them the sentence "We are hitchhiking to Mongolia" on another paper. Even though I explain them three times that the other sentences on the phrase sheet aren't meant for this moment, they carefully read all of them and take the sheet too. It seems that they are making a collection of our belongings but nothing else is happening.

The next five minutes, they are trying to decipher the message on the rear side of the sheet, written by a truck driver in a different region one month earlier. It makes them pretty confused and we can't help them because we also don't know what the message means. I am pretty happy I didn't show them the second part of the phrasebook that has things like "You don't have the balls to do this" written on the rear side. 

While we are waiting, I climb across a bar to go among some locked booths because I need to pee, and I get myself escorted by a cop to a bathroom inside the police station. When I come back (again with the police escort), I see nothing has changed. (Except that our driver is looking more and more sad and nervous.) 

Eventually, we call our friend the police officer from Shiraz. Immediately after that, the guards give us their collection of our documents and vocabularies back, copy Vojta's Iranian phone number (to ask Vojta out, probably) and let us go. Our friend then told us something about idiots that get confused by anything that is not an Afghan passport.

Alarm für Cobra 11

Another meeting with police, this time with some action, comes just one day later. It is initiated by an overly helpful gardener at 3 AM.

We have made more than 800 km in just one day. A truck driver leaves us in the middle of a city where we want to visit Azad, our hitchhiking friend. He is expecting us tomorrow. It is few hours after midnight and we are dead tired. We just want to pitch our tent anywhere and sleep like a dog.

Except that we can't find any park or just a little area with trees. All the places that look green on the map are gardens surrounded with fences and walls. We walk to the end of the city. It is totally empty, there is not a single person on the street. We finally find at least a field. There are no trees, so there will be hot in the morning. We start walking along a wall to find a better spot, and suddenly a guy on a motorbike catches us up.

He starts chatting with us in Farsi but we are too tired for a conversation, so we just tell him hi and to his questions we just answer that we are pitching a tent here.

He starts telling us that it is too dangerous. He is not really able to tell why. The field doesn't look dangerous at all and I don't care and I just want to sleep. The guy starts explaining that we should go to the other side of the city. That is of course out of the question. 

He is standing his ground, though, and it seems that he will never stop bothering us. I'm wondering why we had to meet the only person who is awake in this city now, and why he has to be so annoying. He even calls his colleague, another gardener - this time with a car - and asks him if he speaks English. He of course doesn't, so the same Farsi conversation repeats. They eventually tell us they will drive us somewhere - we refuse - and they go dump some branches in the field.

We slowly walk away and finally find a hidden spot among three buildings. We pitch the tent, put our mattresses in there and unpack our backpacks. Some cars with blue lights are driving around. Why the hell a police party is starting here now when there was nobody awake except for the two gardeners ten minutes ago? 

When everything is ready and we are just about to crawl into the tent and pass out, one of the cars enters our hole between buildings and shines its lights at us. It's police. What the hell do they want? Then our gardener comes and he looks very happy he and the cops finally found us. Oh thank you, that was very helpful, you bloody moron. 

Another car stops - I can barely see anything with all the lights flashing into my face. Cops with Kalashnikovs jump out and start asking for our passports. We give them the documents and the same conversation repeats for the third time. We are travellers. We come from Europe. We just want to sleep here and in the morning we will go away. We are tired. We are really very tired.

It's apparently not enough. The cops want us to pack the tent and go with them. Oh great, we will just not sleep tonight. Tiredness is making me pissed. And rude. Vojta is just resigned, and that's pissing me off too. I'm packing the tent, throwing stuff violently to my backpack and swearing at the cops and the gardener in Czech. 

We are thinking of calling our friend Azad to save us and explain our new company that we are neither illegal immigrants nor drug dealers but we just find it too cruel to wake him up at 4 AM. So we decide to deal with it ourselves.

The cops want us to sit in the gardener's car and drive somewhere with them. In one of their cars, another detainee is sitting and waiting. They still have our passports and that's making me nervous. I keep asking about them but they won't give them back to us, so we have to do what they want. So we sit into the gardener's car (he is still very friendly and it's making me want to punch him) and our convoy moves. There are two police cars, our car and a cop on a motorbike, all with flashing roof lights like a casino. 

We are speeding through the sleeping town like in an action film. We cross half of it and stop at a police station. They bring the detainee and our passports inside and we are made wait in the courtyard. There is a couple of cops who want to talk about soccer. Nothing else is ging on. Suddenly a loud bang pierces the air as the guard at the door dropps the magazine of his Kalashnikov on the concrete ground. He picks it up and throws it elegantly to the air to make it seem on purpose, catches it again and sticks it back to his gun. 

The cop with our passports comes out and tells us we are going somewhere else. 

Oh no, they are looking for somebody who knows the Latin alphabet again. It reminds me of one of those police jokes - how many cops does it take to read a European passport?

Our next convoy is less cool than the first one. There is just one car and one cop on the motorbike besides us. We drive through half of the city again, this time less like in an action movie, and stop at another door. 

The guard drops his car keys. 

It seems that we are successful this time - our cops wake another cop up; the next cop is looking at our passports for thirty seconds, then he gives them back to us and we are free to go. It's almost five in the morning. The gardener looks very content and tells us he will bring us to a good camping spot. 

We don't care anymore so we don't even protest when he drives us 10 kilometers away from the town and releases us on a concrete parking lot where we are apparently supposed to camp.

He wishes us good night. I'm wondering whether he is making fun of us, and I wish him good morning. When we are pitching the tent under the trees next to the parking lot, sun is already shining and Azad is already up and at work. We send him a message to call us at noon, and we finally go to sleep. (Exactly at noon he's staring into our tent and telling us that the picnic is ready. I'm so happy to see him again that I can't be mad at the cops or the gardener anymore.)


.....

All in all, considering the unusual things we were doing, everything went quite well. We didn't get any fine, we weren't asked for a bribe, we weren't detained... The only trouble seemed to be the alphabet in which our passports were printed. I expected it would be worse.