With dung across the desert to the New Year celebration

On our way further, we also needed to cross a desert - several hundred kilometers of nothing. It was just a few days before Nowruz, the New Year. Everybody was on holiday, traveling across the country, and most of the cars were packed with people and things up to the roof and sometimes more. (The old Peugeots and Saipas sometimes had a mountain of trunks and carpets on their roof.) And several drivers told us we would never be able to cross the desert until we told them we would go by a truck - the small road across the desert was probably only used by trucks.

Oasis

Camels, sweatshirts and manure 

We bought several cans of beans and bread, filled our water bottles and got ready for a two-day long crossing. We camped on the outskirts of the last city before the desert and woke up early in the morning. We had already noticed that Iranians hold a siesta in the early afternoon - around 1 PM everything is closed and deserted and there are fewer cars than usually. And the next day, there could be no trucks whatsoever because of the Nowruz holiday. We really wanted to start hitchhiking before that.

Putting backpacks on a truck

Worries again showed as unnecessary, though. Maybe the fifth truck Vojta was waving at stopped and brought us to a nearby village. (Even though there were sand plains with just few crampled shrubs up to the horizon, there still were villages with houses made of bricks and mud.) Our driver stopped at a shop with a couple of guys wearing sweatshirts even though it was almost 30 centigrades, and immediately referred us to another driver who was parking nearby. We had to put our backpacks on the load since there was no more room in the cabin, and then we continued towards the real desert.

From time to time, we would see a roadsign warning drivers against camels, and sometimes we would even see camels themselves. Even thought the driver first told us that he was going to the first big town in the middle of the desert, it later revealed that he was crossing the whole desert. And he agreed to take us with him all the way. (I'm not sure what was his name anymore but let's call him Muhammad.)

At noon, he stopped at a petrol station in an oasis. (There really were palm trees, a small river and all.) It was not deadly hot, but it was hot enough for me to give up the turkish cap under my headscarf. (People having picknicks on carpets around still were wearing sweatshirts or looked quite happy in black chadors or thick coats.) We wanted to eat beans from a can but Muhammad didn't let us and invited us for a kebap with rice instead. 

Iranian dresscode for 30°C

We made about 800 km that day and we got way further than expected. At 2 AM, our driver shared heated fish and eggplant cans with us at a petrol station (and when we stopped paying attention to our garbage bag, he dumped it into a ditch next to a garbage container). Then we went to camp nearby. We slept something like 4 hours because Muhammad wanted to continue very early in our direction. Since we were all the time speaking Farsi (even though calling it like that is a bit too ambitious), we weren't sure where exactly he would continue.

So the next morning we found ourselves in a pistaccio orchard, waiting several hours for the truck to unload. We also found out that the thing our driver had been transporting across the whole Iran was dung.

There was another truck, too, and we were trying to speak with both drivers over the dictionary. Contrarily to other people, they knew how to search words in it, so our conversation was moderately succesful. We learnt a couple of new words in Farsi and tought Muhammad and his friend some in English.

Approaching the desert

In the late afternoon, Muhammad drove us out of the city and then he had to wait because of a Nowruz limitation on trucks. So we had to say goodbye to him and to hitchhike on. Most of the cars were packed by families but the Iranian hospitality didn't let us down. In a couple of minutes, we were on our way on. 
Our driver spoke a little bit English. It was good enough for telling us that he hated the current regime and that he preferred the previous one. For the rest of the yourney, we were watching videos with the shah.

In the evening, we almost reached the Persian Gulf. The weather didn't care it still was just March. It was hot and humid like in the middle of the European summer. I was rather sorry in my hijab that I wasn't a guy or that Islam wasn't invented in places like Siberia or Greenland instead.

Nowruz eggs 

After crossing the desert, we met a young family and were invited to celebrate the New year with them. For me, it was a good reason for not trying to run away to colder regions as soon as possible. (Very soon it started raining heavily, though, which was quite unusual in ths region, and made me happy because it wasn't hot anymore.)

Our hosts (let's call them Hossein and Sabereh) have very active little kids, and if there were a World Cup in parenting, I think they could compete for medals. Even though they were all the time busy taking care of the kids, they didn't mind having us around and taking care of us too. And over the couple of days we've been with them, they never looked stressed, never raised their voice to the children or complained when they had slept for just several hours. (A couple of times, one of us was given a kid to carry her somewhere in our arms, and especially for Vojta the heartless it was a particularly challenging mission.)
It was especially funny to watch Sabereh trying to pray. It looked more like some kind of a Zen patience exercise. For praying, one needs a chador. And chador is something very interesting you just totally need to have if you are a little kid. So they would always come and pull her by the the chador, they woud steal the praying beads, the stone one puts her forhead on or the little rug. Sabereh would never lose temper. She would always finish a part of her prayer, then take all the stolen things back and then continue. This then would repeat several times.

I visited with Sabereh and the children a birthday party of their friends' kids (guys were not allowed to go there, so they were having a nap instead) and then we were preparing the New Year's celebration.

One of the important Nowruz traditions is to make a so called Haft Sin. It looks like an altar, and it basically means putting several things starting with an "S" on the table, and also some things that don't start with an "S". Each of them symbolises something related to spring and life regaining its strength and there should be seven of them. There usually is a mirror (it symbolises light), fresh grass (for growth), some kind of sweet jam (for I don't know what), garlic (for I also don't know what), colored eggs (for new life) and some other things I don't remember. Some people put coins instead of garlic. Some people also put a small living fish in a bowl. (Sabereh says she doesn't like that because the fish always dies soon.)

Nowruz fish

Our friends approached Nowruz with a particular tranquility, like everything. They didn't make any hectic or stressful preparations, and started making their Haft Sin in the morning of the Nowruz day. They also let us take part - we were supposed to color the eggs. So we were making Easter eggs in Iran (for me, it was the first time in maybe ten years since I hate the most popular Czech Easter traditions).

At noon, the year 1396 started. At the celebration, people put fancy clothes on (we tried to wear the ones with the fewest holes) and sometimes they give each other presents. Also banknotes are given as presents (the kids immediately tried to eat the ones they got).

Nowruz Easter eggs (I'm especially proud of the one with eyes)

A Haft Sin

After the Nowruz day, our friends took us to several short family visits, showed us their city (there was a lot to see) and helped us cook a Czech meal. We were discussing with Hossein political systems with our countries and realized that there was actually a lot of things we didn't know about our system (such as which state body is controlled by which).

When we were leaving, we knew that we would miss our new friends like we already missed all those we had met before. 

A water tank

An old bath

The Extraterrestrial's Guide to Iran

For a couple of days, we were trying to get used to Iran.
 
After leaving our friend, we continued our journey further. Over one week, winter turned into summer. Since I still only had winter clothes and a black hijab, I was hot all the time. (Whereas Iranian people still wore winter coats, complained about cold and in their cars and homes their heating was on like in the middle of winter.) 

Traffic lines suitable for the Iranian traffic rules

3000 years of civilization

One of the funniest things was money. Nobody ever uses the numbers as they are written on the banknotes. People usually say prices in Tumans, which means that in their minds they delete the last zero on the banknote. Sometimes, though, they delete three zeros. Or two. Or they say a different price (usually when they are speaking English and they are not sure how to tell some numbers, so you'd better learn the Farsi numbers).

We learned that Iranian people loved sugar and sweets even more than people in Turkey. Since they never deliberately walk and the oil is so cheap that even 200 meters is a distance long enough to be travelled by car, I couldn't understand how come they were not fat. (I think that if I consumed the same amount of sugar every day, I would turn into a huge fatball within a month.)

We found out that one of the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims was that Shia Muslims (that means most of Iranian people) pray three times a day instead of five times. That also meant fewer mosque chants, so we couldn't use it much to tell time as we did in Turkey.

Camping like a boss

We discovered that Iran had the best bathrooms in the world. They mostly are for free and they are everywhere. There always is soap, they hardly ever are gross and, above all, they have water hoses that you actually can use. These hoses are outside the toilet so they don't look like something that will infect you with plague and cholera and kill you within 3 days - and they can be aimed with. (So you can use them as quite a decent shower if you get disgusting enough to need it). So even though I hated squatting toilets in Turkey because they were too gross to be used properly and their slimy hoses always splashed me all over, I started loving these toilets in Iran - even though they still were unergonomic. And if the bathrooms were too crowded, there always was one poor sitting toilet free (it's called something like "toalet farangin") because everybody but me was afraid to use it. As Vojta said, the Iranian bathrooms are a nice result of 3000 years of civilization.

We saw a lot of tents all around city parks and sometimes just at random in the countryside. We were happy we didn't have to hide our tent out of fear of being kicked out. Locals camped in a much more fancy way than us, though - they had carpets, big cooking stoves, pillows and water pipes. And cars. There is actually nothing like carrying the tent somewhere by walking. Also, in the parks and also randomly in the streets there very often were fountains with cold drinking water. For free, of course (another result of 3000 years of civilization, I suppose). 

Separated subway compartments

We also soon realized that public city transport was close to non-existent. (So, logically, every city is just a huge honking traffic jam.) In Tehran, there is an overcrowded subway and some overcrowded buses (even though it feels like a cattle cart, there still always are sellers who, thanks to a special superpower, are able to move through the totally packed carriage, shout and sell stuff). Here, I found so far the first advantage of being a woman in Iran. In carriages, there are separate parts for men and for women, and the female part is always less crowded (which means that it's just crowded, not completely packed). In other cities, there is maybe a couple of buses. Sometimes. "Public" transport then consists of cabs that have specific routes as if they were buses. Except that they are smaller, more expensive, drive crazier and it is easier to get scammed in there (it seems that taxi drivers are a specific species since they are probably the only group of people who are not overwhelmingly nice to foreigners in Iran). That's why we have often gave up and have walked instead. However, our hitchhiking drivers were usually so nice that they have driven us through the whole city to the place we needed. (Or, someone was so surprised they saw people - and what's more, foreigners -  walking, and gave us a ride inside the city.) So we have, surprisingly, made much less urban hiking than expected and than in Europe.

 

A random guy in the mountains

We were trying to find out how tarof worked, which for me resulted into a general paranoia. We eventually settled on the model "keep refusing everything; if they mean it, they will push it onto you no matter how much you protest anyway". (And they very often meant it.) Just refusing rides was kind of stupid since we actually were hitchhiking. However, if a driver of a totally packed car or car with just one spare seat accepted us, we would kind of recognize it was a tarof.

We found out that like in the previous countries, there was no way how to sort out garbage in Iran. And often people didn't bother to put it in garbage cases either. At the beginning, my heart was sore a couple of times when I saw our drivers throwing our trash out of the car windows on a nice mountain plain. Then I started insisting on throwing my garbage myself. Sometimes I would hide it out of fear our driver would tell me to dump it out of the window too.
 
I also spent a couple of days staring at people in chadors and trying to figure out how the hell they could walk with them. (For those who don't know, chador is a big long - usually black - sheet with a tiny hood. It is only worn by women, usually the traditional ones.) Since chadors don't have any buttons whatsoever or holes for arms, people always have to hold them. I saw ladies in the streets towing the bottoms of their chadors behind them, looking like turtles if they had a small backpack underneath, holding their chadors by teeth when they needed to use hands or having the chadors tied around their bodies like an Indian sari. Sometimes the chador would just fall or was fluttering behind them as a flag when it was a bit windy. (I even saw a lady hiking a rocky mountain path with a chador on, though.) It seemed to me that one must be very pious in order to be willing to inflict so much suffering every day on themselves for God's sake.
So far, chador is the winner of my personal competition for the least practical and most annoying garment in the world. Before that, high-heeled shoes and handbags without holders had been sharing the first place. It is worth mentioning, though, that some Iranian ladies manage to wear all the three most annoying garments at once.

Coats and chadors

Khareji power

It was before Nowruz, the new year celebration, and streets everywhere were packed with people and cars. We could never walk unnoticed.

Every couple of minutes, we would hear somebody shouting "khareji, khareji!" (foreigners). Then people would come to say salam and take a selfie with us. We would tell them all the Farsi words we knew and would try to explain where we were from and that our country was neither in Germany or in the Netherlands, nor in Russia. Then they would recall the name of Petr Čech and other famous Czech soccer players they knew way better than us. Surprisingly, nobody would come to sell us stuff and hotels or manipulate us into giving them money. People just wanted to talk.

We were also not always able to eat our snack. Drivers would very often invite us for a lunch instead. Once, when we sat in a park among pick-nicking families, we didn't even have time to unpack our bread and beans. A man came and invited us for a delicious home-made soup. 

A nice family who invited us for food

If we were lucky enough (and it would happen quite often), the person who approached us could speak good English. We would then talk, sometimes for quite a long time, and sometimes the person would invite us home.

Most of the people we met had never been abroad, the biggest travellers among them maybe once or twice in their lives. There were too many obstacles. There are just very few countries where one can go without a visa with an Iranian passport, and it always is too expensive. Last but not least, guys are not allowed to leave their country before their military service unless they pay a huge deposit.

Kiwi packing

Being a good person is good enough

We met as many interesting people and had as many interesting conversations within just a couple of days as never before. It seemed that people were not only hospitable, but also curious and hungry to seize any opportunity to talk with anybody from the outside. Sometimes because they just wanted to tell us they were not terrorists, sometimes because they wanted to hang out with us.
It also seemed that our backpacks worked like a magnet for liberal and/or open-minded people. 

Most of those we spoke with were very open for a discussion about religion, functioning of our societies and life in general. And poetry. (And our acquaintance who would speak English would usually become interpreter for all their relatives who were equally curious.) Also, most of them offered me to take off my hijab at home since they respected I was not a Muslim. Some of them didn't wear hijabs at their places either.

There was an English teacher and his wife (in a chador) who showed us around a city and took us to Nowruz markets. In the car, the teacher was reciting poems by Rumi for us. At the market, we got several things for free from the shopkeepers just because we were foreigners. (Normally I would think it was a tarof, but our friends certainly were better at recognizing tarof than us.)

Iranian music instrument

There was a young guy with a very religious-looking beard who told us a story how he had been imprisoned for one day since he had tried to smuggle vodka to a concert. 

There was an elderly man who was a big fan of Rumi and his poems. A girl from India was also a guest in his family and they would discuss Rumi together (even though they needed the son of the family as interpreter). When the father found out that Vojta was learning Farsi, he taught him a part of one of the famous poems. (The Indian girl then gave me a light-coloured headscarf and a shirt since she was leaving Iran. I could finally stop frying in my black scarf. The shirt was smaller than my size but I was happy for it anyway. My only other summer garment Islamic enough was an old LARP costume made by myself, with holes and sleeves of different lengths.)

Rumi

There also was a young smart girl with a perfect English (let's call her Tahmineh - it means something like courageous or strong and I think it suits her well) and her family. Their house was a safe haven where I was forgetting I actually was in a theocratic country. Tahmineh and her relatives had no troubles shaking hands with Vojta (and her father and uncles with me), her friends (just girls, though) were coming and going and people didn't worry about scarves and long sleeves inside the house too much. Everybody in Tahmineh's family was curious to see us, and ask who we were and how come we hadn't frozen to death in our tent in winter.

I got along with Tahmineh really well. I felt we were close to each other in our way of thinking even though we came from very different backgrounds. It seemed to me that she didn't really belong to Iran. I could very well imagine her living in some western-European country.

She seemed excited to be with us and was willing to discuss pretty much anything we wanted to know. 

We were talking about tarof and how to recognize it (the answer is that one needs to be Iranian and even then it's not sure). We were discussing economical conditions of our countries and their current situations. We were talking about nose surgeries (I saw 8 men and 8 women with a plaster on their nose during the first week in Iran only - and it seemed that a nose job for people with just a slightly specific nose shape was some kind of a social must, as well as a thick make-up for girls and an elaborate haircut for guys. Without that, others take you for something like a rebel or a deeply traditionalist person or a weirdo). We were singing songs in our languages and playing our musical instruments. We were talking about meanings of names in Farsi (this is something I really like - Iranian names have meanings people know, and parents usually care about them and don't pick names at random from the calendar as in our country.) We were cooking together. We learned that Vojta looked like an Iranian guy (we had been thinking so, since he had easily passed for a Turk or for a Georgian too) and Tahmineh even imagined a  Persian name for him. (We sticked with Timur, though, a nickname Vojta had started using in Turkey since nobody could retain or even pronounce his Slavic name). We were discussing how Iranian people can tell a foreigner on the street (usually thanks to unkempt haircuts and clothes of colours that don't fit together). We were joking about police making people pay fines for painted nails just in the summer because that's when the state budget needs extra income. We were discussing language systems and language learning. We learned that in Iran, guests are very important. They can show up unexpected and chances are high that their hosts will be home and will change their plans to be with them. It is also quite popular to use your guest as an excuse for not attending a family meeting or for not doing your school homework. When we told Tahmineh's family that in Europe, guests hardly ever come unexpected because people would be too busy to accept them or they probably wouldn't even be home, they were rather shocked and thought that Europeans had to be quite selfish and cold-hearted. We were sharing jokes popular in our countries. For several days, we were watching Iranian movies and Tahmineh never got tired of explaining some of the social realities that were too difficult for us to grasp. 

When I asked her what was her approach to religious rules and the hijab, she gave it a thought and answered: "I don't think God cares about clothes that much. I think that being a good person is good enough."

Eventually, she told us that she had always wished to be born somewhere else.
I normally think I am quite a cynical person but at that moment I found out I had tears in my eyes.

"Martyrs" - people killed in war. This was a general killed by DAESH.