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.

Philosophy, freedom and the wrong gender

We spent the next month or so speaking with people. And they were telling us stuff. 

The art of conversation and the taboos

We were drifting here and there across the country to visit all those who we had met somewhere and who had invited us to stay with. (We saw some of the famous places too, but people gained absolute priority.) In our friends' places we sometimes met other people and were invited to visit them too. 

And we spent hours and hours just talking. 

Our foreign faces, English language and our backpacks kept working as a magnet for philosophers. Every single person we could talk with was thoughtful and had intriguing things to say.

What was striking about all these people was how easily they were willing to talk with us about things such as their attitude to life or their faith. 

(The second thing that was striking was that they were willing to discuss these things sober. In Europe, I always find it difficult to engage in a genuine conversation. If it happens, it usually is when people are drunk, which necessarily - to put it mildly - dissolves the outcome of the conversation. Here, I enjoyed sober talks to the full.) And it seemed that in Iran it was possible to know a person more within one day than elsewhere in a very long time. 

At some point, we always necessarily came across religion and our attitudes to it. It was another occasion for me to be surprised. In the West, people tend to see Iran as a homogeneously Muslim country. In my experience, though, every single person we met had their own views and their own theories about the existence and nature of G(g)od, and about things people should or should not do. Sometimes, these views were Islamic; sometimes, they were far from it. And every time, even if our views were in opposition, our talk was friendly, full of respect and it always was a dialogue, not parallel monologues. 

Christian church in Esfahan

In one of the small hidden churches

We would also talk about environmental protection, democracy, evolution, Israel, Marxism, suicide, the definition of love, Russian and American imperialism, poetry, reason, the Iran-Iraq war, gender equality, prophets, existentialism, sex education, the Syrian crisis, knowledge, DAESH, the human nature, patriotism, the purpose of human life, freedom... 

There however was a taboo - the LGBT issues. It seemed that even very open-minded people had hard time talking about them. (Even though there still were people who would discuss it without difficulties and people whose views were humane and liberal.)

Even donkeys make philosophical stares in Iran. 

The handshaking question

I try to be as culturally open as possible. I really do. (Otherwise I wouldn't be hitchhiking across Asia and I would just comfortably sit in Europe.) But when I spend enough time in a country, there sometimes is a custom, a little thing that I find hard to digest. Something that makes me want to yell "you-guys-are-doing-it-wrong-for- f***'s-sake!"

In the USA, it was sniffling. (I got used to not blowing my nose in public, but regardless of how much I tried, I would always find hearing people sniffle downright disgusting.)

In Iran, it was the thing that I wasn't supposed to shake hands with guys. 

I like handshaking. To me, it's a beginning or a confirmation of a fair relation between two equals. 

I know that in Islam, not touching the other sex at all is a sign of respect or so. I know people don't do it because they find it wrong or they just aren't used to doing it. Or they don't do it because there might be a sneaky cop watching. I knew all that.

But after some time, it started annoying me.

Especially because we were meeting loads of guys and way fewer women. Out of those guys maybe just 40 or 30 % would shake hands with me and a couple of the others would explain they couldn't do it, which I found totally OK. The rest were gradually making me feel as if I had fleas or leprosy. 

Slowly, this rule was just pissing me off. It seemed to me that it presumed that people were animals unable to control themselves, and just shaking hands between people who happen to have different bodily organs necessarily makes them want to have sex together. Whereas I prefer to think better about the human nature. I like to believe - and my experience proves it - that we as a species are quite well capable of a civilized interaction even with a holder of a different set of reproduction organs.

Luckily, there still were the 30 or 40 % (and those who explained themselves). Every meeting with people like that made me feel as if we were members of a secret brotherhood, and a plain old handshake was a conspiracy sign. But it was kind of making us part of the same universe.

The khareji privilege 

As we were crisscrossing the country, hitchhiking and visiting different people and families, I realized how unfairly special our position was. And how difficult or even unbearable my life would be if I were part of the local social structures. 

We were guests, so everybody was helpful, was taking care of us and communicating with us. We were not part of the tight net of family and neighbourhood relations, so we were immune to gossip and things were pardoned and tolerated to us - we could hang out whoever we wanted to hang out with, we could go wherever and whenever we wanted, we could do unusual and strange things and we could wear unfashionable shabby clothes and dirty shoes. Last but not least, as foreigners we got some kind of a khareji gender, so the strict separation of different sexes didn't apply to us that much.

First of all, everybody accepted that Vojta and I were just travel buddies, which for the locals would be a no-go. (With people who could speak English we were not lying about being married or a couple. Eventually, we would stop lying about it completely because we kind of felt safe enough even if we would tell the truth.) 

Also, our friends, both girls and guys, were less afraid about getting into troubles for hanging out with us and having us at home than they would be if we were Iranian. And I was very often offered to take off my hijab indoors even if the locals would keep it. Even young guys from traditional families would tell me I could take it off if the older generation wasn't around, and nobody would ever give me offended, awkward or creepy stares. The only thing I ever got was one polite joke when I put my scarf back on ("You actually look cute with the hijab..."). It seemed that people found seeing other people without their headscarves pretty normal after all.

Poetry everywhere

And they were happily ever after

It seems that Iran is a huge, tight web of smaller family webs, and everyone has their fixed place in it. There is nothing like individualism in there (and in Iran I first realized how much individualist we are in Europe). Also, most of the social activities revolve around the family. That's why every time we met a couple, we were quite curious how they had met each other.

And sometimes we found out that people got married because it had been arranged by their families. At first I was surprised because I had always imagined that people who do arranged marriages live in remote villages, are covered by chadors and beards from head to toes and don't speak western languages. However, these were young, English speaking people, open to the outside world.

This is another thing that makes me think that in the Iranian society, family is the most important value. A value in itself. And individuals are devices whose purpose is to make the family machine work. In this light, the European notions of freedom, choice, happiness or rights of an individual become way more complicated and less self-evident.

As for personal happiness, it seems to be not valued or sought if it would be achieved to the detriment of the family (or the family's reputation) and is for many people not even possible without the family (because people are, also, so much dependent on their families and love them so much that with bad family relations it is hard for them to be happy). 

Also, it is necessary to say that it's always the guy and his family who initiates the marriage negotiation. The girl only has the right to say yes or no after a couple of weeks or even hours of talking with the guy (with other people around).

At first, I found this whole system just horrifying. 

However, the surprising thing was that the young people - who had, several years ago, married really quickly compared to the European standards - seemed to get along really well. We would spend several days with them and they would seem just content and happy. 

Once, we even heard a true love story about a girl and a boy who had secretly loved each other for years even though they were too shy to even speak to each other, and then ended up together in an arranged marriage and have been happy ever since. All fairytale characters could be jealous.

It seems that in Iran, people are somehow able not only to survive with almost a total stranger that one day pops up in their life, but can build a nice relationship with them. To my European brain it seems like a story from a different galaxy. For understanding better how the hell they do it, I just haven't been there long enough, so it stays a big mystery for me. 

The importance of having the Y chromosome and a big car

This post seems to be too much about social relations. I know I seem obsessed by them. But even though we were talking about so many things with our new friends, this was one of the most unfamiliar and strange ones. So I will keep talking about them in this post. 

Another thing that surprised me is that whereas in Europe, being an unmarried or a married couple makes no real difference - and there is no point in knowing whether people have an official paper to confirm their relationship or not - in the Iranian society there seems to be a huge gulf between these things. 

The gulf is so deep that some people seem to prefer marrying somebody who has not been their girlfriend or boyfriend - for the very reason they haven't been in relationship with them before. It also seems that for a girl it is socially unacceptable to be in a relationship without marriage whether for boys it doesn't matter (even though a relationship kind of usually needs a boy and a girl). And having been in a relationship in the past might be some kind of an issue for a girl - even in an environment that seems "liberal" - if she is about to marry someone or to start a new relationship.

I haven't been in Iran long enough to understand what kind of sense it makes, and that makes me feel sorry. So far I just suspect it might be some kind of sexist bullshit that doesn't really make sense.   

After all the liberal opinions we had heard, learning this was like a blow with a hammer in my head. It knocked me back down to Earth and reminded me how full of contrasts the Iranian society was.

However, marriage can be a big issue for boys too. Society pushes them to get married and expects them to have a nice job and to be rich in order to do so. (Nobody expects a girl to be rich and to have a nice job, though.) This requirement might be so oppressive that some boys feel their position in a society is worse than the position of girls. (This surprised me quite a lot because I have hard time imagining a more fatal oppression in a nowadays' society than not being allowed to leave the country or to marry without the permission of a random relative who happens to be male.) 

How to become Iran-sick

On this trip, we always have hard time leaving countries we get used to, but leaving Iran was especially difficult. Over a couple of weeks, we had become friends with more people than usually in years. 

Since we had extended our visa, we spent maybe two weeks just visiting our friends in different cities again, saying bye to them and being sad that we wouldn't see them for a long time. And we always stayed with our friends longer than planned and there always was a lot of things to do and to talk about.

When we left, I was Iran-sick. Being Iran-sick is something like being homesick, except that you miss a country which is not your home, where you only spent two months and where you would probably just go crazy if you had to live there. But you miss it anyway. A lot.

And there were several discussion that I couldn't stop thinking about - some of them were making me sad or just pissed, but it didn't make them any less interesting. 

Even Vojta who usually is just grumpy, doesn't like showing any positive emotions and hates being sentimental said something about one of the best experiences of his life. 

A riddle for those who don't understand Farsi

Trip with Iranian Hitchhikers

"Khareji! Khareji! Aks!" 
Foreigners! Picture!
For maybe the 10th time that day, we lined up for a selfie with some passers-by.
It seemed that as soon as the Nowruz holiday started, all the 80 million Iranians jumped into their cars and came to Shiraz. The whole city was packed like one huge Tehran subway. 

It also seemed that besides visiting the Eram garden, the holy shrine and the hipster café in an old water tank, taking a selfie with foreigners was another thing on a must-do list. In any western country, we would probably just ignore people shouting at us because we would think it just is catcall or they want money. In Iran, though, we knew that they were curious and really just wanted that selfie. 

Sometimes, we noticed a group of people whispering next to us. Then a person, usually a young girl, would approach us and very politely ask in English if she could talk to us. We would agree, she would start asking us questions and then her whole extended family, sometimes up to 15 persons, would surround us and make her interpret their questions too. 

How to crash a traditional wedding

It was our second day in Shiraz and I felt like a tired soccer player or a pop star.

Hipster café in Shiraz

The only remarkable thing we had done, though, had been moving our butts to Iran.

We had been invited at home by the people who had given us a ride to Shiraz. We had seen most of the famous places where we had to pay 10 times more than Iranians because being a khareji actually is a bit of a double-edged sword. We had camped in a park and found a bag with money and phones, and had been hunting for an English-speaking Iranian to help us track the owner. 

We had also visited the holy shrine and I had experienced what was it like to wear a chador. (If it weren't rude, I would say it sucks. I could focus on the shrine just a little because most of my mental capacity had been consumed by trying not to stumble over the chador and not to let it fall down along with my hijab. Eventually, I had tied the two corners of the chador together in a huge knot. It definitely was very un-islamic but I at least I finally had my hands free.)

We were going to see the last famous place, a castle. Then we wanted to hitchhike on, to Persepolis. 

We saw some luxury rooms, took some selfies with tourists and then we sat in the garden to eat our snack. 

"Hi, can I ask you where you are from?" I heard as soon as we finished the lunch. 
Oh, another selfie, I thought. 
"Hi. From Czechia. It's in Europe." 
"I know where that is," a very young guy standing in front of us smiled. Then he shook hands with both of us. "Are you traveling around the world?" 
I realized he probably knew more than three sentences in English. Maybe we even could have a real conversation...
"No, just Asia... Did you come here for Nowruz?"
"Yes. I'm actually hitchhiking to the Persian Gulf with my friends."
"I see... eh - WHAAAT??" 

That's how we met our future fellow traveller. I will need to speak more about him here, so I will call him Atesh (it means fire).

He was our first Iranian hitchhiker (out of a dozen others we met later), so we couldn't let him go easily without asking him loads of questions. He was on his first hitchhiking trip with his brother and another friend. His brother was just making money for traveling by selling jewels made by their friend's sister. They too had the khareji power, probably because of their backpacks and of his brother's European face. People also wanted to take selfies with them, and once they had made a person think they were from Italy. We also learned Atesh knew several Czech novelists and historical figures.

As for hitchhiking, it is no longer true that it's not known in Iran. Now, there is something like a boom of hitchhiking. There are young people who are into traveling, who like the US novels about Beatniks from the 50s and who hitchhike in the very same way we do.

Then he invited us to a wedding of his friend's friend.

In Europe, you usually need to be invited by the newlyweds months in advance. Here it took one phone call three hours before the event.

So we ended up in a house full of nicely dressed people and six Polish physicians Atesh had also found on the street somewhere. (They were planning to go by bus to the Persian Gulf.) 

It was decided that guys would stay whereas girls - that meant two Poles called Gosia and I - would go with the family to see the wedding ceremony. We squeezed in a car with Atesh's friend (we will need him further in this story so let his name be Azad - it means "freedom" and I like this name for him) and his sisters. There were seven of us in the car but nobody minded. We found ourselves in a house with more people in even nicer clothes. Then the bride and the groom arrived. We were allowed to look as they were signing their documents. Soon the ceremony was over and we returned to the first house.

And then the party started. It was the craziest party without alcohol and without guys I had ever experienced. All guys were celebrating upstairs and all girls downstairs. They came with perfect make-ups and high-heeled shoes. As soon as the door closed, they got rid of their hijabs, stockings and long-sleeved coats. Underneath, they had dresses I would be too shy to wear in Europe. For several hours, they were dancing to the loudest disco music I had heard since my high school. The Polish girls and I looked like visitors from a different galaxy (the Polish girls, though, at least had clean clothes with no holes). But everything was pardoned since we were khareji. Even here people wanted to take selfies with us and they were asking what we were. And the bride asked me to dance with her.

Our friend from Morocco 

It was decided. Persepolis will wait. Let's join the Iranian guys for the Persian Gulf.

In the rainy morning after the party, we squeezed to a taxi with Atesh, his brother, Azad, the taxi driver and five backpacks in order to get to the hitchhiking spot.

We bought some cans and bread. Atesh's brother - let his name be Samir - wrote two nice hitchhiking signs saying "Bandar Abbas" for us. Thus we got our first Iranian hitchhiking sign. And we learned that the Iranian guys didn't mind using the thumb sign for hitchhiking.

We divided into two groups - Azad and Samir would be in one group, and the rest of us would go together. (We were 3 but we counted on the khareji power.)
"You go hitchhiking and I will wait with the backpacks," Atesh said, smiling. "People in here are nicer to foreigners than to other Iranians. I bet we will be faster like this."

It was the most comfortable hitchhiking ever because Atesh took care of all the taxis.
He was thinking on. "Maybe I should also speak English and tell I'm a foreigner..."
"Try it. I bet you won't pass for a Czech," I laughed. "You look totally Iranian."
A car stopped. This time it wasn't a taxi and it was going our way. Our friends were still waiting - Atesh had been right.

"I hope the driver won't be too good at English," Atesh grinned when we were putting our backpacks into the trunk.

He was wrong - the driver was very good at English. He asked us several questions about the trip and about us.
Atesh solved his problem by falling asleep immediately.

At noon, our driver invited us for a fried fish. This time, he was also asking Atesh questions - but our friend was playing his part well and was way less nervous than me. 

In the car, we were then talking about where to extend our visa. The driver knew how to do it and even gave us a number of a person who could tell us all the requirements. 

We got off in a city half way to Bandar Abbas. Atesh's cover remained uncompromised. I felt bad for having fooled a person who had helped us, though.

"But it was fun!" Atesh grinned again. "And it had done him no harm."
He was actually right. 
"But we need a nationality for you. What about France?"
"Morocco is better! And I tell I have lived in the UK since childhood, and that's why I only know bonjour in French."

We realized we were stuck at the opposite side of the city than needed. But even if it was a small city in the middle of nowhere, Atesh had friends there. He called them and they immediately came to the rescue. Just Iran things... I was not even surprised that much.

The next driver didn't speak English, so Atesh passed for a foreigner quite easily. He was a miraculous foreigner, though, who would always somehow understand what the driver was trying to tell us - and he would then answer him in English. (Telling isolated words in Farsi with bad accent was my and Vojta's job.) When we stopped near Bandar Abbas and the driver left the car, Atesh called his brother to agree where to meet. Suddenly the driver opened the door again. I was trying to warn Atesh, but there was no need. He fluently switched to English on the phone. He was playing his part with ease. 

In Bandar Abbas, it was really hot. It was also raining heavily, which was rather unusual for this part of Iran. (Atesh was afraid that we would freeze and die, and I was happy that it was making the heat a bit more bearable.) 

After a bit of theatre in which Atesh was making the driver talk with his brother on the phone, pretending Samir was his Iranian friend, we landed in the middle of Bandar Abbas. We got reunited with the other guys, went to the harbor and found out that boats to the islands had already left.

Here we realized a big advantage of traveling with Iranians - they had friends everywhere. So by some magic, Azad pulled out of his pocket some relatives living in Bandar Abbas, and they agreed to host all of us.

The Hobbit, cave trolls and Islamic rules

We were then walking several kilometers to the relatives' house in rain because we had got lost, and the guys were making fun of Samir. They were calling him Karl because he looked like a European, and he was worried whether it was a male name. We called him Marushka instead and he ended up being my Czech brother. After that, the guys started singing a song from the Hobbit movie and I joined them, and then we were calling Vojta a cave troll and making nerdy jokes about Tolkien's novels because we all actually were his fans. Then we were making fun of Azad's communist-style hat and were calling him a dictator.

I had never imagined before that I would joke with Iranians about the same nerdy things in the same way as with people I know at home. I felt like at an ordinary camping trip with my Czech friends and it suddenly seemed weird I was wearing a hijab. Sometimes I was forgetting I was in a country where I was supposed not to hang out with guys, do high fives with them and sing the Hobbit songs with them, and that I might even get my new friends into troubles by my mere presence if Vojta weren't there too. (Our friends seemed totally undisturbed by the fact that I happened to have the wrong gender, though.) 

Our hosts looked quite traditional, with hijabs at home and all, so it reminded me again we actually were in Iran. (And we got a huge dinner which also was quite an Iranian thing).

In the morning, we bought some supplies. (The guys told me to buy bread since at the bakery, there were separate lines for men and women, and the women's line was always shorter. Like that I discovered the second - and so far the last - advantage of being a woman in Iran.) Then we took a boat to the Qeshm island to reunite with the Polish doctors.

The air felt like in an oven and I rolled my sleeves up even though it was unislamic, and I was frying anyway. The Iranian guys still had two shirts. Atesh eventually agreed that it was a little bit warm and took off one of the two pairs of jeans he had been wearing at once.

The Polish friends invited us to a house they had rented. The weather was a bit too hot even for them, so most of the afternoon, we were sitting in the yard over non-alcoholic beers and chatting (the Iranians wouldn't mind alcoholic beer either but they didn't know where to buy it). The Polish girls weren't wearing their hijabs and the Iranians seemed totally undisturbed by that again, so I took mine off too. In the evening we went to the beach, we were baking potatoes in fire, smoking water pipe, making fun of Azad's hat again and I felt I was among good friends.

Unexpected lack of culture clashes

We spent a day with our new international group, and we made a trip back to the mainland to extend our visa. (The cops in the visa office were very much willing to give us the extension even though it was very clear we weren't staying in any hotels as we were supposed to. The only cop who spoke English mainly spoke about soccer with us. There were also many Afghan people waiting with us, and the cops weren't that much nice to them, though. So I realized that being a khareji in Iran was maybe only cool if one happened to be a khareji from the west.) 

We also moved to a small, mostly uninhabited island nearby and camped on the beach, watched sharks from the cliff and walked 10 km in a horrible heat back to the harbour and were smoking water pipe again. (When we were camping, I noticed that our Iranian friends were not only NOT throwing garbage to the nature, but also collected some of the litter that had been there before.) 

Then the Polish people had to get ready for flying back home, and we were one last time camping with the Iranians. When we were walking through the city, people were asking us in English where we were from (Atesh sometimes answered them also in English that he was from Iran) and they wanted to take selfies with us.

When we had started hitchhiking with Atesh and his friends from Shiraz, I was curious about the cultural differences we would certainly come across.

Except that I realized I had failed to find any.

We didn't share only movies and songs to joke about, but it was also very easy to talk about art, religion, approaches to life, social traditions etc. I realized that we even shared most of our values (at least with Atesh whose English made it possible to talk about this kind of stuff). 

We were also talking about freedom and cultural taboos. When Mirek, one of our Polish friends, asked Atesh whether he was not afraid to talk openly, he just shrugged his shoulders: "What can happen to me? They can't do anything worse than to kill me." 

When I heard this young, smart, helpful person saying this, I suddenly felt as if I had a stone in my stomach. This was the second time in a couple of weeks already I almost had tears in my eyes.

The only cultural differences I eventually found were our notion of hot or cold weather, openness to strangers and the fact that straight Iranian guys usually hug each other way more than straight guys in Europe. 
That was pretty much it. 

Also the thing that I happened to be a girl made no difference at all. The guys weren't ignoring me and weren't too rude or too nice to me. They were just normal. (I had expected many things about Iran, but I was actually surprised to find guys behaving just normal in there.)

The next morning, we took a taxi to the harbor (which meant that all of us climbed into one car and made a huge heap of people and backpacks on the back seat again), and took a boat to get back to Bandar Abbas.

On the mainland, we said goodbye to each other and I realized I would  miss these people horribly. We had known each other for a week and I felt as if we were leaving old friends.

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