Stephen Orth - Couchsurfing in Iran - Revealing a Hidden World

After a few minutes, someone knocks at the door. The bald-headed guest again, whose sudden appearance reminds me of a good-natured genie in a bottle. He hands me a hotel business card, on which he has written his name, Mehran , and his cell phone number. “If you need help, give me a call.” Maybe it’s not as safe here as I thought.

He then shows me the washroom, which can only be reached via a small courtyard. The light doesn’t work in the men’s shower. “You can use the women’s shower in the morning,” he says.

“Would you like a drink,” he asks. “I have some Iranian vodka. Absolutely forbidden!” He signals for me to follow him and explains how he got the stuff. “I combed all the pharmacies and said I needed ethyl alcohol for insect bites.” After a few attempts he was successful; the assistant asked him whether he wanted a large or small bottle. Small, he said, so as not to raise suspicions, and then inquired about the price. Of course, the larger ones were cheaper. He pretended to ponder the options before deciding to take the larger bottle. Twenty thousand toman, five dollars. “That’s what I always do. Come in.”

He opens the door to his room; it has the same prison-cell dimensions as mine. A small boy is sleeping on the bed. From the floor next to the fridge, Mehran picks up a heavy two-pint flask with a round belly and short neck that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an apothecary museum. Ethyl Alcohol 96% is written on the label next to Highly Flammable . The amount would be enough for quite a number of insect bites. “We can mix it with water or Pepsi,” says Mehran. “At home in Tehran I drink a bottle in five days. Don’t worry, you won’t be arrested. This stuff is good. After all, it comes from the pharmacist—medical quality.”

The term brings back memories; I remember it from last year’s trip. “Medical quality,” said the student Samira from Tabriz as she fetched a bottle of ethanol from a cupboard almost exactly a year ago. Alcohol content 70 per cent, a demon’s drink. Mixed with orange juice it still tasted like hard candy dissolved in gasoline. We lay on a rug on the floor of her student digs and watched The Exorcist on a laptop. Three long days we traveled through the wilds of Kurdistan, getting drunk on long drinks from hell and smoking melon-flavored shisha. We spoke much of freedom, which meant we spoke of the chances for her to leave the country.

Of course, I wanted to meet up with her again, but a couple weeks ago she contacted me to say that she had made it. Samira is now studying engineering in Shanghai on a scholarship and doesn’t plan to return.

Taste and smell are more deeply embedded in memory than experiences. Memories of the hard-candy taste flood back, and I even believe I can feel a slight rasping in my throat. And anyway, the experiences connected to the memories weren’t that good, so I turn down ethanol and cola or ethanol soda or whatever else Mehran is planning to serve up today.

The next morning the light in the washroom still isn’t working, so I creep off to the women’s unit. What on earth happens in Iran if you are caught in the women’s washroom? I think I would have simply said that the genie in the bottle sent me there.

Couchsurfer Kian can only meet me in the evening, so I explore the island with a cab driver. Qeshm is notorious for its smugglers, who transport cigarettes and gas canisters to the Musandam Peninsula or to the United Arab Emirates in wooden boats. But it is also famous for its canyons and sandstone mesas, which you would think you were more likely to see in Utah as the backdrop to a cowboy movie. Apart from that, plenty of dust, a couple of chimneys burning gas, and mangrove wood on the shore. Unlike the fifteen-times-smaller Kish, Qeshm isn’t geared toward mass tourism.

But, as Kian explains over an evening meal of fish stew in an austere restaurant with wobbly tables and designer lamps, that is all about to change. He is a pleasantly chubby guy, 6’2”, red Nike polo shirt, and rimless glasses. Two new five-star hotels are being constructed, as well as four shopping centers, he explains. As far as hotels are concerned, in my mind there’s room indeed for improvement. The state is creating the prerequisites for the boom—contractors pay no taxes, the same applies for employees like Kian, who works as an engineer for a gas power plant.

He tells me that today is an important day for Iran. As part of the nuclear negotiations, sanctions against Iran have been relaxed. From today, for the first time in thirty-five years, airplane parts can be imported from the U.S. On top of that, Iran can again export oil, and 4.9 billion of a total 100 billion U.S. dollars frozen in foreign accounts has been released. “We have had two hundred plane accidents in recent decades, with more than two thousand deaths, which were mostly down to the lack of spare parts,” explains Kian. Supplies of medication have also been affected by the sanctions and caused many deaths in Iran, among cancer patients, for instance. “It never hurts the government but always the ordinary people.”

In the summer Kian plans to travel to Europe. First to Italy, because he’s heard that it’s the easiest place to get Schengen visas. From there to Disneyland, near Paris, then to Germany, where an uncle lives near Stuttgart. His uncle has already taught him three words, which he proudly recites: “ tschüss ” (bye) and “ guts nächtle ” (good night in the Swabian dialect).

THE NEXT MORNINGI take the ferry back to the mainland. In the bleak bus terminal of Bandar Abbas I ping-pong from counter to counter until eventually a giggling woman in a chador sells me a ticket to Bam. She asks for my passport so that she can enter my name on the ticket. While I’m rummaging through my backpack, she has second thoughts and simply writes “Mr. Price” on my ticket. Allah only knows how she chose that name. From the poster on the wall behind the counter, Ayatollah Khomeini looks down on me probingly.

I have an hour to kill before departure, so I buy myself a kebab: burnt chicken bits, black-red tomatoes, and onions in pita bread.

“Where do you come from?” asks the vendor.

“Germany,” I reply.

“ Alamâni ! Germany, Aryan! Klinsmann!” he says

“Ali Daei! Mehdi Mahdavikia!” I reply.

Soccer Esperanto always works. We both laugh, but I feel a bit like a dumbass everybody is nice to because they all think that the poor old guy hasn’t got it easy in life, so we may as well be friendly to him. It’s high time I learned Persian.

Of course, with these thoughts I’m being unfair to the cheerful vendor. But everyone who travels extensively knows you make a fool of yourself three to ten times more often when you’re away from home. Buying fruit, at the ticket window, asking for directions. When routine situations that at home come naturally suddenly require a creative solution, then it’s a good experience because it teaches you humility and to laugh at yourself. You can be a five-year-old child again on a dare buying a strawberry ice cream with your mom’s money. Simple exercises, with failure and tears not excluded. Sometimes at an interview they ask applicants more personal questions, such as: When did you last push yourself to your limits? I think it would be much more revealing to know when someone last made a complete and utter fool of themselves.