Stephen Orth - Couchsurfing in Iran - Revealing a Hidden World

The Kurd village of Nowsud with 1,500 inhabitants is so close to the border that our cell phones connect to an Iraqi network. We stop for a kebab. On the main street some riders approach, hooves clattering on the asphalt as they gallop. Mustached men in white trousers, using heavy dust-coated cloths for saddles and no stirrups, stretch their legs forward for balance. Some of them have one or two horses or mules behind them on lines, fully laden with bags and bundles beneath their saddlecloths. If most of them weren’t wearing Adidas sneakers, I would feel transported back a hundred years.

“Smugglers,” says Yasmin. “They go up in the mountains at night and cross the border. The police know all about it, but for a little baksheesh they turn a blind eye.”

“What do they bring?”

“Alcohol, cosmetics, household goods, all sorts of things that you can’t get here.”

“Do you think I can photograph them?”

“Sure.”

I go to the roadside, pressing the shutter button time and again; the men are simply too decorative to ignore. Yasmin, too, takes some snaps on her cell phone. One stops and asks whether we are from the government. Yasmin says we are just tourists. “Then you can take as many photos as you want.” A soldier with a machine gun wanders around in the middle of the caravan, so the problems with the government don’t seem to be too serious.

Judging by what is on offer at the market stalls, the smugglers bring stuff across the border that you can easily live without. Or maybe the goods that arrive by horseback obtain a special aura that makes them irresistible. Okay, they do sell food processors, vacuum cleaners, and pots and pans, which could be useful. But they also offer soap with extract of snakes and snails that’s supposed to be good against acne, “Green Berlin Tea” with a picture on the label of what looks like an Indian plantation, with veiled women pickers in front of the Brandenburg Gate. And Star Wars characters as garden gnomes.

OUR TOUR ENDSwith two men in traditional Kurdish costumes, who introduce themselves as policemen and ask to see our passports. You would think that at a market specializing in illegal products they would have something better to do, but that of course is a very European viewpoint. In the East the coexistence between racketeers and law enforcers allows for considerable diversity.

They certainly don’t look like public servants: one of them is wearing a khaki shirt, the other a pink shirt. I am immediately alert. In Kurdistan there are fraudsters who pretend to be policemen to swindle tourists. You can get a lot of money for a European passport on the black market because they can be used to escape from Iran—at least if there is some resemblance to the rightful owner. So before traveling they would need to go to a hairdresser to match the hair style and color.

I would love to help refugees, but I need my passport myself. So I lie and tell them it is in my hotel. I show them a photocopy of my passport that I always have on me. The larger of the two men, the guy with the khaki shirt, takes the sheet and shakes his head. “Get in,” he says, pointing at Farsad’s yellow taxi. He sits on the passenger seat, and his colleague climbs into a silver Peugeot 405 that I hadn’t noticed until then. Two soldiers with machine guns are sitting on the back seat of the Peugeot. So they really are policemen.

The police station, whose gate we pass through five minutes later, also looks real. We are led to the entrance. In the courtyard there are two Toyota pickups, and an armed guard patrols the roof, his right thumb on the rifle sling, his left hand fisted behind his back. One of the soldiers tells Farsad that he should reprimand Yasmin for showing her hair beneath her veil. Farsad obeys, but it was not necessary. Yasmin, who was walking right next to him, had already taken the hint.

We are then taken to the interview room. All backpacks are searched. The “Bad Cop” and the “Good Cop” start questioning us. We tell them lots of lies, and I hope that no one notices that the tea cup in my hand is shaking. Finally, the brawny official scrutinizes my camera. He scrolls through the pictures I’ve taken in the last couple hours. A rider on a horse. Two riders on two horses. One rider with three horses. I must have appeared to him like a Japanese tourist in New York, indiscriminately holding the camera in front of passersby and snapping just because they look American.

“Why so many pictures of riders?”

“We don’t have costumes like this; they’re magnificent. Anyway, I have to take a lot of pictures when people are moving to get one that isn’t blurred,” I answer truthfully. If this were a German police station, I might have added, as a watchful citizen, that an occasional glance under the saddlecloth might be interesting. At a German police station I would be fairly sure that nothing nasty would happen—the rule of law will sort it out. I haven’t robbed or killed anyone. In a country where after a traffic accident people prefer to sort things out among themselves and no woman would dream of going to the police after being raped, things look different. Where are the lines between amateur photographer and spy, between naive holidaymaker and alcohol-consuming criminal? If “Khaki Man” scrolls further he will find pictures of Azim’s whiskey bottle, of the battlefields of Ahvaz, of the nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Then there will be some answering to do.

But he stops scrolling. After 250 pictures of riders, even the hardest cops become tired. Allah bless the smugglers and their horses. He passes my camera back. He finishes his handwritten report and fetches an inkpad, and I sign the report with a print of my right index finger. We are free, and being free feels pretty damn good, in Iran more so than elsewhere.

“I was scared shitless,” says Yasmin, as we sit in the taxi. “Luckily, they didn’t find the battlefield pictures. Those guys weren’t particularly bright.”

“Have you often been questioned by police?”

“Of course. Once they questioned me about the BDSM group. I had to show them all my e-mails and Facebook posts, very private stuff. That was nasty. But they released me in the evening.”

Our destination for the night is Hajij, and we arrive at dusk. From an aerial perspective the village is shaped like a crescent moon, from the side like a series of steps. Blocks of red stone houses nestle on the slope like oversized rows of amphitheater seats, and there are people on every rooftop terrace, watching people observing other people on other rooftop terraces, or the cows being driven to their stalls, or the Sirwan River flowing in the valley below. Grandmas and grandkids, mothers and fathers—the whole village seems to be on its feet, a wonderful atmosphere. We ask about accommodation and are shown a simple room. A carpet and a socket are the only furnishings. In front of the door there is a mulberry tree. I lodge with Farsad, the cab driver. Yasmin gets a room of her own.

To: Mona Hamedan

Hi Mona, thanks for your message on cs! I might go to hamadan the next days—do you have time to meet or could you even host me for 1 night? Would be great! Cheers, stephan

From: Mona Hamedan

Stephan how old are you? Are you alone? Or coming with your wife?

When in Hajij do as the Hajijs do, so up to the roof it is. Of course, we are immediately invited to tea on one of the public balconies. The women wear long red robes with delicate floral designs. The men have mustaches that would make American actor Sam Elliott turn green with envy, and old men move about with carved walking sticks with rounded handles. Compared to the people here the smuggling riders were wallflowers. In ten years, buses full of Japanese tourists will come to Hajij.