Whether you like it or not guide books are an essential part of travel.
The most ubiquitous in the world of cheap and cheerful/nasty travel, and subject to the most “I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller” snobbery, is the Lonely Planet. Sometimes its info is plain wrong and the spelling and grammar can be horrific, but it’s handy when you land in a strange town at 10 o’clock at night or only have a short amount of time and need to plan a fast and dirty itinerary.
Sometimes it’s just patronising.
A sternly worded commandment in the Iran version is not to hitchhike. Blokes can do it with care but “in Iran, women should not even consider it”.
Hitching is admittedly not the safest way to travel anywhere in the world, and less so when single women are seen as being of dubious moral character and Westerners, well, us Western girls will do pretty much anything apparently.
The Lonely Planet has a duty of care not to tell people to take foolish risks but the black and white Don’t Do It, Period stricture belies the true nature of Iranians, who are, on the whole, a friendly bunch of people who aren’t as unlike me as I’d been led to believe (which doesn’t mean to say we’re all that similar either; they don’t get my jokes).
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My Iranian hitchhiking adventures started outside Rayen, in the south-east, when I discovered my plan to go an hour south to Bam by bus or train required a three hour backtrack north.
Having faithfully followed The Book’s woman rules until now, I proceeded to ignore them, for how much worse could it be than in Tajikistan, land of the repressed man and suppressed woman?
I caught a ride to the main road heading south, where I waited 30 seconds before a truck delivering fizzy drinks to Bam pulled over.
What can I say, they were truckies: generous to a fault (these ones insisted on giving me an Iranian non-alcoholic beer for breakfast) and the driver was inclined to make rude jokes about how he liked to play football, but his friend only liked sex, nudge nudge, wink wink. His friend didn’t speak English but got the gist and squirmed uncomfortably through the whole ride. I felt quite sorry for him by the end of it.
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The difficulty in hitching in Iran is that people have no idea what it is. If you’re standing on the side of the road, it’s because you’re waiting for a passing share taxi or bus, even in the middle of the desert. The concept of picking up free lifts from whosoever is a bit weird, but they won’t leave the idiot foreign tourist on the side of the road. Not for long anyway.
The next day I acquired a friend, a Frenchman named Dimitri, for the trip to pirate town Bandar Abbas.
We were at the turnoff for the southern highway. It was a deserted piece of road and a broken down mosque 100m away was the only building for miles.
A truck transporting cars on its two trailers pulled up 50m down the road. As we walked towards it two separate cars pulled over asking if we were ok, why we were there, and whether we needed a ride. They looks on their faces when we said no thanks, we have an 18-wheeler waiting for us, said it all.
The thing about hitching with truckies is that they are slow vehicles and you have to wait while they do business on route. Our truckie was a great guy, offering us tea and biscuits and the chance to have a nap in the back, and was hugely apologetic when we had to spend an hour waiting around at a workshop where he was dropping off a car.
Between my limited Farsi and Dimitri’s ‘I’m hitchhiking, please give me a ride’ note that he has translated into the language of every country he visits, we entertained our driver right up until he stopped for the night in a town called. He worriedly tried to find us a hotel but apparently this town has none, so we pointed out we had a tent and would pitch it in the park.
No one camps like an Iranian and setting up your tent in a public park is almost encouraged. You can see tents lining pavements, sides of expressways, parks, and especially near popular tourist sights. We ended this chapter by being adopted into a group of 20 year olds smoking shisha and playing in the playground who assured us we’d be raped and murdered if we stayed there. Instead we stayed with one of their number, who turned out to be one of the local cops.
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The next adventure was on Qeshm Island. The taxi drivers there are pirates, charging double, if not triple anything I’ve see on the mainland, so Dimitri and I hitched inland with a group of Shirazi engineers in charge of the construction of a new town; two days later I hitchhiked out alone.
This guy was a bit keen; he used a flimsy pretext to lean over and brush his hand against my face and side before pulling off the road into the desert, at which point I freaked out at him.
As I was considering how to stop the ute, steal his keys and leave him in the desert (worst case scenario) we turned back onto the highway. It turned out that he was taking a short cut across the island. But as much as he laughed at me and made out that I’d hyperventilated like a pregnant woman, it was enough to make me prefer the bus for the next leg up to Shiraz.
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Usually it’s truckies who’ve pulled over and picked me up, such as the bloke who taught me grammar on the way back to Shiraz after a day trip to Persepolis and Cyrus’ dynastic resting place Pasargad, or the one on the way to Yazd who became more talkative as I got quieter, when the flu chose that day to sink its claws in (my hitching buddy Australian Dan wasn’t pulling his weight on the driver-entertainment front, as he was asleep in the back).
But car drivers can be the most entertaining.
The first people to pick Dan and I were a couple of cool guys.
If they’d been in Australia or New Zealand they’d have been drinking beers and smoking joints. As it was they were drinking Iranian non-alcoholic beer from plastic cups and smoking regular cigarettes, but not wearing seat belts.
They had spiked hair and stubbly good looks, liked their Backstreet Boys and Cyndi Lauper played loud, and sniggered at our unfashionable enthusiasm about Iran.
Hitchhiking with a friend is easier, both on the conversation front and in fending off unwanted advances, but going it alone has its good points – mainly that you have to try harder and in the process learn more of the language and more about your temporary hosts.
The Lonely Planet’s commandments on hitching in Iran aren’t completely off the mark if you’ve never done it before and have never been to the country, but I think single women are safer doing it here than in other places that don’t have such a strong culture of respecting and hosting visitors, be they man, woman, foreign or local.
Silkworms & Iron Roosters 