A Travel Junkie's Diary

by Dina Bennett

  I sit, my weight dislodging a fusty smell of sweat, smoke, cooking oil, and diesel from the bed. Standing again is not an option; hovering over a soldier as he does the necessary exit paperwork would be rude, if not vaguely threatening. And then there’s my general border caution. I scarcely dare move, so uncertain am I whether what I do might incline him to have a little sport with me and peruse my passport for hours. I dread being the fuel that enlivens the tedium of his morning. Today though, my paranoia is replaced by novelty. Rank smells aside, I have never sat on a man’s bed while he decided whether or not to release me from his country.

  Remote borders where few travelers cross are the most arbitrary of places. They ooze all the possibilities of proximity while making manifest all the divisions of distance. How can it be that people separated by nothing more than a bridge over a narrow river never mingle? They’ve lived for centuries just across the way from each other, yet on one side the women tie their floral headscarf pirate-style, have blue eyes, fair skin, and hair that’s brown and wavy. They pile harvested wheat in mounds, bake flat bread with dot patterns, and decorate donkeys with flags. On the other side, the scarf is tied under the chin, children have black eyes, swarthy skin, and straight black hair. Harvested wheat stands in pyramids, flat bread is decorated with stars, and the donkeys sport tassels. Even their homemade liquor is different.

  I want each border official to like me, under the unproven assumption that he wouldn’t unnecessarily inconvenience a friend (would he?). Now, to put myself more at ease while the Tajikistani soldier frowns and thumbs our passports looking for visas, I make innocuous small talk like “Cold here!” at which I rub my shoulders and shiver, and “High!” rolling my eyes heavenward to mime altitude. Each utterance provokes a nod, no more. He reaches for my folder of car papers just as I lift it to give to him, and our hands touch. I laugh awkwardly and so does this young man with the deeply lined face. The implications of the unusual setting are not lost on either of us. I’m sitting in a man’s room hoping that the only thing that’s going to be scrutinized is my visa. He’s sitting with his back to a woman who’s on his bed, surely a rare occurrence.

  He bends to the serious task of entering passport and visa number, with dates and places of entry and departure. I don’t know where to rest my eyes. They watch him, stare at my hands in my lap, glance around. I notice a plastic bowl on a shelf next to the door. In it are perhaps twenty nubbly white orbs, the size of golf balls. This is irimchik, made from curdled, pressed yogurt cheese that has been left in the sun for many days to desiccate further, until it is so hard and dry it can last for a year. It’s the dairy version of beef jerky, something a yak herder can carry in a saddle bag and gnaw on, or grate into a watery soup.

  Yesterday I was given a ball of irimchik by a woman near Karakul Lake. I tried it. Despite my strong, orthodontically corrected, crowned, veneered, and whitened Western teeth, I barely made a dent in the rock-hard surface. What bits I did scrape off tasted like the smell from the seat of a well-used saddle after a hard day’s ride. Loving irimchik is an acquired taste.

  After having his way with our passports, the young officer hands them back with a look that says “Rules! Regulations! What can one do!” He stands. I stand. And there we are, knee to knee. We both twist away. “Please,” he says, pointing outside. The door out, though, proves sticky and unobliging. Edging around me to help, the young man takes one of the petrified cheese balls out of the bowl and gives it to me. Then, thinking himself remiss in his hospitality, he hands me two more. And finally, a fourth.

  Lacking even the most rudimentary Tajik, I ooh and aah, hoping to convey that I appreciate his generosity, recognize the value of his gift. I imagine a wife or other beloved woman he has not seen for months, handing him a sackful as he’s leaving for his remote mountain post. Scraping at one of them may be one of his few pleasures. I exclaim a broad, delighted “Thank you,” as I wonder whether stuffing the four balls in my pocket will give offense.

  “Please,” he says, as he shows me the door. Outside, he lights a cigarette behind a cupped hand. I fairly skip back to the car, amazed that we have completed the exit formalities so quickly. Narrowing his eyes from the smoke being blown back at him by the wind, he motions me away from the car, waving me around the gate. Though Bernard and I are cleared to go, our car is not.

  Taking our car out of Tajikistan should be a simple matter. It’s a country’s entrance formalities that make driving halfway around the world in your own vehicle an exercise in patience. And those formalities are the responsibility of the official who let us in. All the exit official has to do is stamp the papers to note he’s seen us leave in the same car in which the papers say we entered.

  However, if the officer on duty hasn’t slept well, or is searching for amusement in this bleakest of high-altitude posts, or has been chastised by his superior and needs to vent his frustration on someone, we may have to unpack everything in the car. And it’s a big car, with rear seats removed to store all the gear we imagine we’ll need for a nine-thousand-mile drive. If we have to remove the car contents, we will be here all day. That would be very bad indeed, because after the Tajikistani border there’s twenty kilometers of country only a yak herder could love, before we reach the Kyrgyz border post. Arrive there late and they’d be closed. Stuck in no-man’s land, unable to go back yet prevented from going forward, we’d be relegated to a night of upright sleeping in a cold car. As I contemplate these possibilities, I know that, although I long to be Zen-like in the face of officious behavior, I’m unlikely to achieve it here.

  Several more soldiers swaddled in camouflage stamp about in the cold gray morning, plumes of icy breath mixing with smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes. They glance at me from under their hoods, keeping their distance. The only one inclined to be friendly is a handsome German Shepherd. I smooch for him to come. As he trots over I recollect that this is no suburb and he’s not a local pet. He’s a guard dog, trained to sniff, to attack on command, to be fierce-looking as well as simply fierce. Though I know this, the dog does not appear to have been so informed. He wags his tail, happy to be scratched, and leans against me sharing his warmth.

  Eager to get the remaining formalities underway, I knock on the door of a white trailer and open it onto what I expect will be a modest office with a proper officer sitting behind a desk. Instead it’s again a bedroom, where I see a man frantically shrugging into his jacket. The odd thing about a soldier without his uniform buttoned and tucked is that he seems unmanly, without much authority. This soldier waves in desperation for me to leave.

  Back outside, my thin cargo pants flap about my legs and my light fleece jacket surrenders to the wind without a fight. I search for a wind break, but our car’s back at the lower gate some fifty yards away and I’ve been denied entry into the only building around. I’m stuck in a mini no-man’s-land, with only a German Shepherd for company. I hug myself to ward off the cold.

  Finally, the trailer door opens and the inspector struts over, all spit and polish. He gives the Shepherd a good kick with his shiny, black boot. As the dog yelps and cringes, tail between his legs, the officer snatches away the folder I’m holding. If we want to leave here any time soon I cannot let my dog-lover side show. But I can’t help myself. As the official swivels to return to the trailer I shoot him an angry glare. He hesitates a moment, raising one eyebrow, before marching off with nary an invitation to join him.

  I stamp my own cold circle outside. Soldiers drift about. Snow swirls. The dog stays away. I try to imagine what it must be like to live out one’s assigned posting here, for months on end. The officer returns, papers in hand. He points at them, looks around. “Your car?” he asks in a stiff voice. “Where?”

  My stomach sinks as I rue my earlier undisciplined glare. “Here we go,” I think. “He’s going to search the car.” I point to the gate, behind which sits the Land Rover, Bernard snugly warm inside. “Back there,” I mumble. “Waiting.”

  “Bring it,”
he points to the trailer to show where. Then he shakes the folder at me. “Bring it.”

  Waving both arms overhead to attract the attention of the gate guards down the road, I signal to raise the bar so Bernard can drive in. When he’s parked outside the trailer I rap a tentative knock on the trailer door and step back. I know when I’m not welcome. The officer circles the car, peers inside the door that Bernard graciously holds open in a gesture we’ve perfected which conveys we have nothing to hide. He retreats to the trailer, letting the aluminum door slam. I shake my head at Bernard. Things don’t look good. I now wait in the car, foot again drumming the floorboard, wondering if I can kidnap the German Shepherd and take him with us through Kyrgyzstan, China, Nepal, India, and eventually home.

  In too short a time, the officer is back. Holding out the folder, his face cracks in a wry smile as he snaps a salute. “I stamp,” he says, issues a desultory wrist flick to the guard at the exit gate, and retreats indoors. We’re free.

  Checkpoint

  KAPIKOY, TURKEY TO IRAN, 2011

  I have an extended passport, its extra twenty-six pages already half-filled with visas. Though my nervousness at borders hasn’t abated despite so many crossings, the experience is now as much a love relationship as a hate one. From the smarmy officiousness of Bolivian military police at that country’s Desaguadero border with Peru, to the polite studiousness, accompanied by tea, of a barely literate Nepalese civil servant at the Friendship Bridge border with China, borders are a perfect microcosm of the remarkable differences between countries. Borders also are the place where my imagined perception of a country meets up with hard reality.

  Kapikoy Checkpoint is the newest crossing between Turkey and Iran. Set in a shallow valley beneath modest scrub hills, the entire border post is compact enough to fit in a football field, its surroundings barren enough to discourage anyone moving where they shouldn’t. Open only since April 2011, it’s an hour and a half by car east of Lake Van on the D300. The Turkish roads are rough, but the going is far worse in Iran, which is probably why Kapikoy sees little traffic. When Bernard and I crossed from Turkey into Iran in our own vehicle, Kapikoy had been checking passports for all of five months.

  I was thrilled to be going to Iran, the incarnation of my feeling that the people in a country are not the same as the government. That as sure as policies affect lives, they do not represent them. Paul Theroux’s impression, that at a border you may hardly tell one country from the other, was confirmed on the visual end immediately. Both country’s facilities are housed in modest trailers so similar it’s as if they were ordered from the same catalogue. Cube-shaped huts serve as barracks, the whole encircled by chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. Some borders, like Paso Roballos between Chile and Argentina, are separated by kilometers of no-man’s-land. Not so Kapikoy, where Iranian and Turkish border guards live in such close proximity they can look in each other’s windows.

  On the day I cross, it takes me less than thirty minutes to complete Turkey’s exit formalities, in which they verify our car is our car, and we each are who our passports say. The formalities for Turkey are so informal the border police sip coffee and barely interrupt their conversation while we’re in front of them. Despite such cursory attention, I’m reluctant to move on. Turkey is, after all, nearly Europe. I feel safe there. Even though the Iran entry trailer is only ten yards away it’s another world, one in which petty officials make decisions that can provide newspapers with fodder for months. That uncertainty played a big part in my desire to visit the country. Doubt and mystery are powerful emotions, double-edged swords that make me sweat at the same time they heighten vision. It’s in those situations that I am most aware that I am no longer at home.

  There’s more to our interest in Iran than that, though. After several years of road trips, I’ve been on the lookout for places that most Americans do not want to go to. Usually this means a country whose politics and policies conflict with our own. It also can mean a country where, as Americans, we will be assigned a government minder to stay with us through the whole trip, or where our route will have to be registered beforehand. Both are true of Iran, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m hopeful that our minder will be as happy to have Americans to talk to as we will be to have an Iranian to discuss our preconceptions with. I foresee camaraderie and hope for a spirit that understands the letter of the law just enough to sidestep it.

  These hopes are in the future, though, and at the moment, when the Turkish border police raises his eyebrow to question why I’m still standing at his window, I start to sweat. Picture me as a bug, my multiple antenna bristling and waving left, right, left, scuttling for shelter while also trying to inspect everything around me. I’m so distracted as I head toward Iran that I trail my headscarf along the new black tarmac. It’s the stares of armed guards that remind me my scarf is not where it belongs. Mortified, I swirl the length of fine blue cotton around my back and over my head. In this regard I know what I am doing, having studied online images of Iranian women for appropriate variations on the theme of hair coverings. Mindful that I’ll not be given a second chance in the arena of modesty, I cross the scarf ends under my chin and fling them over my shoulders, to help it stay in place. Bernard has no such issues, both because his hair is sparse and because he’s a man. He does, however, tote a camera with a bulky wide-angle lens. His ostensible excuse for slinging the camera over his shoulder is that he didn’t want to tempt anyone by leaving it in the car while we were in a trailer doing paperwork. I know him like the gray hairs on my head, however, and I know he’s done his own clever practicing, to wit, taking photos with the camera at his side as he walks, without needing to bring it to his eye to check framing. As he saunters behind me, I hear the telltale click and hope the next one I hear will not be the click of a rifle safety being released.

  Iran’s trailer is nicer than any in my ranch town’s trailer park. Inside, I approach the glass booth that says PASSPORT CONTROL in English and Farsi. It’s empty. I do a loud clearing of the throat, say a cautious hello, peer surreptitiously through windows, but no one appears. So I sit in one of three new plastic chairs and adjust my headscarf. Bernard sits next to me. We wait. Nothing happens. To occupy myself I retrieve my camera and pretend to clean the lens while doing my own unobtrusive snapping of illegal photos of the border facilities.

  A man dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt comes out of the room across from me. Though there’s no badge declaring BORDER OFFICIAL, the way he says “Passports, documents” conveys he’s the one to reckon with. This is the moment of truth, the reason I went through all the steps of getting a visa for Iran on my own. If there’s something wrong with that ivory page with its intricate purple and green swirls, which has an unflattering thumbnail-size photo of me embedded behind a hologram in one corner, this is where I’ll find out. The little blue booklet I hand over, stamped in gold with United States of America, never seemed so precious as right then. The man nods and disappears back into the office.

  The trailer door opens to allow in five Iranian women dressed in skintight pants and slinky, thigh-length sweaters. Each wears her brilliantly colored silk scarf Grace Kelly–style: pushed back on the head, knotted under the throat. Toenails are glossily varnished, feet sheathed in fashionable sandals. Hands grasp the handles of bulging shopping bags, the kind made of heavy paper with store names in bright lettering. A border guard enters the glass booth, gives each identity card a cursory glance, and waves them through. They are chic, and I envy their perfect headscarves.

  Twenty minutes later a handsome Iranian youth in T-shirt and jeans enters the trailer, introducing himself as our government guide. Ignoring my outstretched hand, he leans forward to knock shoulders. “Ramadan,” he says, then murmurs hesitantly, not wanting to offend, “And as a woman, you are impure.” He says be patient, there’s nothing he can do to speed things up, but everything will be all right.

  An hour more and the border control medical officer invites me in
to a small side room, where he questions me solicitously. Do I have a fever? Have I recently vomited? Headaches? Sore throat? He’s polite in a detached doctorly way. Then, “Welcome,” he says. “I am pleased to speak with an American.” Spirits boosted, I return to my plastic chair, primp my headscarf, and wait.

  After forty-five minutes, the man who took my passport beckons me into his office. Being an American woman with a slouchy cotton headscarf sequestered in a room with Iranian men strikes me as having great potential for all sorts of awkwardness. And then there’s my self-consciousness. Mindful of the chic beauty of the five Iranian women who crossed before us, I feel I am letting my side down. When he motions to our guide to join, it’s a relief; I want someone to witness what happens.

  Inside the office are four men sipping tea, rifles nearby. One nods his head, another studies his tea glass, the other two eye me like shy teenagers. It’s as if they’ve heard about the being called “American woman,” but now that they have one in front of them they’re tongue-tied. There are two desks in the room, each with a PC, papers and folders spread about. The passport officer points to my right hand. I think scary thoughts about fingernails and the loss thereof. Then he places a form in front of me and, digging through a drawer, extracts an ink pad, which he opens and hands to me, as if offering snuff. Then he motions what I should do. When I’m done pressing each fingertip into the ink and onto the paper, he hands me a tissue so I can clean my fingers, looking remorseful that he has been the cause of a woman dirtying her hands.

  Another forty-five minutes and the man whom I now know is the senior immigrations officer emerges from that office. In halting English, he apologizes for the delay, explaining that Checkpoint Kapikoy is so new their computer link to Teheran and the software to check visa numbers are not yet the best. For which he is sorry.