by Jill Worrall
The street between our hotel and the baths is lined with shops selling towels, inflatable toys and bathing suits for both sexes. We fight our way past a bobbing selection of blow-up tigers, Mickey Mouses and donkeys to reach the interior of the shop that Reza judges to have the best selection.
My appearance brings all other retail activity inside (and in the shops on either side) to a complete halt. Under the interested gaze of about a dozen onlookers I search the racks for a suitable bathing suit, my face red with embarrassment. There’s no changing room. It’s bad enough back home buying a bathing suit even when one can try it on first – to buy without a test drive is terrifying.
I whip along the rows of capacious matronly togs splashed with giant flowers and pull out a pale blue suit complete with short wraparound skirt and a bathing hat.
‘What is the largest size you have in this costume?’ Reza asks the male shop owner loudly in Farsi.
‘Thank you very much,’ I hiss.
‘Well, don’t you think it looks a little small?’ he asks.
‘I don’t care – I just want to get out of here ... everyone’s looking.’
The shopkeeper rustles around in a carton of bathing suits still in their cellophane bags. He pulls out one stamped ‘L’. All of us (even the inflatable animals seem to have swung round to stare) decide I now have the perfect bathing suit. It costs the equivalent of $US2.50.
I am still traumatised when Reza turns into the bathing complex and stops outside a doorway covered with a long black tarpaulin.
‘This is the ladies’ entrance because of course the baths are completely segregated. I will see you in maybe one hour?’ He starts to walk away.
‘Hang on,’ I squeak. ‘What do I do when I get inside?’
‘Um, well I really don’t know what happens on your side,’ Reza says patiently, ‘I’ve not been into the ladies’ section.’
I concede it was a stupid question.
‘There will be somewhere to leave your shoes and to pay and then I guess there will be a changing area. I am sure you will be OK.’
I push through the tarpaulin and into a cavernous room to one side of which is a counter surrounded by a gaggle of young girls in bathing suits. Silence falls as I walk towards them. I take out my wallet and ask, in Farsi, ‘Where?’
I suspect the conversation that followed between those girls went something like, ‘Gosh, I think she’s here to swim – she doesn’t know what to do. Someone needs to help her. Sara, you help.’
‘No, you, Fatima, my English is not good enough.’
After several girls are pushed forward, then retreat giggling, a solidly built teenager edges past them determinedly.
‘Shoes here,’ she says, pointing at the shoe attendants. ‘Now, money.’
I hand over my shoes, pay my money and then my guide, who is 17, and her 11-year-old cousin lead me to the changing room. They choose a locker for me and then stand back and wait.
I am not going to change into a new bathing suit for the first time in front of an audience. Glancing around desperately, I notice three little changing booths and make a dash for one of them.
The bathing suit is skin-tight and the material thin. I have a horrible feeling it is going to prove see-through when wet. Thank God for segregated bathing.
When I emerge my two friends are waiting. They lead me past a steam room full of baths inhabited mostly by older women through to the main pool. Groups of women stand neck deep chatting while youngsters splash around them in water the colour of lager.
I think I’ve managed an unobtrusive entrance, but once I’m halfway across the pool at a slow breaststroke, I look round to discover at least 10 people swimming alongside me. When I reach the far wall the questions begin.
After 30 minutes of swimming interspersed with faltering conversations in Farsi and English it’s time to retreat. To my dismay the changing booths are occupied. I peel off the togs as discreetly as I can and am reaching for my top when I realise the hum of conversation around me has stopped.
Everyone is looking at me. My pool guide explains:
‘We are sorry – but we were just saying you have a very beautiful bra.’
Outside, darkness is falling and the slushy snow is starting to refreeze. Reza appears from the men’s side.
‘That was very relaxing wasn’t it?’
We warm up with a local speciality – yoghurt soup made with herbs and beans. It’s perfect comfort food after my swim into the unknown.
The next morning we leave Sara’eyn as the light is just starting to slip down the snowy cone of Mt Sabalan. Reza B shields his eyes against the sun as we head due east towards the Caspian Sea.
The road winds through one of the few forests I have seen on our journey. Although most of the trees are deciduous I enjoy even their leafless presence. I can understand why it is one of Reza’s favourite roads in spring and autumn. Once this would have been a favoured habitat of the extinct Caspian tiger, the last known sighting of which was in 1947 in the eastern Caspian. This animal was the third-largest sub-species and was the favoured tiger for use in Roman arenas.
Occasionally, hopes are still raised by sightings across its former range from the Caucasus through Iran, Central Asia and into Mongolia, but realistically the chance of meeting this big cat padding through the oak and maple forests of northern Iran are tragically remote. However, Reza tells me wolves, bears and panthers can still be found in the Caspian’s forests.
We emerge from the tiger-less hills at Astara right on the border with Azerbaijan and beside the sea.
The air is markedly milder here and as we follow the Caspian towards Rasht, rice fields and tea plantations appear. Iranians are proud of their locally produced rice and tea, although their prodigious consumption of both means they have to import a significant amount of each as well.
Tehranis love the Caspian coast for its mild climate, the sea itself and the holiday atmosphere. But it seems to me that this narrow strip of balmy shore is in danger of being loved to death. Ribbon development stretches almost unbroken along the coastal highway, with hotels, apartments and villas springing apparently unfettered by any kind of planning regulations. And if there is a Caspian waste authority it’s clearly not doing its job – nowhere else in Iran is there so much rubbish piled up at the roadside.
Despite these problems the Caspian still holds some fascination for me. I first heard its name while reading C S Lewis’s Narnia series – could anything be more exotic for a young reader (albeit one already showing signs of an obsession with geography) than a character called Prince Caspian?
But even today the allure lives on. In Bandar-e Anzali, Reza and I find a boatman to take us out through the Anzali lagoon – one of the largest freshwater lagoons in the world that manages more or less to co-exist with Iran’s largest Caspian Sea port nearby.
We zip out through a wide channel past a number of the most unprepossessing waterside shacks into a world of waving reeds and tiny islands. Herons and cormorants perch on logs, peering intently into the water and turtles sunbathe on semi-submerged rocks and hummocks of grass and here and there are a few fishing huts on stilts. Like fishing huts the world over they have evolved over time to become a home-away-from-home; some sport curtains and potted plants.
At water level it’s impossible to see anything above the reeds and when the waterway we’re on suddenly branches four different ways I have no idea which way I’d have chosen to go back to the dock. But the boatman turns the tiller without hesitation and suddenly we burst out into the Anzali port.
Rusting fishing boats bob gently in our wake – Reza thinks some may once have fished for the Caspian Sea’s most valuable inhabitant – the beluga sturgeon, which can grow up to 15 feet long and weigh up to 2000 lb. Of the three sturgeon species in the Caspian it is the black beluga’s caviar that is the most sought after – it can command up to $US100 an ounce. But over the last 20 years, sturgeon populations in the Caspian have plunged by 90 per cent and th
e beluga is perilously close to extinction; it doesn’t help that in order to extract its eggs you have to kill a sturgeon. The species is affected by over-fishing because beluga can live up to about 100 years and don’t reach breeding age until they are 15. Even then they reproduce only every three or four years.
Pollution, especially from the countries of the former USSR, poaching and over-fishing have all fuelled the decline.
Iran, used to being branded the black sheep of the region in so many other ways, has in the case of the sturgeon been able to bask in the recognition of being the one nation of those bordering the Caspian Sea to do the most to halt the sturgeon’s decline through voluntarily reducing its sturgeon quota and appearing be more dedicated and successful in reducing poaching.
But while the relatively new nations of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan along with Russia seem to have more pressing issues to deal with, poaching and over-fishing in their part of the Caspian Sea is still a major threat to the survival of this giant fish.
We leave the fishing fleet in our wake and tear across the main harbour. The ships tied up at the wharves are respectably large ocean-going vessels, graphic evidence of the size of the Caspian Sea which is in fact the world’s largest inland body of water containing more than 40 per cent of the world’s lake water.
It’s windy out here and my headscarf whips off my head and wraps itself around Reza’s face. I scramble to retrieve it, worried the boatman will be glaring disapprovingly. But when I turn to look at him he’s grinning and indicates that I shouldn’t worry.
He guns the engine a bit harder and we shoot out through the arms of the port breakwaters into open sea.
‘If we kept going,’ I shout at Reza above the engine noise, ‘we could travel to four other countries.’
It’s an irresistible thought for me.
‘We could go north to Russia, visit Astrakhan and boat up the Volga River.’
‘Or we could go to Baku in Azerbaijan and see the oil rigs,’ adds Reza, getting into the swing of things.
The fact that our little blue boat would struggle to cross the world’s largest lake and would probably end up on the sea floor doesn’t really enter into our dreaming. That’s the trouble when travel addicts start scheming.
Back on dry land we continue driving east towards Ramsar, which despite the best efforts of developers still retains some of its old seaside-resort charm. We eat lunch in the vast empty dining room of the new wing of the Ramsar Grand Hotel perched on red velvet balloon-back chairs, on a red carpet and surrounded by gilded walls and ceiling.
It’s hardly cosy but gives us the perfect excuse to walk next door into the old hotel to see the teahouse with which I was very taken when I was here years ago. It is not in the slightest sense traditional; it’s actually converted from what used to be the hotel’s basement disco. The interior decoration can only be described as Persian boudoir meets Scottish baronial.
Back in pre-revolutionary Iran the hotel used to be a casino. Upstairs grand salons with tall windows look down on Ramsar and along a palm-lined promenade to the sea. The last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah used to come here and Reza shows me the room they used that features two cane chairs with fan-shaped backs. Placed in a bow window, they have attracted the attention of a group of tourists a couple of whom are sitting in them – I’m not sure if is by accident or design that the flimsy cane seems a parody of the magnificent peacock throne that once symbolised Iranian royalty.
Downstairs in the teahouse it’s just the two of us and a bored waiter. Set among the dark-stained pillars are banquettes and chairs covered with red and green Scottish tartan. The tartan has also been used to cover floor squabs and tables in a low-ceilinged mezzanine with numerous shadowy niches. Through the gloom I make out a young couple huddled together in the far corner.
A touch of the Middle East has been added to the mix in the form of an alcove with a beaded curtain. We sit in here and order saffron ice cream and tea. Thirty years ago it would have been full of girls in mini-skirts and guys with long hair and tight jeans.
Like the current generation of Iranians, the Shah too enjoyed retreating to the Caspian to escape the dry heat of Tehran’s summers and its snowy winters. His summer palace is a short walk away from the hotel, set in gardens filled with palms, flowering sub-tropical plants, citrus trees and ponds.
The palace is now known as the Caspian Museum and with paper bootees on our feet to protect the parquet floors we tour it with the compulsory guide whose delivery is set on fast forward. I’m surprised, given the size of the Shah’s other properties in Tehran and his family’s predilection for excess, how compact the palace is. It’s a delicate light-filled one-storey pavilion that’s still full of the family’s carpets, furniture, paintings and chandeliers. It seems more like a royal holiday cottage than a sumptuous palace.
We say goodbye to the Caspian at the end of the promenade where teahouses, restaurants and souvenir shops crowd the beachfront. One shop is a little different from the rest in that the window is crammed with taxidermy – if stuffed animals could ever be described as fanciful these certainly fit the bill: ducklings and chickens in nests, rabbits in plus fours, lambs captured in mid-gambol and even what looks like stuffed sturgeon on the walls. Busy among the glassy eyes, furs and feathers is the taxidermist himself who is occupied pushing a polystyrene mould up the inside of a duck carcass. He tells us ducklings and chickens are especially popular as springtime souvenirs for the local tourists.
Outside the weather has changed and waves, whipped up by a strong wind, are crashing onto the gravel. Lines of metal posts stretch out into the sea and Reza tells me they indicate the women’s bathing areas. In summer canvas or plastic is strung up along the poles so women can swim behind them unseen.
Iran’s highest mountain range, the Alborz, lies between us and Tehran. There are four passes through the mountains and we are going to take the Chalus route. This highway, which zigzags up the northern faces of the mountain in a dizzying series of hairpin bends, took 20 years to build and is regarded by Iranians as an engineering marvel.
The Caspian’s mild early spring is soon replaced by the firm grip of winter as snow appears, first on the precipitous mountain slopes on all sides and then in metre-high piles on each side of the road. We stop briefly at a teahouse built above a gorge, its narrow veranda hanging over a gully of jagged rocks, and sadly, a great deal of rubbish. The snows above us are blushing with sunset colours, but there is no time to linger. It’s extremely cold and Reza B wants to get over the summit before darkness falls.
Once the southern slopes of the Alborz were home to bandits who used to raid the silk routes that skirted the mountains. Today, however, Tehran is creeping up into what was remote mountain terrain. It feels as if we are in the outer suburbs of the city almost as soon as we are over the top of the pass.
We’re all a bit subdued. While we are pleased to be going home, at the same time these are the last few hours of our road trip. When we go to Isfahan and Kashan in a few days’ time it will be by bus. The two Rezas calculate how far we have travelled since we left Tehran three weeks earlier and come up with more than 8000 kilometres.
We’ve stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, gazed at mountains on the borders of Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia, suffered one minor dent, been fined for speeding, but luckily have not had a single flat tyre or breakdown. Most importantly, we’ve become family. We talk about future trips to explore the few areas of Iran that we haven’t visited, but I think we know in our hearts that this is unlikely.
Reza B battles through the Iranian evening traffic towards central Tehran and Reza’s family apartment. On our arrival he rings the bell and Mojik appears. The first thing he does is hug Reza, then, after he shakes my hand he hesitates briefly before hugging me, too.
We unpack the van in silence: bags, piles of coats, our travelling library, the mosque teapot and the numerous bags of fru
it and nuts that litter the floor. Reza B and Reza have already taroffed at great length over who should take the food and apparently it is staying with us.
Upstairs Reza’s mother Sedighe and his sister Nasik are waiting for us. We’re enveloped in more hugs as the small family room is swamped with all the gear. I’m perilously close to crying – a result of the warm welcome home and having to say goodbye to Reza B. He’s keen to get home, too, so leaves quickly – partly I suspect because none of us wants to prolong the goodbyes. I tell him it might be un-Islamic, but I’m going to hug him anyway. You’re like my daughter, he tells me. I can’t imagine driving anywhere in Iran without him.
Reza and I add to the chaos by delving among the assorted bags to find the family’s presents: nuts soaked in honey from Sara’eyn for Mojik, a pink headscarf from the Persian Gulf for Nasik and saffron and perfume from Mashhad for Sedighe.
The family wants to know everything – we’ve visited parts of Iran they’ve never seen. Even though it’s late we dig out maps, put the photos on the laptop and relive the journey.
The next day is the first for weeks that we haven’t been on the move. I find it an effort even to get from bed to couch, couch to chair. Reza appears to be feeling the same. When I stagger past the kitchen I see him sitting at the table nursing a cup of tea and staring vacantly into space.
It’s back to normal the day after, though, as Reza wants to take me on a typical Tehrani day out via metro and shared taxi. The plan is to avoid Tehran’s tourist haunts, which are mostly museums, and our starting point is the main bazaar. As we take the efficient Tehran metro into the south of the city I ask Reza why he doesn’t bring tourists here.
‘You’ll see when we get there. In fact I need to tell you now to be very careful once we get inside.’
Immediately I conjure up images of pickpockets, muggers or maybe even rabid fundamentalists on the lookout for escaping blonde hair. But as we pass under the arched entrance into the main bazaar thoroughfare I realise that it’s not crime nor religious fanatics that are potentially hazardous. It’s the delivery men. Few of the alleyways are open to motorised vehicles (in some cases they are not even wide enough to take them) so most of the goods in this enormous complex are moved from warehouses and trucks to shops on wooden trolleys similar to those found on railway platforms and pushed by men in blue coats. These guys don’t stop for anyone, which is understandable because if they were to give way to pedestrians they’d never get anywhere.