Global Wanderer

2/7/2023 – 3/7/2023

Well, today was pretty uneventful! After getting back to Dave Hotel at close to midnight, we knew we only had about an hour and a half before we’d need to head to the airport. After a quick shower, our bags were packed, and we were half asleep on the beds ready to drag ourselves up. Yesterday was a long day! At about 1:30am, we checked out, and I ordered a Yandex to take us to the airport. The first bloke who rocked up decided that he’d rather not drive out to the airport, and cancelled the ride. Luckily, the next guy was more than happy, and we found ourselves in the back of an ancient Merc rocketing towards Zvartnots Airport!.

A warning out there for all potential Armenian travellers – Zvartnots Airport is a bit chaotic. It seems relatively new, and the check in desks are fine, however the queues for immigration do not work well – there is a screen that tells you, as you (finally, it took us half an hour) get to the front of the exit control queue, which counter you should proceed to. Before you can get to that counter though, one of the friendly staff will direct you to a different one, often one that already has people queued up, whilst the immigration officers wave frantically to get SOMEONE to come to their desk. It seems that the people working at the front of the queue aren’t able to see some of the staggered desks, and it created a bit of a nightmare. Despite having only 10 minutes after clearing immigration before the gate closed, the security situation was much easier to navigate, and our gate was right in front of us when we cleared security!

Yerevan to Doha was our first leg. Whilst a boutique Armenian airline DOES offer direct flights to Tehran, they weren’t operating on the day that we needed to travel, and so we had to take the unfortunate long route around. Oh well! Qatar as always lived up to expectations, and after eating a banana pudding for breakfast, I fell fast asleep, waking up pretty much just as the wheels touched the ground at Doha Hamad. Our second flight, from Doha to Tehran, departed just an hour after we arrived, so we made our way to the next gate and got on the obligatory bus (I’m pretty sure I only saw three gates at the airport using airbridges, and two of those were A380s). On our ride to the plane, Dad got talking to the Iranian guy next to him, who had noticed one of the baggage tags on Dad’s backpack, and was also from Perth. He gave some useful advice on Iranian currency, chatted about the state of his country, and wished us luck on our trip, by which point we were exiting the bus and walking up to the plane.

Another uneventful flight which I again slept through almost the entirety of! Breakfast of a mushroom and potato frittata was washed down with orange juice before I closed my eyes for the second time that morning, for another hour or so of terrible plane sleep. When I woke up, we were above Tehran, ready to land.

Expecting a bureaucratic nightmare, we were pleasantly surprised when we got to the visa issuance area, where a lone South African man was waiting for his approval. Given we’d already received our visa approval letters, all we had to do was pay (145 euros each!) to the bloke at the bank counter and have our insurance documents checked. This whole process took about 20 minutes, after which we made our way to immigration control. Surprisingly, unlike the immense scrutiny my passport faced in Georgia, I was told I had a lovely face, and welcomed into the Islamic Republic of Iran. That was a nice change!

Welcome to Iran!

Once Dad’s bag came off the carousel, we headed out through customs to find Kharoush (who also goes by the nickname ‘Jack’) from SurfIran waiting for us. After an abortive effort to acquire a SIM card (something about our passports not being in the system), we headed upstairs to the currency exchange desk, whilst Kharoush beat away the black market money exchangers eager to get their hands on our precious euros. We changed 100 euros, and got 50 million rial, packaged in 500,000 rial notes in a gigantic stack that barely fit in my pocket. If you’re going to change more cash than that, I reckon you need to carry around a hessian sack with a dollar sign on it like a cartoon bank robber! Kharoush took us through the carpark to what he explained was his father’s car – his was in Shiraz waiting for us tomorrow!

Giant bundle of rials!

Tehran is a strange bustling city – the first thing we noticed was the lack of headscarves. Lots of women seemed to be either forgoing the covering entirely or wearing it over their shoulders but not on their heads. It actually feels like a normal, big city, which sounds obvious until you notice that all the cars are ancient, the Iranian flag is flying on every street, and you remember that you’re in pretty much the most sanctioned country in the world.

For the one night we’re here, we’re staying at the Howeyzah Hotel – which looks a bit like an Iranian business hotel, but which only really has working Wi-Fi in the lobby. I really need to get that SIM card tomorrow! The first thing on our agenda though, and the only real thing we have planned for today, was to visit the former U.S. Embassy, the site of the Iran hostage crisis, which was conveniently located around the corner.

The embassy is covered in anti-U.S. propaganda, and the inside is preserved pretty much as it was when it was overrun by the demonstrators in 1979. Obviously, the propaganda shown inside is of the heavily anti-American variety, but who can blame them – both sides engage in propaganda warfare, and the truth often lies somewhere in the middle. The office of the Ambassador has been left in its original condition, complete with a Jimmy Carter portrait on the wall, and the location of the Ruhollah Khomeini dartboard has been marked with a photograph of the item (the actual photo of the Ayatollah was removed by the students who stormed the embassy). The embassy was certainly worth the visit – particularly when you got to go into the intelligence-gathering rooms. No wonder its current name in Iran is the U.S. Den of Espionage Museum!

Once we finished up there, we headed around the corner to look for something to eat, before retiring to the hotel for an early evening. We spotted a local pizza place open, and headed in, trying the Iranian take on pizza, soren pizza. Simply put, it’s a puffed-up flatbread, no tomato sauce, and a bunch of thinly sliced meat, cheese, and mushrooms. You add whatever sauce you want to the TOP of the pizza. Incredibly delicious, and watered down with Hey Dad, an Iranan non-alcoholic beer (which I would happily drink at home if they had it!). After that, we headed back to the hotel – not before stopping at a pastry shop along the way for some dessert/breakfast. This has been a long two days, and I am completely wrecked!

Before I could properly sleep though, the phone in the room went off. I picked it up and salam-ed hesitantly. One of the staff in the lobby answered back, starting one of the most ridiculous conversations I have ever heard in a hotel before. “Are you down?” he asked. “Down, like, asleep?”

“No,” I replied. “Not anymore at least!”

The man on the other end paused for a second. “Okay. You have i-ron in your room?”

At this point I was starting to laugh. “An iron? I’m not sure, why?”

“Ah, okay,” was the reply. “Wrong room.” And with that, the phone went dead. Dad went and checked. No sign of an iron. That conversation though, pretty much summed up Howeyzeh Hotel in a nutshell – it was like Fawlty Towers style service, to the point where it was so bad it was funny.

Side notes about the hilarity of this hotel:

The next morning, Dad went and asked if they had any coffee for the room, as there was only a single tea bag there. The man at the lobby nodded, repeated the word ‘Nescafe’ and disappeared, never to be seen again. Not even kidding, we never saw him again… or any Nescafe!

The only channel working on the TV in the room was a movie channel… which was playing a Farsi-dubbed version of Free Willy on repeat (as in, that was literally the only movie the channel ever played).

The guy at the egg station at breakfast seemed intent on not serving anyone except for a single Iranian guy who kept getting up for more. When asked by a Russian tourist why he wouldn’t serve anyone else, he told her that it was because that Iranian guy “he wanted a few omelettes.” When pressed further, he resorted to “I speak no English.” Strange.

There was a bunch of other funny things that happened – if I remember them, I’ll write them down here!

Despite the beds being pretty uncomfortable, I got an okay-ish sleep – probably given my absolute exhaustion from the last week of travel. Breakfast at the hotel was, well, breakfast at a hotel, nothing too special. Today, our plan was to visit the Golestan Palace and the National Museum, before flying to Shiraz in the afternoon.

We were met in the lobby of the hotel by Kharoush (forgot to mention, UK, US, and Canadian passport holders must be on an official ‘tour’), who gave us some relatively horrifying information – we still hadn’t been booked on our flight to Shiraz, and every single flight that day was full. Kharoush’s father, Reza, used to be a flight attendant, and so he called him to see if he could pull some strings for us. One of the crap things about the sanctions on Iran is that you can’t use international credit cards like Visa or MasterCard – which means that you can’t book flights yourself. In addition to that, apparently in Iran it is now almost impossible to book a flight more than a week in advance. Nothing we could do except continue on with our plans for the day, and hope for the best, I suppose!

First up was the National Museum, which consisted of an interesting variety of artefacts, statues, and reliefs recovered from the Persian Empire. One of the more fascinating parts of this museum was the tranche of relics recovered from the period after the Persians’ defeat to Alexander the Great – a vast array of Grecian style busts and statues that wouldn’t look out of place in Athens. Very strange to say the least.

The exterior of the National Museum.

Once we’d finished up at the museum, which gave us a little taste of what was to come in Persepolis on the 5^th, we headed to Golestan Palace, taking a little detour on the way to get some fresh berry juice (absolutely incredible, I have to say – even Dad enjoyed it and he doesn’t particularly like sweet things!). Golestan, we were told, was the most expensive site in Iran – at 6 million rials each, it worked out to almost $20AUD each, which is a lot no matter what way you look at it. The palace itself was very impressive, used by the last dynasty of Persian Shah’s, the Pahlavi. It is abundantly clear why there was considerable discontent over the hoarding of wealth by the Shah toward the end of the imperial regime – the palace looked like something plucked straight out of a European city, its interior filled with gold, beautiful paintings and tapestries, and an abundance of odd objects like gilded chairs. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole heap else to see here, the garden’s petit canal system having long run dry. One other part of the palace to note, however, was the impressive throne room, which was technically open, facing out into the courtyard, but was covered by giant curtains. The reason why was pretty clear from the second you walked in – the entire room was built like a broken mirror, facing out towards the sun. You quite literally would have been blinded if it weren’t for the curtains! The throne room in itself was certainly impressive!

Once we’d finished up at Golestan, we were told we’d be having lunch with Armen, the (coincidentally named) Armenian-Iranian running SurfIran. Before that though, there was time to visit the Tehran Bazaar, and so off we went. The bazaar itself is, apparently, a shell of what it used to be. I’d honestly imagined some Silk Road style market full of fruits and spices, but the Tehran Bazaar is now emblematic of the New Silk Road – full of cheap goods manufactured in China. Very different to what I’d imagined, but interesting to visit nonetheless!

We finally made it to the restaurant and met with Armen, who I’d been dealing with for the previous few months over email. He, like everyone else in Iran, seemed grateful for the tourism, and told us at length about his COVID-impacted plan to open a travel agency in Armenia. I, not used to this strange idea of eating 3 whole meals a day thing, didn’t eat anything, but Dad got a chicken kebab, and Kharoush and Armen shared a stuffed chicken. Once we were done, we got a move on back to the hotel, to pick up our bags, as we were due to check out. We’d finally gotten confirmation that we were booked onto the 8pm flight to Shiraz, which meant that we had a few hours left to kill.

Kharoush, however, had other plans, and invited us to drop our things off at his parents’ house whilst we waited. One thing led to another (Islamic hospitality again!), and we were sat upstairs in the family flat, watching Iranian TV and getting fed an immense amount of fruit, tea, and sherbet, and being regaled with old family stories. Definitely a strange, but rather funny experience! Finally, we were ready to head to the airport – ably assisted by Reza, Kharoush’s father, who would take the car back home from the airport. I learned today that another thing is the same across the world – Dads who backseat drive!

Kharoush’s Mum’s incredible spread.

Most notable parts of the flight – the absolutely ancient MD-82 that we were flying on, the fact that even budget airlines in Iran provide you with a meal (even on a 1 hour flight!), and the strangest – that a few passengers are picked on each flight to complete a written survey form about the performance of the airline, the staff, and the comfort of the plane. Very odd indeed.

Shiraz Airport has an IranCell booth, I repeat, HAS an IranCell booth. And unlike in Tehran, where I was turned away, this time, I came away with a working Iranian SIM. The Wi-Fi situation throughout the country is a bit patchy, and having your own SIM card means you’re not relying on anyone, or anything, else to access the Internet. That’s one of the most important things I personally need whilst travelling, and given almost everything is going Internet-based now, is going to become even more necessary as times goes on. We hopped in a taxi, and zoomed across the city to our accommodation for the next 2 nights, the Arg Hotel.