Leaving Iran. Thoughts and reflections
It's been the best part of a week since I left Iran now and I guess some sort of summary is in order. Getting out was quite easy. Due to the lack of Pakistani visa I'd got a flight booked over to Delhi with Gulf Air. Contrary to their stated policy online (bikes are carried for US$30 but must be bagged or boxed before the airport) when I rang them I was told my bike was to be transported as part of my luggage allowance (30kg + 5kg discretionary + hand luggage, after that US$7 per kg) and would be made ready for travel at the airport. Spent the day before flying ditching or posting back to the UK anything that was surplus weight which meant I posted 5kgs of kit back and did the first proper clean out of my bags in months.
At the airport the bike had to be X-rayed then various passport stamping when on. When it came to the check in bike and bags came to 34.5kgs and carry on luggage to about 8kgs. And I was wearing pretty much all I could as well! Wrapping the bike was a nightmare though, with a man using a clingfilm machine and his mate not rotating the vertically held bike properly. Crunch. I've still not brought myself to unpack it...
Iran is without doubt the most hospitable country I've visited on this trip, although it's hard to know how much of the hospitable character is a genuine old time thing and how much comes from their relative isolation. I think, going from my experiences in Eastern Turkey and Serbia it's made up much more of the former rather than the later. At times it's wonderful, at other times a little annoying and sometimes dangerous, such as the time I ended up flanked by motorbikes in heavy traffic, with four people trying to talk to me at once and both motorbikes slowly moving in to the point where I felt it was all going to end in tears. So the people, with one or two dishonourable mentions were fantastic (yes, there were one or two pricks, but far less than elsewhere).
The government, however, I as less than chuffed with, and talking to people I'm pretty certain the country is going to change. Either the government is going to manage that change and start making limited controlled changes (which would be in their best interests obviously) or the country is liable to explode into bloody violence. The majority of the population is in the 15 to 30 age bracket and when you're that age you think you're immortal. Your friends might die but you won't, and those are the people who will be the cannon fodder. I spoke with one person, well to do in a very senior station who told me about the Sepah (you might know them as the Revolutionary Guards) unofficially sending out videos of how they'd tortured kids after the summers uprising. The one that shook him (and he wanted to share it with me) was of hooded detainees being led to the edge of a third story roof then told to step down the "stairs". The video captured the falling and the landing and was made and released purely to affect the parents of those who might be involved in the next round.
Still, I believe (although I have no particular evidence to base this on bar talking to a self selecting sample) that change will come within the next five or ten years, provided, of course, that the Americans or Israelis don't intervene and cock it all up as usual. And when it does Iran I'm of the opinion that it will become a secular democracy. Democratic because even now Iran is nominally a democracy. And after all, Iran was establishing increasingly more democratic systems in the early twentieth century despite British and Russian interference. Killed off by the American and British coup in 1953 of course (organised out of the US Embassy btw, which goes some way to explain just why the siege of 1979 and 1980 happened). And as to secular well the vast majority of those I spoke (and yes, it was a small sample etc etc) not only despised the government but also increasingly Islam and Arabs. Loathed them with a passion in fact. I'll end with an interesting statistic I came across: 1.4% of Iranians go to the mosque on a Friday. In the UK the figure for church attendance is around 7%.
At the airport the bike had to be X-rayed then various passport stamping when on. When it came to the check in bike and bags came to 34.5kgs and carry on luggage to about 8kgs. And I was wearing pretty much all I could as well! Wrapping the bike was a nightmare though, with a man using a clingfilm machine and his mate not rotating the vertically held bike properly. Crunch. I've still not brought myself to unpack it...
Iran is without doubt the most hospitable country I've visited on this trip, although it's hard to know how much of the hospitable character is a genuine old time thing and how much comes from their relative isolation. I think, going from my experiences in Eastern Turkey and Serbia it's made up much more of the former rather than the later. At times it's wonderful, at other times a little annoying and sometimes dangerous, such as the time I ended up flanked by motorbikes in heavy traffic, with four people trying to talk to me at once and both motorbikes slowly moving in to the point where I felt it was all going to end in tears. So the people, with one or two dishonourable mentions were fantastic (yes, there were one or two pricks, but far less than elsewhere).
The government, however, I as less than chuffed with, and talking to people I'm pretty certain the country is going to change. Either the government is going to manage that change and start making limited controlled changes (which would be in their best interests obviously) or the country is liable to explode into bloody violence. The majority of the population is in the 15 to 30 age bracket and when you're that age you think you're immortal. Your friends might die but you won't, and those are the people who will be the cannon fodder. I spoke with one person, well to do in a very senior station who told me about the Sepah (you might know them as the Revolutionary Guards) unofficially sending out videos of how they'd tortured kids after the summers uprising. The one that shook him (and he wanted to share it with me) was of hooded detainees being led to the edge of a third story roof then told to step down the "stairs". The video captured the falling and the landing and was made and released purely to affect the parents of those who might be involved in the next round.
Still, I believe (although I have no particular evidence to base this on bar talking to a self selecting sample) that change will come within the next five or ten years, provided, of course, that the Americans or Israelis don't intervene and cock it all up as usual. And when it does Iran I'm of the opinion that it will become a secular democracy. Democratic because even now Iran is nominally a democracy. And after all, Iran was establishing increasingly more democratic systems in the early twentieth century despite British and Russian interference. Killed off by the American and British coup in 1953 of course (organised out of the US Embassy btw, which goes some way to explain just why the siege of 1979 and 1980 happened). And as to secular well the vast majority of those I spoke (and yes, it was a small sample etc etc) not only despised the government but also increasingly Islam and Arabs. Loathed them with a passion in fact. I'll end with an interesting statistic I came across: 1.4% of Iranians go to the mosque on a Friday. In the UK the figure for church attendance is around 7%.
posted by Bill at 8:11 am
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