Monday 23 January 2012

Meeting People Is Easy

Technically, things got off to a rocky start here in Iran. Three punctures in one week. I'm starting to suspect my tubes are trying to tell me something. Setting aside the mild irritation this caused, the general mood has been one of mellow contentedness. This has nothing to do with any mindblowing scenery, because so far the surroundings have been, well, a bit drab. More discarded bottles and nappies than birds, trees and flowers. The stretch along the Caspian Sea was a particular letdown. I didn't manage to even glimpse that salty pond.

Cookies from Fuman: as good as the sun
But, as I'm beginning to find out, traveling is not just about the magnificent mountains, cities, castles and deserts you lay eyes upon. Chance encounters, real conversations and wordless acts of kindness give a trip like this its hue. Realising this blog is getting more sentimental by the week, I'll state the obvious: it's about the people you meet. When I think of the places I visited, be it Cappadocia or Padua, it's not the fairy chimneys or the Capella di Scrovegni that first come to mind but the people I met there: their faces, the things we talked about.

I have an inkling this won't be any different in Iran. Forty kilometres into the country a car overtook me and pulled over. The young man who got out embarked on a monologue in Farsi with the odd English phrase thrown in. I gathered he invited me to dinner. It turned out he lived in the town where I wanted to spend the night, so I gladly accepted. He escorted me a good twenty kilometres to a slightly run-down hotel, knocked down the price, helped me carry my luggage upstairs, and returned later that night to take me to a restaurant. Conversation was lively if fraught with silly misunderstandings. 'What? Your brother got married to your sister? Ah, you mean your wife's sister...'

Saying goodbye to David (again)
In Rasht I was hosted by a fiercely independent middle-aged woman suffering from an incurable case of wanderlust. However, it's nearly impossible for her to venture far from her own doorstep. Her husband prefers to stay at home, and it's practically unheard of in Iran for a woman to travel unchaperoned. Couchsurfing is her window on the world. She loves to explore the area around Rasht with her international guests, talking about the places she has been or still wants to go, and eagerly soaking up their travel adventures.

A few days later I teamed up with David, a German fellow with an excellent command of Dutch. We'd first met in Mardin, in the southeast of Turkey. He's touring Europe and Asia by motorcycle, and somehow we keep bumping into each other: first at the Turkish-Georgian border, later in Batumi and Tbilisi. This time we made a point of meeting up. Low on funds, he desperately needed a cash injection. As a matter of fact, money is one of the major headaches for foreigners traveling in Iran. Economic santions have left the country's banking system pretty much isolated, which means you need to bring all the cold, hard cash you may need. David, now, suffered a motorcycle accident on one of Tehran's many expressways, a broken arm his souvenir. Unable to travel, he needs to spend more time in Iran than he anticipated. A hefty hospital bill left him counting his last dollars. Fortunately, he sent me an SOS when I was still in Azerbaijan. It was good to see him again. We shared a tatty hotel suite, gorged ourselves with king-size pizzas, and talked at length about the people we've met so far. Encounters that are often, paradoxically, humbling and uplifting.

Monday 16 January 2012

Charity

Big business in Azerbaijan: oil...
'Do you think a person's name can somehow impact his life?' This question comes out of the blue, like most things Mohammed says or asks. I smile, realising we're about to take the conversation a few steps beyond the harmless small talk that usually comes with the kind of lower-intermediate English classes he's taking. 'It feels like these classes have untied my tongue', he told me earlier that morning.

Sonja, my host in Ganja, a city in the west of Azerbaijan, has organised a field trip to Xanlar, a picturesque village not far from town. This German girl is here for a three-month teaching stint, and she's doing a marvelous job setting up all kinds of projects for the local youth. German and English classes, political discussions, a women's club, sightseeing trips in and around town: her pupils, Mohammed included, simply lap it up.

...and gas. Anyone for a cuppa?
Sonja is not the only foreigner in Ganja involved in community work. I also happened to meet a few members of the Peace Corps, the American volunteer program set up fifty years ago by John F. Kennedy. The Peace Corps is active in over seventy developing nations worldwide, and in Azerbaijan alone you can find at least one or two volunteers in any decent-sized town.

You've got to hand it to them: these boys and girls are a hardy bunch. When they sign up, they commit themselves for a twenty-seven month period, not knowing in which part of the world they may end up. Moreover, their wages are in step with the local average pay.

There is no doubt the classes these volunteers teach and the funds they help raise and the advice they give to NGOs and small businesses all serve a good purpose. But it's hard to shake off the feeling that there might be a hidden agenda: to create goodwill for the American cause, or, more specifically, to clear the ground for fresh investments from overseas. In the end, even charity is a matter of checks and balances.

Now, it's easy to criticise the workings of a charity moloch like the Peace Corps, especially for a mere passerby. But this passerby rather unexpectedly found himself holding up his hand. Having ended up in Shirvan after another long day, unwilling to cough up the dosh for an overpriced room in the only hotel in town, a member of the Peace Corps came to my rescue. I was fed, given a roof over my head and, more importantly, I didn't have to spend the night talking to myself. Upon leaving the next morning I felt strangely uplifted. Sometimes it only takes a little nudge to see things from a new perspective.

Wednesday 4 January 2012

Thuis

Names of Dutch plant species on window at Amsterdam Airport
Language is a powerful thing. It can be used to inspire hatred, unite people for a common cause, convince someone of your love. But there is more to language than mere semanticsand I'm not talking about poetry. When you've been on the road for a while, you tend to lose touch with whatever it was that defined you at home. Social ties lose their hold, the job that once absorbed you is but a dim memory, and what's making headlines at home is anyone's guess. The one thing you take with you, wherever you go, is your mother tongue. Call me soppy, but I scream with delight when I spot a Georgian lorry carrying building materials, huge letters on its side suggesting I try 'hartige hapjes van bakkerij Roelvink'. (It seems more than just a few Dutch companies have found a profitable way of getting rid of unwanted trucks and vans.) And even though most of what passes my lips in the course of a day is Englishnot that it gets me anywhere in these partsthe last thing I hear before falling asleep is the familiar murmur of Het Bureau, a five hundred-episode Dutch radio play that has a particularly soothing effect on me.

Winding my way through the crowds at Amsterdam Airport, fresh from Tbilisi, I found I kept pricking up my ears. Hey, that's Dutch! Hey, Dutch again! I can understand what these people are saying! Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a tremendous affection for these kind souls rambling on about TV shows and what to buy for Christmas. I simply revelled in those guttural consonants and lowered dipthongs.

Beach at Monster (Holland)
Of course, after ten minutes this language high I was on had fizzled out. Then again, I hadn't come to Holland to feel phrases such as 'Wilt u het bonnetje?' or 'De sprinter naar Den Haag Centraal van vijftien uur zesenveertig vertrekt vandaag van spoor acht b' ripple down my spine. There was some serious business that needed to be taken care of. Ten days of excruciating phone calls from a hotel room in Tbilisi to the Pakistani embassy in The Hague had left me spent and frustrated. I was told that my visa application, filed by my parents, had been rejected because they wanted to see me in person. Why? They couldn't tell me. I didn't even get a chance to reason with the visa officer as he stubbornly refused to come to the phone or return my calls. Which, of course, makes him an excellent visa officer.

Once in Holland I quickly managed to smooth things out. The visa section of the embassy turned out to be a cramped two-room basement occupied by three listless clerks rather than the beehive of activity I had imagined it to be. The oh-so-important interview consisted of the visa officer checking my full name and inquiring as to whether I was planning on doing any hiking in out of bounds areas.

Interrupting the continuity of this journey so crudely wasn't something I had been terribly keen on. However, it allowed me to spend Christmas with my family and share a couple of beers with my friends. Moreover, I got to meet my fourteen-month old nephew for the very first time. Initially, he watched me somewhat suspicuously, bright blue eyes darting across my face. Then, all of a sudden, using the sounds of a language that one day will be his, I managed to make him smile. And no words can describe what that did to me.