Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Deserts and Rain

Iran sits at the convergence of the Arabian, Indian, and Eurasian
continental plates, and as a result it experiences frequent
earthquakes (the historic city of Bam, along with its Unesco World
Heritage-listed citadel, was flattened ten years ago, with over
30,000 dead), hosts two massive mountain ranges, and, in the rain
shadow of these mountain ranges, has two vast deserts, the  Dasht-e
Kavir in the centre-north of the country and the Dasht-e Lut in the
southeast. This week was supposed to be my week of deserts, and I
visited both. And so naturally this week was also the only time
during my visit to Iran that I experienced any significant rainfall
(there was some drizzle and snow flurries in the Alamut Valley but
that was both light and brief). Jalal, my guide in Kerman, told me
that Kerman averages seven days of rain in a year (I remarked that
Oxford averages that many days of rain in a week). Over the course
of my day with Jalal, I found that he was a bit prone to
exaggeration, but I was certainly in some arid country this week,
and it was surreal indeed to see rain tipping down on brown,
featureless landscapes. I suppose all but the driest deserts get a
bit of rain from time to time and I should count myself all the
luckier that I got to experience this meteorological anomaly.
Besides which, people in this part of the world need rain more than
I need sunshine, and there are more of them than there are of me
(since when was I a utilitarian?), so I really can't complain.

The main purpose for my visit to Kerman, in the southeast of Iran,
was to take a trip out to the Kaluts, a stretch of the Dasht-e Lut
desert with famously beautiful towers of sandy rock. It was also my
most expensive day in Iran because tourists are required to take a
guide with them to the Kaluts, and since I was unable to find anyone
to share the costs with, I paid for Jalal's services on my own. He
spoke decent English, but had also lived ten years in Germany and
was near-fluent in German, so we agreed the tour would go better in
German (my German's better than his English), besides which it was
good practice for my German.

Spending a day with a guide is always a chancy proposition: it's not
just the quality of the guiding that matters in a one-on-one
situation, but also how well your personalities match. It started
inauspiciously enough, with Jalal expressing interest in the fact
that I teach philosophy, and explaining that he has an interest in
philosophy as well, not the kind of philosophy you find in books,
but his own philosophy. My mother is an autobiography scholar, and
has remarked on how that seems to license people to tell her their
life story. Similarly, it seems my ten years of philosophical
training qualified me to hear Jalal tell me his view of life, the
universe, and everything, but certainly didn't qualify me to have
any views of my own, which were generally dismissed about half a
sentence in. It was a lot of stuff about how you don't know if
you'll be alive tomorrow so don't take anything for granted, a line
of thought that would have been less unnerving if it weren't being
preached to me by a guy zipping about on Iranian roads--we passed
two roadside accidents that morning. More interesting was the
stories of the near-death experience that had brought about this
revelation in Jalal, but because it was this experience rather than
anything you can read in books that had given him his philosophy,
none of my book-learning amounted to a hill of beans. It took a fair
amount of work to get him to see that, if I couldn't learn anything
of any genuine value by attending to what the people who wrote books
had to say, I couldn't learn anything of any genuine value by
attending to what he had to say either.

But fortunately the philosophy seminar had ended by the time we
reached that Kaluts, and for the most part, Jalal was a pretty good
guy and not a bad companion for the day. As we crossed over some
mountains, the landscape got emptier and emptier (there was no rain
in the Kaluts when I visited and there probably hadn't been in
years), and eventually the car pulled off the road in one of the
hottest deserts on earth. The weather wasn't too bad on the day I
visited, but deeper into the Kaluts there's a spot that's recorded
the hottest ever land surface temperature at 70 degrees Celsius (or
104 degrees if you believe Jalal--that's degrees Celsius, mind--an
exaggeration that makes my blood boil).

Despite what I've said about Jalal, it's to his great credit that he
recognized that what I most wanted to do was to find a spot where I
could be alone and quiet and I didn't even need to say anything to
him to have him allow me to do that, and find a perch of his own a
few hundred metres away. The Kaluts consists of grey pebbly sand
punctuated with massive reddish-brown icebergs of rock jutting
heavenward. As I looked out toward the horizon, these rock towers
became smaller and smaller and fewer and fewer until there was just
a vast, grey emptiness. I felt like I was standing at the edge of
the world. And even though (or rather because) this landscape was so
emphatically inhospitable to life of any kind, I felt a magnetic
attraction: it took some will power not to just start walking out
toward the horizon. I thought of the opening chapter of Moby-Dick,
in which the narrator talks about the powerful attraction of the
sea. I thought of Pascal's line about our smallness in the vastness
of space and time: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces
frightens me." I thought about how prophets and saints had taken
refuge in the desert, and I thought about how a bit more time out
here could silence thought. Sadly, as the wind picked up, we needed
to head back to the car and back to Kerman (sandstorms are very
dangerous things to be caught in), but my hour staring out in the
nothing of the Kaluts was one of the most entrancing of my time in
Iran.

The following morning, I took in what sights Kerman itself had to
offer under sporadic showers. My first stop was the Museum of the
Holy Defence, commemorating the Iran-Iraq war. A series of exhibits
started with documents dating back a century showing treaties that
settled the border between Iran and Iraq before providing photos,
documents (mostly illegible to me, of course, although some of the
treaties were in French), and materiel from the war. The placards
were obviously propagandistic--apparently there was a lot of
manliness and self-denial on the part of Iran's soldiers and
citizenry--but there's no denying that this war was crushingly
awful, and not of Iran's choosing. One irony of the war is that
Saddam Hussein was trying to take advantage of Iran's internal chaos
after the revolution, but one consequence of the invasion is that it
helped solidify the revolution and consolidate Khomeini's position.
Nothing like an external enemy to get a people to rally together.

Next stop was Kerman's old and sprawling bazaar, which also featured
a charming old bathhouse (now a museum with waxwork bathers) and a
small but exquisite mosque.

And by early afternoon I was on a bus to Yazd, again, driving
through semi-desert landscapes in pouring rain. As we approached
Yazd I had my first encounter with the kind of Iranian officialdom
that people imagine when they imagine Iran as a dangerous place to
visit. At a military checkpoint I was questioned by a soldier in a
surgical mask who then hauled me off the bus, searched my luggage
and looked through my camera's photos (on the bright side he helped
me discover there's a function on my camera that allows me to look
at past photos without popping open the lens), and interrogated me a
bit more about my profession, purpose in visiting Iran, etc.

There are military checkpoints all over Iran, but most of them are
very tame affairs. One consequence of having a military draft is
that most of the soldiers I see here are lanky nineteen-year-olds
trying their best to have a good time during an annoying
interruption to their lives. At the road check returning to Shiraz
from my Sizdah Be Dar outing with Alireza a few days earlier, the
young soldiers were simply high-fiving the motorists as they passed
through. But the guy at this roach check had the musculature and
grim efficiency of a career soldier. There's good reason that road
checks coming up from the southeast are different. About 85% of the
opiates that enter Europe pass through the deserts of eastern Iran
from Afghanistan and Pakistan before making their way northwest
toward Turkey and the Caucasus. Apparently there are even "homing
camels" with drugs surgically implanted in their humps who are then
set loose in the desert to find their way back to their druglord
owners on the Iranian side of the border. Why, on a bus full of
Iranians, the white guy should come under the most suspicion is
another question, and I think my interrogation had very little to do
with drugs. But it was all over in about twenty minutes and no harm
done, except for my fellow passengers, and the driver who seemed
irritated that we were now behind schedule. Geez, sorry.

Yazd is an ancient desert city that's apparently great to walk
around (the very thing I intend to do once I've sent off this blog),
but when I awoke the following morning (I arrived from Kerman at
night) it was tipping down with rain. Not very auspicious for a
walking tour. Fortunately I got adopted by a pair of Polish guys
who'd arranged a tour to some of the sights outside of town and were
looking for other tourists to share the cost. It seemed like a good
day to spend in a car, so I said why not. We took in some fairly
interesting sights in the 1800-year-old mud brick town of Meybod
before heading on toward the Zoroastrian pilgrimage site of Chak
Chak. But we never made it to Chak Chak. Part of the way along the
road we came across another car that was trapped in a river that had
started gushing across the road under the heavy rain. I suppose
deserts also don't have the orderly drainage systems of places that
experience more rain. And indeed, seeing the desert rain was really
more of a highlight than Chak Chak would have been. Dozens of
waterfalls cascaded off a nearby mountain. The cracked brown earth
was slowly turning to mud. And the road was blocked by a river. So
we turned back and went to Kharanaq. This village is also over 1000
years old and now a ghost town. It was hugely fun running around the
old alleyways and into crumbling mud-brick buildings, with the only
downside being that the mud had made it very slippery and limited
exploration options. But I can well imagine that Kharanaq could host
a future Hide-and-Go-Seek World Cup (speaking of which, look up on
YouTube--I can't give a link right now because YouTube is blocked--
the Monty Python sketch about the Hide-and-Go-Seek finals at the
Olympics: it's one of my favourites).

I'd planned to go out to the oasis village of Garmeh the next day,
but I decided to go out that same evening since it might be better
to wait for the weather to clear in Yazd. Garmeh's out in the middle
of the Dasht-e Kavir, but even so, we drove out there under heavy
rain, and the desert itself had experienced rain all that day. But
fortunately by morning the rain had stopped and the desert had gone
back to behaving like a desert.

I stayed at Ateshooni, a desert guesthouse run by Maziar (whose real
name I might as well use since he's readily identifiable), a huge
bear of a man with a bushy grey beard and ponytail, a booming deep
voice, and baggy clothes, all of which made him out to be the model
of an ageing hippie. I shared the guesthouse with a French couple
and a group of four--three Iranians and the Italian husband of one
of the Iranians--and spent the day seeing bits of desert with them.
In the morning we went out to a salt lake--not actually a lake, but
a white expanse of salt at the bed of what had presumably once been
a lake. Because the deserts of my Canadian imagination are as often
polar as tropical, it was easy to imagine this white expanse as the
ice pack on the Arctic Ocean, the more so because the previous day's
rain had left the salt quite moist. Naturally, I had to get a photo
of myself pretending to take a slap shot.

In the afternoon, we drove out to the sand dunes around Mesr and
Farahzad, which looked right out of a Hollywood movie. I got to take
a bumpy fifteen minute camel ride and then sat with my companions
atop a sand dune above the village of Farahzad and watched the sun
set. The only thing that would have made it more pleasant is if the
mosquitoes from the irrigated fields below didn't make their evening
commute up to the sand dunes and start attacking me just as the sun
was setting.

But fortunately there was a refuge. Felix and Pauline, the French
couple, were staying the night in Farahzad, and before the rest of
us left, Maziar put on a performance for us inside the mosquito-free
guesthouse. Maziar doesn't just look the part of the ageing hippie,
he also has the musicianship to go along with it, with drums and
digeridoo no less. But most entrancing for me was a performance he
put on with a pair of clay jugs, flicking, tapping, banging, and
cupping his hand over their apertures to make an impressive variety
of gently muted, hollow sounds. He played it all in a mesmerizing
rhythm that was startlingly musical and unlike anything I'd heard
before.

The Iranian/Italian foursome were driving back to Yazd that night
and offered me a lift, which was gratefully received. We also took a
fifteen-minute break in the middle of the desert night to gaze up at
the stars surrounded by total blackness. They were an interesting
bunch. The three Iranians had all studied film in Tehran, and one of
them had gone on to further film study in Bologna, where she'd met
her husband. For those of you who don't already know this, Iran is
famous for its critically-acclaimed films. Asghar Faradi's A
Separation recently won a much-deserved Oscar, and figures such as
Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have won all sorts of
international prizes (the Palme d'Or in Cannes in the case of
Kiarostami). This lot certainly seemed like serious filmmakers (one
had been working as a cinematographer on a new film by Oscar nominee
Majid Majidi), and Felix was also a documentary filmmaker, so I felt
like a bit of a wimp clicking away all day with my hand-held camera
while they all took professional care in lining up their fuck-off
big cameras to get the best shots possible.

Also interesting is that both of the women were called Azadeh, which
means "liberty." They were both born in 1979, and apparently a lot
of children born in the years following the revolution were given
this name (Azad for boys), so that you can generally guess the age
of an Azadeh or Azad within a couple of years. Needless to say,
their parents' early enthusiasm for the overthrow of the shah didn't
translate into any love of Ahmadinejad or Khamenei among this crowd.

Speaking of which, I mentioned earlier that there are images of
Khomeini all over Iran. Khamenei is just as omnipresent--either
photographed with Khomeini, or twin portraits on the walls of
eateries or bus stations or wherever else. But whereas Khomeini has
the grim appearance befitting a man willing to be ruthless in
implementing his vision for Iran, Khamenei generally has the shit-
eating grin of a man who can't believe his luck that he's been
elevated to the position of Supreme Leader. And well he should: up
until a year before Khomeini's death, the likely successor seemed to
be Hussein-Ali Montazeri. That he fell out with Khomeini is one of
the great tragedies of modern Iran, as Montazeri was a moderate who
would have likely led Iran in a much different, and healthier,
direction than the one it's taken. Khamenei, by contrast, was
rapidly promoted up the ranks of the ulema (the Muslim clergy) so
that he could be appointed Supreme Leader on Khomeini's death, and
his relatively unimpressive status as a scholar of Islam only
reinforced the politicization of an office that was supposed to be
above the political fray. As for Montazeri, he spent most of the
rest of his life under house arrest, and died in 2009 (of old age)
after providing spiritual and moral support for the Green Movement
that rose up after the (almost certainly) rigged elections that year.

Final side note: when one of the Azadehs said the 2009 elections
were rigged (I didn't start this conversation: I'm taking care not
to broach the subject of politics unless someone else broaches it
first), the other two Iranians disputed this, saying that just
because they and their middle-class Tehrani friends all hated
Ahmadinejad didn't mean that he didn't have huge support from the
poor and rural voters. It's certainly true that Ahmadinejad's
populist appeal resonates more with the kind of people who lack the
education to express it to me in English, but from what I've read,
the 2009 election results were suspicious for a number of reasons.
For instance, there was a surprising uniformity in the tallies
across regions of Iran, without even expected spikes in support for
particular candidates in their home districts. And the results were
also announced suspiciously quickly and ratified by Khamenei with
even more suspicious rapidity. We'll probably never know the whole
truth of what happened in 2009. But it does seem that many of the
Iranians who supported Moussavi or other reform candidates in 2009
aren't even going to bother to vote this June, since they're now
convinced that their votes won't count.

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