Shiraz
And hitchhiking south
Mani
I arrived in Shiraz on a dark and stormy night, and a taxi driver abused my ignorance and wallet between the bus station and the hostel. Taxi drivers and money changers were the only people I learnt to distrust in Iran.
The clouds cleared during the night, and before sunrise I was seated in the famous Nasirolmolk Mosque. As the sun lifted over its courtyard, the wall of stained-glass windows cast saturated colours onto its saturated carpets. Photos of that passing moment are found in all guidebooks, brochures, to-do lists, blogs, Instagram accounts, or anything else that speaks visually of Iran. The room and the moment are truly magical. But they are also the Hunger Games of travel photography. Tourists flock to the mosque, lured by a photo taken when it was closed to all but official photographers. For an ordinary person, it is near impossible to recreate the image, but they still try. People queue and hustle. Cultural views of politeness clash, and selfie sticks whirl. The sun moves but the posers don’t, and beauty is trampled under frustration as those who overslept their alarm join the fray.
Gabriela and Marcela invited me to join their trip to the ancient city of Persepolis—once the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, now an exquisite field of ruins. Gabriela was 57 years old, Marcela just over 30. Both were from Mexico. Marcela was an organiser, Gabriela a composer, and they complemented each other in a project they carried with them called Journey and Magic.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
‘We’ll show you later,’ they replied coyly.
On the dusty road to and from Persepolis, Gabriela played music she had written and recorded in Mexico. The lyrics spoke of the bitter heartbreak of lost relationships, or the fleeting love affairs between them. As the sand blurred to haze through the dirty windows of the shared taxi, she told us she was still reeling from the loss of her second attempt at lifelong love.
We arrived back in Shiraz in the late afternoon, and they invited me to meet Mani, their CouchSurfing host.
Mani was 31 years old, energetic, and intense. He had no filter. When he said things like, ‘The Arabs are sand monkeys,’ it was hard to know whether he was joking or not. He described his father as ‘so fat that when he sits on a couch he spreads like butter over warm rice.’ He watched Saturday Night Live, HBO, and Telemundo on his PlayStation. When Marcela presented me as South African, he asked if I knew voodoo.
‘I love black magic,’ he said. ‘We don’t have it here.’
His knowledge of the world was deep and sporadic—the kind that could win Who Wants to Be a Millionaire once but never twice.
He lived with his parents in a three-storey building clad in marble. His mother wouldn’t let him live alone, but after relentless insistence, she gave him the second floor as a compromise. Mani turned it into a man cave for sleeping, partying, and PlayStation, but dropped it all the instant food was ready upstairs.
Mani served us tea while we declined his persistent offers of a meal. Marcela, Gabriela, and I sat around the table, and Mani switched chairs every few minutes or talked to us from the balcony while he smoked. He asked again whether we wanted dinner and added,
‘I just want you to know that I don’t do Taarof. That’s for my parents. I hate it. It’s like playing chess—I must know your move before I play my move.’
He changed track.
‘Tell me about Apartheid. Is it true that whites and blacks could not drink from the same water fountain? I heard that whites and blacks were completely separated. They had their own beaches and buses, and they had to live in different areas.’
‘All that is true,’ I said.
‘Man, that’s crazy. Even here we don’t treat the poorest people or even the immigrants like that.’
‘But you separate men and women,’ cut in Marcela.
‘Women are happy with that,’ said Mani. ‘Think about it. They are allowed in our train carriage, but we are not allowed in theirs. Who has the power? Our culture is matriarchal, not patriarchal. The mom is the centre of the family. We all worship her. When my dad gets his salary, he gives it all to my mom. She also works, but when she gets her salary, she doesn’t give it to my dad.’
‘And politics, Mani? Is Iran matriarchal in public?’ asked Marcela.
‘It’s not a good image. That is true,’ he replied, flicking a half-smoked cigarette over the balcony.
He gripped his lower back as he slumped into a chair.
‘Lie down, Mani. I can fix that,’ said Gabriela.
He looked at her sceptically but lay down on the carpet. Gabriela kneeled and dug her palms into his back.
‘Are you standing on me?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m just pushing hard. How does it feel?’
‘Like my bones have turned to yoghurt.’
I excused myself to leave before it got dark.
‘You’re not going to leave now!’ blurted Mani.
‘Before you go, we’d like to give you a taste of our Journey and Magic,’ said Marcela.
They asked Mani and me to sit on the couch and blindfolded us. We sat in silence. Light, ambient music started and hung gently in the air.
‘We’re going to pass scents around you. Breathe deeply and think of nothing else.’
I felt two hands take mine and rock them in a seated dance to the undulating music. I let myself go and lost awareness of where I was. After indeterminable time, the hands pulled me up and we continued our dance, moving slowly through the faint light, physical contact, and music. One hand let go of mine and another took its place. I imagined we were in a circle.
‘I hope that’s not Pierre’s hand touching mine,’ said Mani.
We remained silent and moved slowly in a circle. The hands let go.
‘Please don’t make me dance with Pierre,’ said Mani.
‘Shut up, Mani,’ said Gabriela quietly. The music died down.
‘Now listen carefully,’ said Gabriela. ‘We are going to give you a gift. You will feel a tray with small paper packets on it. Choose one. Choose whichever you feel is right. Touch it, play with it, and when you are ready, open your eyes and unwrap it. Inside is a wish for you. They were written many weeks ago by those who attended our last session of Journey and Magic. It is a wish that has now found you. It is a wish that you have now chosen.’
I unwrapped mine, lifted my blindfold, and found I was holding a small letter written in Farsi. Mani translated for me.
‘They wish you peace and prosperity through means that are just.’
Marcela and Gabriela invited us to sit down again with a slight gesture of their hands. They sat opposite us and smiled in silence, signalling that the session had ended.
‘Do you want some of my homemade alcohol?’ said Mani immediately. ‘I think it’s really good, but nobody wants to share it with me.’
‘Sure,’ I said, as I realised it was too late to take the last bus home.
Mani brought me a glass filled to the brim with distilled spirits that desperately needed a mixer. Lemon rind in ice cubes softened it slightly and gave it the edge of a Caipirinha. Gabriela and Marcela asked to try his homemade red wine. Mani swore he had used local Shiraz grapes, but the wine itself was filthy white. They thought it tasted great. I thought it tasted like sherry stirred in vinegar.
Mani gave me the option of sleeping on the carpet in the living room or in a cold spare room with nothing in it.
‘This room must be useful when you host parties.’
‘Yep,’ replied Mani. ‘All my friends live with their parents, so this is where they get their twenty minutes of fame.’
We declined another offer of dinner, but Mani’s mother ignored us, and at midnight she arrived with a tray of spiced bean soup and bread.
The next day I changed money on the street and left Shiraz. The exchange bureau was no more than a cardboard box on the pavement with a wily man sitting next to it. He had piles of banknotes, mostly small denominations, stacked on his cardboard box. But when I showed him the dollars I wanted to change, he told me to hide them. The rate was suspiciously good. He counted out what he owed me and spoke each million loudly as he laid it down in 500,000 Rial notes. When I recounted it, he had shorted me by a fifth of the total amount—a clever trick of words and fingers. He gave me the shortfall without arguing, but I sent half of it back because of the tape holding the notes together. He grew frustrated and replaced everything he had originally given me but held a million Rials back for commission. I argued that we’d already agreed the price, and he angrily handed me the final notes.
I scanned the street for loiterers or anyone who may have been watching the exchange and ducked into the metro station. Shiraz’s metro was so new that the skid marks from cheap shoes stood out on the tiled walkways. I boarded an empty carriage and rode it to its final station outside of town.
Salimi
Ever since I’d imagined traveling in Iran, I’d wanted to hitchhike. Hitchhiking reveals textures of a country that you miss on formal transport. Hitchhiking chooses the people for you and releases you from the cage of your own selectivity.
From Shiraz, I wanted to go to Qeshm or Kish Island, or anywhere else on the Persian Gulf. I walked out of the subway station and onto the highway and passed a fruit truck on the wide shoulder selling watermelons, water, and shoes. It had three flags in its window: Iran, Turkey, and the USA.
A car pulled up next to me before I could settle in or even hold out my thumb. A young man with a clean haircut leaned out the window, loud music spilling after him. I couldn’t understand anything he said, and my phrasebook was only useful for questions that had yes or no answers. There were three routes south; any of them would have suited me, but it was impossible to explain that. We ascertained that we were both going forward and that was enough. I threw my bag into the back and hopped into the front. The stuffing of the seat collapsed under my weight, and I etched out a space in the litter on the floor for my feet.
After an hour, the car pulled off the main highway to take a smaller route towards Jahrom. The driver assumed that I preferred to continue along the highway, and he stopped to let me out. I would have loved to join him for the views of the regional roads, but it was impossible to explain that, so I got out to wait for another ride.
A new car arrived quickly and dropped me only a few kilometres further where the road forked in three directions. I preferred the middle route. On the map, it looked sinuous, full of mountains, and too troublesome for large trucks and roadside shopping centres. The intersection was busy with small stores, restaurants, and a little beyond them, three Iranians flagging down passing cars. Nowhere is prejudice more obvious than hitchhiking and rather than wait my turn with the other Iranians, I walked down the road. I assumed that I would be picked up by cars that otherwise wouldn’t stop for local hitchhikers but for that I’d need to be alone. Later, I’d realise that the others weren’t hitchhiking at all.
It was still early spring, but the sun was already baking my face. I set my bag down and scanned the open desert. A small range of mountains rose behind the tented shops and the men still waiting for their ride. A dirt road skirted the base of the hills and then rose over a low neck on the ridge.
A blue Jeep, the first open vehicle I had seen in Iran, bumped down the small road, kicking up a cloud of dust. At the tar road, it turned first towards the intersection but then swung around and rode the dirt shoulder towards me.
A 62-year-old man with a thick cowboy hat and clear, thick-rimmed glasses sat back and looked at me with a smile. We threw some words at each other, mine English, his Farsi, and neither of us understood anything. He told me to get in, so I did. I had no idea where he was gesturing to, but it seemed to be forward, and that suited me fine.
‘Name? What’s your name?’ I asked.
Nothing.
‘My name is Pierre,’ I said, pointing at my chest. ‘Pierre. Pierre.’
He smiled and said, ‘Salimi.’
The sun was dipping to my right, and it cast a warm glow onto the hills and highlighted Salimi’s generous smile. His hat was tied on, and I had to sit on mine while we flew down the road through open desert. My lungs filled with the dry evening air, and I could feel the warm wind shed the weight of two weeks of cities. I sat back, relaxed, and felt grateful for an open ride at that time of day. I was imagining the sunset, followed by the stars over the desert plains, when Salimi abruptly slowed and pulled off to a dirt track. A sign on the corner pointed to ‘Sassan Palace’.
I thanked Salimi for the ride and asked if I could get off at the main road. He was confused and kept pointing at the sign to the Palace; he had assumed that it was where I was staying for the night. When he realised his mistake, he said, ‘No problem, no problem,’ and swung the steering wheel back towards the tarred road and continued the way we had been heading. I had no idea what he was thinking. How could I?
A cluster of buildings emerged on the right, and we drove through the gate to a prefabricated house that resembled a shipping container. I didn’t want to assume that I was being invited to stay, so I stepped out without reaching for my bag. Salimi insisted that I take it inside with me. The sun had set, and I hoped the day was over. I was tired, and it was too late to catch another ride.
Salimi gave me a tour of his orchard before the dark hid the trees. Everything he grew was for himself: lemons, figs, plums, grapes, and marijuana.
The house had a single room and a bathroom with a large patio extending to a slope that led down to the garden. Below the house, he had dug a small room and lined it with a thick carpet and a fireplace. It appeared that Salimi lived alone, perhaps single in retirement, a simple man with little need for adornments. Yet the value of the Jeep did not fit that story. Nor did the modern air conditioning cut into the wall. There were also no clothes or cupboards in the house. The fridge had only eggs and cheese.
We sat on the carpet, drank tea, and watched television. He asked me if I was hungry and said something about a ‘restaurant’. I had eaten. So had he. An awkward atmosphere of ‘what now?’ crept into the room. It was too early to sleep. We had already made tea, we wouldn’t make food, and Salimi was clearly not a man to numb time with television. He kept the silence at bay, briefly, by making a few phone calls that often mentioned ‘turisti’, but soon he had no one left to call.
I sat and did nothing. He sat and did nothing. I wondered if this was how he passed his evenings alone. Salimi looked out the window while I looked at the carpet.
Electrified, he suddenly jumped up and suggested that we make tea in the fireplace under the house. We went below and soon the fire and the struggle to make it thawed the cold bite of awkwardness. The flames became the conversation in moments of silence.
Shared time and patience communicate more powerfully than shared language. Slowly, Salimi learned where I was from and what it looked like. He was far more interested in the photos I had of cities and streets than in those of elephants and giraffes. I learned that Salimi did not live in that house. He was married and lived with his wife and two children in Shiraz. The pieces fell into place.
We were at Salimi’s garden, but he had never planned to stay there for the night. Curiosity and a taste for adventure led him to pick me up, and he hadn’t thought what would happen next. Before he could back out of it, he had a guest who was comfortable and grateful for a place to sleep.
Salimi reached into a box and removed a beautifully crafted pipe. A wooden straw fed a dark glass sphere wrapped with thin metal bands. He asked me if I wanted to smoke, and I naively assumed that he meant his homegrown weed. He rummaged in the bag and took out a film canister filled with small pieces of black resin. He called it morphine; I knew it as opium. A few days earlier, Mani had shown me a YouTube video of a truck driver smoking opium while travelling in the southeast of Iran.
‘They are drug runners, and they will shoot the police if they are stopped. You shouldn’t hitchhike there,’ he had said.
I asked Salimi about the dark spots on the inside of his left hand. They looked permanent and not the result of smoking or labour. He built a story with three English words: grenade, Iran, Iraq. He jumped up and stood in the middle of the carpet while he explained, or rather, performed, that he had killed four Iraqis in close combat during the war. He had blown their brains out at close range or stabbed them with a bayonet. His eyes were alive, he was larger than he had been all evening, and his smile exuded joy. His face was half-lit by the fire, and his enthusiasm for death was terrifying. Abruptly, he sat down, made a phone call, and told me that a friend of his was coming.
The friend was a six-foot, bulldog of a man with a face like he had chewed through a fence. He was joined by his wife and their two adult children. Once the greetings were done, Salimi went up to the house to find more cups for tea, and the family sat down next to me. They said nothing. They did nothing. I tried to spark a conversation.
Like throwing a burning wick to a lake.
Silence.
I stared into the fire.
Silence.
I imagined that upstairs, Salimi was blowing glass for the extra teacups.
When he returned, he was still fired up, and he performed to the delight of his guests. He served tea, teased the children, and told stories of ‘turisti’, ‘Afrika-e Junubi’, ‘Jeep’, and ‘Sassan’. He lifted the pipe, and they laughed. He pointed at me without addressing me, yet his story was void of malice.
The friend’s son noticed that my eyes were growing heavy and must have said something to Salimi. He offered to show me where to sleep upstairs, and I accepted gladly.
I woke to the soft dawn light and saw Salimi passed out on the floor next to me. After a long while, we rose, and he prepared bread, honey, eggs, jam, and goats’ cheese for breakfast. It would have been best for me to hitch from the road outside the house, but Salimi insisted on driving me back to the intersection where he had found me. I wished that I could explain it was easier from the open road, but thankfully, I followed his lead.
When we arrived at the crossing, he approached every car idling outside the shops and restaurants until he found someone who would take me. He gave me a huge hug and the affectionate greeting of three kisses on the cheek. He wrote a letter in my notebook and asked me to message him on WhatsApp as soon as I arrived in the next city. He messaged me every day for a week after that to check where I was.
Hitchhiking is rarely comfortable and can often cost more than a bus, as it did the day I left Salimi. But something always draws me back. Hitchhiking forces you to trust. It obliges you to move forward, no matter how short the ride. If you wait for that one chance that takes you all the way, you never get there. Twice between Shiraz and Kish, I had to go backwards to find a way forward.
Hitchhiking gives intuition a chance to nudge reason aside. And intuition gets time to train. With no way to speak to someone, know their background, understand where they are going, or even where you’re going yourself, it’s impossible to make a weighted, rational decision. You must trust yourself. You must trust others. Intuition alone guides where you go, with whom, and how. And, when given the freedom to do so, intuition does exceptionally well.
It took two days to get from Salimi to the Persian Gulf.
There were no attractions along the way, but the land carried its own quiet spectacle. The road passed through pale hills, dry air, and light that bleached everything equal.
To the north, ridges of clay and chalk folded into one another. A crust of land baked too long. When the sun rose, they turned from brown to gold to ash. Valleys sank between them where small fields of green clung to the dust. Goats grazed among broken walls, shepherds motionless against the glare.
Further south, the mountains rose and sharpened. They lay across the horizon like an army of menace, marching north for no gain but gain itself.
I drove through the stark landscape with a man whose left hand held the wheel while his right peeled a hundred sunflower seeds; with a truck returning empty boxes to a chicken farm; and with a taxi driver who took me for a ride. Further south, one driver was so concerned for me that, when he left me at an isolated intersection, he called his sister in Tehran—she was the only one in the family who could speak English—to exchange numbers in case I needed help.
I waited longer at that intersection than any other in Iran. There was enough traffic, but most cars carried couples or families. I assumed that I would never get a ride if a woman was in the car, but, not for the first or last time in Iran, assuming was a mistake. Eventually, two cars passed by quickly and then both stopped. The lead car turned around, pulled up next to me, and invited me in with the family. They were going to Qeshm for their annual holiday.
I sat in the back, squeezed against a grandmother who pushed apples towards my face and served me tea. Her daughter and son-in-law sat in the front and another couple in the back. The younger women did not wear headscarves inside the car, but they quickly tossed them over their hair when we stopped to refuel. We sat at a picnic table where they gave me more tea, food, and offered to take me all the way to Qeshm. I was tempted, but I declined in favour of heading towards Kish, infamous for its opulence and respite from the harsher rules of the regime.
That night I arrived in Bandar Lengeh too late to go anywhere else. It was a scrappy port town where nobody stayed for long. The only hotel was overpriced but had a hot shower, a large bed, and it saved me the obligation of conversing with a host. I collapsed into its universal sterility, exhausted and grateful.
Over dinner, I received a string of messages from Salimi:
‘Salaam. Did you arrive?’
‘Salaam. Yes. I am in Bandar Lengeh.’
‘Thank you. I have been there. Take care of yourself.’
‘Thank you. I send my love to you and your family. Thank you for your generosity.’
‘I would like to see you and your family come to Iran. You are always welcome in my home.’
‘I will tell them. Have a good night. Thank you for everything.’
‘I am small, and I serve everyone. Goodnight.’
Dear Reader, thank you.
Thank you for getting this far. I wish I could thank you by name, in person, maybe with a cup of tea. I wish I could ask you how the story resonated with you and whether you would like to read more.
Can I send you a book when it's done? If you haven't already, I invite you to add your email to the mailing list below. I don't know how much control I'll have over the final publishing arrangement, but in some form or another, I commit to showing my gratitude.
Thank you for being a part of this journey. Please reach out to me if there is anything you would to share: talkingtoiran@gmail.com
My very best to you and your loved ones,
Pierre
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