My Travel To Iran
Iran wasn’t top of my destinations until recently, and now I realize it was because I didn’t know anything about it. As most people, I had this vague image of a middle eastern country apparently dangerous and somehow not interesting.
The more I read about it, the more I found out how much I ignored. Since I wanted to travel independently, as I usually do, I started looking for information on blogs, forums and I stumbled upon a very useful Facebook group, See You In Iran, created by young Iranians to help tourists prepare their travel and navigate the country on a practical but also on a cultural level. The group is different from any other group I’ve joined so far. You can really feel the urge of young Iranian people to help creating different image from the one presented by Western mainstream media. Reading and seeing the experiences of other fellow travelers and the advices given by admins and users of this group helped me understand how much I was missing.
Iran is changing very fast and is progressively opening up to the world, but as for now you still can’t withdraw money from ATMs because its banking system in not connected to the rest of the world, and so you need to bring cash. Booking hotels was harder than it usually is, since you can’t book and pay them online and Airbnb doesn’t operate in the country yet. This is surely going to change in the near future, but I had to send e-mails to hotels and wait, sometimes never hearing back from them, for a booking confirmation.
Being an Islamic Republic, there’s also a strict set of rules that you need to follow, and a specific dress code. For me, as a woman and as a feminist, this was probably the hardest thing to accept, although when I was there it wasn’t that big of a deal. On the contrary, wearing a (very loose) hijab for 11 days help me better understand the life of muslim women who choose or are forced to wear it — of course in Iran it’s not a choice. An interesting read on this and other related topics is the blog of Hoda Katebi, a Muslim-Iranian fashion blogger, activist and photographer living in the USA.
Before we went, I contacted a young Iranian travel blogger that also works as a professional tour guide, Matin Lashkari of Travestyle.com. She’s a super smart and well travelled young woman and she was our first introduction to the country, since we spend our first day in Tehran with her. In Iran women make up most of the university population, but it’s not that easy for them to actually enter the workforce. What Matin is doing is creating her own job, riding the touristic “renaissance” of the country after the Iran nuclear deal, and many nationalities being consequently granted Visa On Arrival. She also runs Persian Food Tours, a service that offers culinary walks and Persian cooking classes.
The whole time we were there, everybody stared at us. That made me a bit uncomfortable, but it was fun most of the time. We were greeted countless times with the sentence “Welcome to Iran!” and showered with questions, the most common being where we were from. A few times we were even asked to be photographed. We were something they weren’t used to see, especially those who never had the chance to travel out of the country.
We did the classic tour of the most important historic cities: Tehran, Kashan, Esfahan, Yazd, Shiraz and Persepolis in 11 days (some more time would have been useful, but we didn’t have the chance). If you have never researched on Iran you probably have only heard of Tehran and Persepolis, although Yazd, Esfahan and Shiraz are big and very ancient cities — Marco Polo visited Yazd, that is on the silk road, back in 1272, and the adobe city was founded over 5.000 years ago.
Tehran is the capital and the economic heart of Iran. It hosts the main museums, it’s vast and has a modern underground system. Many skip the city on their way to the most touristic destinations, but I think it is absolutely worth a visit if you want to understand how Iran is changing and how Iranian society can be very diverse.
We moved around between cities in comfortable buses (streets are a bit rough though, I must say) and stayed both in regular hotels and traditional houses, that revolve around a central courtyard. The food is amazing and unlike anything I’ve had before; meat stews are a big deal, and if you’re vegetarian — like my partner is — you could have a harder time finding food for you, but the dishes with aubergines (especially kashke bademjan) are to die for. Bread and yogurt (both to eat as a salted side dish and to drink as doogh) are always present on the Persian table. I was lucky enough to receive a Persian cuisine cookbook for my birthday, and I’m planning to try many of the recipes soon at home.
The architecture, both civil and religious is stunning and very hard to capture with modest photographic equipment like mine. Anyway, you can find some of my pictures here and in this post. Yazd was probably my favorite city in Iran, cause it looks more untouched and out of time than the others.
UPDATE!
I decided to edit this post and add the things I wasn’t able to do/see in Iran, but that are worth doing/seeing:
Visit Darband, in northern Tehran. It’s neighborhood at the foothills of Mount Tochal and it’s a place full of cafés and a popular spot for young people to chill and relax.
Sleeping in a caravanserai, Zeinoddin Caravanserai in the desert outside Yazd looks amazing!
Visit the red village of Abyaneh.
Visit Fin Garden, just outside Kashan — although I’ve visited another Persian garden in Yazd, Bagh-e Dolat Abad.
UPDATE N°2!
The founders of See You In Iran Facebook group opened the See You in Iran Hostel and Cultural House in Tehran!
If you have any questions on traveling to Iran, feel free to ask them in the comments and enjoy the video below!
