Qashqai Wedding
October 4th, 2007
Where are your fellow travelers from?” the police officer asks Kamran as we are about to board the train.
“The Global Arrogance,” Kamran answers. The police officer laughs, stamps our tickets and sends the three of us through the gates where we hurry to meet the overnight train.
The train leaves the station exactly on time. A couple of minutes after departure, a porter comes by with clean sheets. We fold the seats down and make our beds. “This is great,” our British friend says. “I just love the train. It’s so comfortable, so great to sleep in.”
“The cabins were larger when I was a kid,” Kamran comments. It’s his first train trip in Iran in more than 25 years.
“No, you were smaller. Trust me.”
At 5 the train stops and we are woken up by the call to prayer booming in over PA system.
“They never let you forget where you are,” our friend says sleepily.
We pull into the train station and take a cab into the city where we are meeting friends of friends who will take us out to a Nomad encampment some 2 ½ hours outside Esfahan.
We make our way through highways, small towns, dirt roads, gravel roads, and tarred roads and, after a spot of car trouble, head towards our destination where there is one teenage boy and some sheep.
“They’re at the wedding,” he tells us. “They’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
There are weddings everywhere in the encampments. We passed one on the way here and now our hosts are at another. We manage to get ourselves invited and are quickly surrounded by huge groups of young and old, women and men, boys and girls, all curious about the two foreigners in their midst. “George Bush is very, very dangerous,” a teenage boy says to me.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” I ask jokingly.
“Afraid of you… No!” they laugh. “You are afraid of us!”
“Terrorist,” says a boy pointing at his own chest. The others laugh. They know we think of them as terrorists.
My travelling companion was exhausted after driving at night behind long lines of trucks on the 2-lane highway between Tuyserkan and Hamadan. “Just tell us how to get to the Ferdosi Square,” she said.
Hamadan is a more interesting place than people give it credit for. For one, the drive to it is stunning. It is easy to imagine silk road travellers coming to this amazing place in the mountains and marveling at its riches: cool summer weather, water, trees, a gentle valley. It is easy to imagine the ancient city from today’s modern city. Ancient ruins pop up in the strangest places. There is the Alavian tomb in a schoolyard. Another tomb sits next to an apartment block.
I enjoyed visiting 
At one point, Angus got pulled into a discussion about world affairs with a group of men who were gathered around a tray filled with dates and “denmarki” (delicious pastries named for Denmark). “We don’t want war,” one man told him. “But if war comes, we will fight. You have to remember that when we kill in war, we are victorious. When we are killed in war, we are also victorious.”
My favorite places were the fruit juice shop where I had amazing carrot juice followed by a chaser of sweet lemon juice (not lemonade: sweet lemons are an Iranian fruit unlike any other that I have ever tasted. Its taste is unlike a Myer lemon or any other sweetish lemon that I had before visiting Iran.) and the stamp shop with the owner and his one inch long pinkie nail and the 150 year old collection of stamps.
Qeshm is a dolphin-shaped island in the Persian Gulf. In fact, it is the largest island in the Gulf. The waters surrounding it are a beautiful, glowing blue-green, that clearly reveal the marine life below them.
One of the best meals we’ve had in Iran was on this unassuming island. Near the ruins of a Portuguese castle is a dive that serves seafood. We ate shark with bright dill; crab with a mix of spices that we did not recognize; the most tender squid imagineable cooked in a slightly hot tomato sauce; and shrimp that tasted more Cajun than Iranian. Normally I like seafood cooked with a minimum of spices, but the cook at this ramshackle restaurant really knew how to use spices to enhance the flavor of the seafood rather than hide it.
Don’t be fooled by people telling you to eat at Bani or any other restaurant. Don’t be put off by non-existent service or the slightly dirty surroundings. Make sure to have dinner at this seafood dive (there’s only one Portuguese castle, so everyone on Qeshm can guide you there) at a plastic table by the sea.