Iran - Andrew Burke [331]
* * *
Never Really Alone in Iran Kerryn Burgess
I was enjoying tea in the mountain village of Masuleh. As I popped a sugar cube into my mouth, the Iranians at the next table invited me to join them – why was I alone, they asked?
In a month of travelling in Iran, I never reconciled my experience of unending hospitality with the perceptions of my friends back home in Australia. According to them, I should have received a bravery award for holidaying alone as a woman in a country where, they believed, women wore burqas (a mask with tiny slits for the eyes) to scuttle to the market in between terrorist attacks.
My new teahouse companions were two scrawny men and a young, superbly athletic woman carrying an enormous backpack and ropes for rock-climbing. Samira, from Tehran, spoke perfect English. ‘I was watching you before,’ Samira said to me, ‘and wondering why you were alone. I thought, I hope one day I can be as brave as her.’
Despite Samira’s perceptions of my bravery, in a practical sense I faced no challenges to equal the vertical rock faces she planned to climb and hungry wolves she was hoping to avoid while camping in the mountains with her fiancé. The summer heat, my limited Farsi skills, and the proliferation of awful fast-food restaurants were my biggest ‘problems’, none of them specific to women. In every other practical way, Iran is an easy destination for women travelling with a companion, whether male or female.
In a social sense, it’s not always the easiest country if you’re alone, particularly for women. Take the stigma factor of the solo female diner at a restaurant in the West and multiply it by 100. One of my journal entries reads: ‘Another desultory dinner time alone; have waited 15 minutes for a waiter to come within shouting distance, while everyone around me stares.’ The waiter probably assumed I was waiting for someone else, because Iranian women never, ever eat out alone.
That said, Iranians were unfailingly welcoming and helpful, even those who were puzzled at my strange lonesome behaviour. Every day, strangers invited me to join them for tea, or to share their picnic, or just to chat. I soon learnt what to say in response to the ubiquitous line of questioning: ‘Where are you from? Are you married? (No.) Are you alone? (Yes.) Why? ‘Man odat daram. Injaree lezat mibaram.’ (‘I’m used to it. I enjoy it.’).
Despite the solo dining, the pleasures and surprises of travelling in Iran far outweighed the inconveniences. I discovered, for example, the sense of camaraderie that exists in the women’s section of a mosque. In a hammam (bathhouse), another woman massaged my back, then showed me how to rub my heels against the rough concrete floor to slough off the dead skin. In the bazaar, a mother of six told me how to make bastani (Iranian ice cream). And before I left the teahouse in Masuleh, a woman I’d never met wordlessly handed me a gift, a silver statue of Fatima (the daughter of the Prophet), smiled sympathetically at my aloneness, kissed me three times, and walked away.
Kerryn Burgess is Lonely Planet’s Middle East commissioning editor.
* * *
You will, of course, be accepted into female society far more than any man (Iranian or foreign), and this is one of the huge advantages women travellers have. Most Iranian women will open up to you far more in exclusively female company than in mixed company. The women’s sections of mosques, public parks where groups of women congregate to chat, read, study or relax, women’s clothing stores staffed by women, and the food sections of bazaars are all good places to meet local women.
You might feel happier travelling in a group