From Tehran to Alisadr Cave

The Iranian countryside can be described, in one word, as sublime. Driving on a slightly disintegrated tw0-lane concrete stream, the arid desert quilt surrounded me. Far off in the distance the purple Alborz mountains flaunted its peaks and the rest of the landscape was a quilt of earth tones slightly reminiscent of a medley between the burnt-orange hues of Arizona and sparce groves of trees emulating a Florentine panorama.

Thick clouds nearly covered the sky taunting its below with an imminent rain, the air was thick with moisture, strikingly sharp rays of light breached through the pillowy crevaces in the sky, and a thin sheet of moisture metamorphed the highway to a mirror reflecting the white of the sun.

We were on the road that goes from Tehran to Hamadan, and our destination was Alisadr Cave, one of the largest water caves in the world. As we moved away from Tehran, the urban mega-oasis, the grasp of the Islamic Republic loosened and very small villages held rule in the area. The structures were simple cubicles holding conservative, self-sustaining villagers surviving with the ebbs and flows of their sheeps reproductive rate. Mehrdad, my cousin's bestfriend and the driver, pulled off to the side of the road so that I could take a picture of the shepherders.

"Naveed, If I tell you to run...run," my cousin half-jokingly, half-seriously told me as we neared a shepherd. He was young, maybe 15 years old, his hair was shaggy, his mustache was thin not because he had recently shaved but because puberty had just set in, and while shooting inquistive eyes in our direction he ran circles around his flock with stick in hand rounding up the sheep. With self-made moccassins, muddy brown draped pants that became wider towards his feet, and a white rough-cut shirt with rolled sleeves, he stood in place as we walked up to him and asked him for a picture. His posture became erect, he clasped his stick with both hands and bore it into the ground, and stared. I set my view on him, he was staring at the camera as if he was seeing one for the first time and clicked. We gave a thank-you, he nodded, and once-again he set out to round up the sheep.

On exiting Tehran there was a mandatory stop that doubled as a tollbooth and a protective buffer. After paying the ten cents necessary to get through we were asked to pull-over as a power-hungry soldier looked over every piece of documentation. He nodded us to go as if he'd done his job, but we, with nervous laughter, mocked him for not noticing the driver's home-made driver's lisence.

The conversations were endless. After sharing a mirthful verbal dual of curse words in our native tongues, my cousin began with the jokes. An Iranian joke is hard to translate because it is embedded with culture. The jokes are usually about a group of people, Turks and Rashts being the most popular to rip on.

"A Turkish man is walking across the street when a car swerves out of control and hits him. The Turk, bruised and battered a good six-feet away from the car gets up and yells, 'Aside from me, what if it was a person!"

"Three guys are getting ready to play a game of Spades. One of the three looks over to a Rashti man with a hand in his pocket and says, 'You playing?' The Rashti replies, 'No, I'm scratching it."

And the jokes go on and on. But story jokes are a minor form of obtaining laughter anywhere one goes. Usually it's statements in everday speech, and in Iran statements and sayings are used unique to the Farsi language.

We soon reached Alisadr cave, and prior to entering had a quick lunch. While eating, a boy approached us with a birdcage in his hand and neatly assorted cards in a box in his other hand. He asked us if we wanted our futures told, he opened the cage, a bird jumped out and nipped a random card out of the box. The boy gave it to us and it was a poem by Hafiz. What was initially a unique experience repeated itself, boy after boy, fifteen times before we left.

I noticed something when my cousin and I were buying the tickets.
In English was written: Ticket price - 150,000 Reals.
In Farsi was written: Ticket price - 37,000 Reals.
I'll leave it at that.

As we entered the cave the looming and lit up pictures of Khomeini and Khamenei were pinned up on the wall. After a bit of a walk moving through the thin passages of the grotto we reached a region where lines had formed and people were getting in boats tugged by a tourguide on a pedal boat. The tour guide gave us a line or two of fact and the rest was figured out by someone who scored high on his Rorschach test. This rock looks like the statue of liberty. This rock looks like a dove. Look! A two-headed lion. At one point the tour guide pointed out streaks of new stalagtites that spelled out Allah, in Arabic, on the ceiling. The cave was interesting and before being on our way I held a conversation with a group of Kurds.

We eventually got back in the cars and headed towards Qom.