The morning after returning from Esfahan, we hopped into a hired mini-van with Mom, Dad, Kia, Khaleh Nahid (Mom’s aunt), Baba Abbas (maternal grandfather), and our family friends the Javaheris (wife, husband, and son Hooman). We were heading for Shomal, which means “north” but used alone it usually refers specifically to the Caspian Sea coast. Winding up and through the Alborz Mountains, the drive was fantastic. We passed picturesque villages with characteristic multi-colored rooftops and a famous doogh-making factory (doogh is a favorite Iranian yogurt drink). The road was quite good, a far cry from the pothole-ridden dirt mountain paths we had seen in South America or East Africa. And it was a reminder that for all its political and social woes, Iran generally does not have an infrastructure problem. Turning a corner at one point, we encountered a spectacular sight. In the foreground a village valley flanked by small lush hills gave way to a pure white, perfectly conical, monolithic mountain. We had glimpsed it before, from far away. But never like this. It was Mount Damavand, the highest point in Iran, reaching almost 19,000 feet into the sky. It’s one of those mountains, like Kilimanjaro, that is so wide and slopes so softly into the earth below that it doesn’t look tall.
You can’t believe that the peak you’re staring at, which you swear you could run up in an hour or two if you were in better shape, is actually 10,000 feet above you. It doesn’t look tall, just big. Also like Kili, it is a volcano. I think maybe only volcanoes can look like this: gentle, deceiving, grand in solitude. After stopping at a roadside joint with those cool carpet platforms for lunch, we continued on and reached the Caspian by mid-afternoon. Then we drove along the coast for 45 minutes or so, a drive that was fairly depressing. We rarely saw the sea itself between all the ugly storefronts and hotels littering a road that Dad said “was so beautiful just 20 years ago.” Apparently development is now restrained, but it looks like the damage has been done. We arrived in a cute neighborhood covered in fruit and flowering trees. The Javaheris were graciously hosting all of us for the weekend. Madhavi and I explored their front yard, picking grapes, oranges, kiwis, and our favorite-of-all kumquats from the carnival of plants. All ten of us took a walk to the sea together, appreciating its beauty only from the end of a pier where the view was finally unobstructed.
We spent the night smoking galyoon and drinking citrus martinis made by Mom. The source of the liquor? “You just call the right number and it comes to your door,” said Dr. Javaheri. That’s exactly what Agha Rezania told us in Shiraz! Was Prohibition this easy? Dr. Javaheri is one of those super-cool laid-back Malibu kind of guys, always seeming to take it easy but also mindful of whether or not you're having a good time. Hooman, his son, is just as nice. And Ms. Javaheri is the swank cosmo aristrocratic matriarch, always fun to be around.
I need to mention that we played Rook, a wonderfully complex trump-based card game known to maybe 2% of Iranians and no one else. The story goes that it was invented in my Mom’s small hometown of Abadeh. Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, it is a significant contribution to the culture, one that binds the generations (my 10 yo cousin begs to play with the otherwise “boring adults", though he is almost always denied as you can’t play well at that age). Madhavi has learned it – study is mandatory for significant others in the family – and she played some that night.
The next day Madh and I walked around the neighborhood smelling flowers (nice lavenders, etc) and stealing fruit, especially kumquats – who knew kumquats were so good? We joined everyone for breakfast on the patio and noticed something. It was humid outside! With a drizzle coming down every so often it constantly felt wet, though thankfully also cool. What a contrast with the snowy rugged Alborz Mountains or the deserts of Yazd. I had just read somewhere that Iran has one of the five most diverse climates/landscapes in the world. Assuming this was true, we started discussing the issue and thought of 3 of the likely other 4 landscape-diverse countries: the U.S., China, and India. But what is the 5th? Maybe Chile? We weren’t sure.
We headed down the coast to picnic at a favorite local getaway spot, which turned out to be a bit touristy but still pretty fun (the tourists in this case are Iranians from elsewhere in Iran). We took a gondola 800 meters up a steep slope, getting great views of the blue-green waters of the Caspian before disappearing into a dense fog. We got off and wandered around this mystical cloud forest of sorts with its evergreen trees interrupted only by the obligatory café/restaurant where young hipster Iranians were hanging out. Back down at the base we had a nice lunch and smoked galyoon again. I realized that this was a lot of smoking so I decided to stop inhaling, for what that’s worth. Besides, Kia was teaching me how to make smoke rings and that was plenty of fun.
Back in the cabin that night Mr. Javaheri and Hooman cooked kababs and we all drank, joked, played Rook, and so on. Ms. Javaheri ranted about the evils of communism, and when we (Madh and I) played devil’s advocate (I hate when people play devil’s advocate) she beautifully retorted “It’s great to be communist children of wealthy capitalist parents, isn’t it?” That shut us up pretty good.
The next day Madh and I wandered around a really dense mossy grassy woody foggy jungle lacking any sort of footpaths or signs. We got majorly lost, and while trying to escape we discovered a giant tree that had been almost completely split down the middle, both sides now in a semi-reclined position propped up by other trees. By the burnt bark in its trunk Madhavi astutely determined that the tree had been struck by lightning. Cool! OK, back to ‘how the hell do we get outta here’? We ran around for like 40 minutes and finally emerged on some abandoned road, where miraculously our driver happened to be cruising along searching for us. .
Soon we started the drive back to Tehran. Along the way we paid more attention to the south side of things and noticed the dense green mountain forests with clouds slithering through their canyons and other nice views. But as day lapsed into night this long drive would get longer. Basically, our driver was overwhelmingly incompetent and for almost two hours tailed at about 20km/hr behind the most black-exhaust-spewing lorry in the Eastern Hemisphere while repeatedly rolling down the window over our desperate objections and telling us to not worry about it, “[Just drink some doogh and you’ll be cleaned out]”. Every time he whined that it was too dangerous to pass on this one-lane road, a caravan of 18-wheelers would casually do just that, literally in our face. When we finally submitted to the pain, Kia and I would look at each other and during a break in coughing we’d just laugh. Iran must have the most polluting and inefficient vehicles in the world, one consequence of their manufacturing all their own cars and putting 100% tariffs on imports.
Anyway, by the time we arrived back in Tehran the situation got so ugly that even very proud Khaleh Nahid (my 70-something yo great aunt) got into it with this driver and in the heat of the argument she demanded that he stop the car and let her out. In the middle of the freeway! Which this jerk did, of course. I tried to stop her but before I knew it she was out of the car and walking towards the off-ramp. Then we drove away. We were all in shock and on the verge of castrating this guy. In the end, 6 hours after we began, we were home. We called Nahid and thankfully she also made it back just fine.
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