Travel Writing Awards Entry
By Tori Egherman
When friends asked me if I wanted to go with them to Alexander the Great’s wall, I expected an ancient stonewall running across valleys. I did not expect a hike into the land that time forgot with thousands of Iranians who, like us, were taking advantage of the first spring weekend after the surge of the snowmelt.
The drive from Tehran to Firooz Kooh, where we were going to look for the wall, is about two-hours over a high, dusty plateau. A left at a crumbling brick wall advertising lemon juice brings us closer to the range of peaks that includes our destination. We follow the dirt road up and into a broken down village where men sell visors, sunglasses, and plastic slippers by the side of the road. “Up, up,” they point when we ask them if we are on the right road.
Four young faces, faded to a pale blue after years in the sun, smile down from a billboard. Like every Iranian town, this one welcomes visitors with the faces of young men killed during the long war with Iraq. These four clearly did not have enough clout to bring extra money to the town to fix its roads, which narrow each year as rain takes chunks down the mountain.
Up we go until we get to the official parking lot where families are picnicking in the gravel, grilling kebabs over charcoal flames, and drinking hot tea. “Join us,” they offer as we walk by. “Please.” It’s hard to resist the smell of grilled meat and answer with the required No, thank you.
Picnicking is the national sport of Iran. It is practiced anywhere and everywhere. Families picnic on highway meridians, in the center of roundabouts, on the side of the road, in parking lots, at the bottom of steep slopes, by rivers, streams, lakes, and oceans; they picnic in forests and in gardens, in city parks and in the shade of towers. There is even a national picnicking day celebrated by tens of millions. We’re not talking sandwiches and soda either. We’re talking kebabs and stews, hot tea and fruit; elaborate water pipes and contraband alcohol. These people are professionals. And like professionals, they don’t need perfect conditions: they need constant practice.
The group I am with, which includes the deputy ambassador of the British Embassy in Tehran, an expat Iranian whose father was executed just after the start of the revolution, a journalist, and an aid worker, is no slouch when it comes to picnics either. We have a thermos filled with white wine, duck liver pate, hard cheese, and crusty bread: all items hard to find in kebab-centric Iran.
Industrious villagers have set up a table to sell plastic slippers to the people who ignored them down the road. We’ll be wading through narrow streams that run through steep gorges so we buy slippers and cross the stream on to a rocky path where we join a line of men carrying huge pots, hibachis, and toddlers and women carrying babies and bundles. At the mouth of the first gorge, boys on donkeys offer to carry us across for a couple of dollars.
When we exit the gorge, we find ourselves in what can be best described as the Garden of Eden. The smell of fresh mint perfumes the air. A group of women have taken off the scarves mandated by the regime and are singing and playing drums. Families have set up tents by streams. Sheep graze. Men walk arm and arm sharing a water pipe. A man sings to his son in a loud, clear tenor voice.
“This is what Iran is supposed to be,” the expat says. “See. This is what we are capable of. My mother always told me that before the revolution Iranians let each other be.”
It isn’t only the singing and picnicking that stuns me: it’s the meadow. Tehran, where I have been living, is beige stone and concrete. There are trees, but the ever-present dust dulls the brightness of the leaves. Nothing has prepared any of us for this expanse of green, the tall wildflowers, and the small lavender moths.
There is no remnant of Alexander’s wall here, so we resist the meadow’s charms and keep walking. Another gorge spits us out by a waterfall where we eat our lunch. From there we climb up stones polished to a dangerous finish by flowing water. I fall on my ass. Children pass me. Old women in chadors pass me smiling condescendingly as I struggle to keep my footing.
At the top of our climb is a vast swamp with low prehistoric plants that swallow us up. We sink into mud, which sucks the shoes off our feet, eventually making its way up through our pants.
“I think I might actually be sinking too far,” the journalist calls out.
“Is that the attitude that lost us the empire?” The deputy ambassador responds. She is way ahead of us, almost out of the swamp.
“It’s the land that time forgot,” the journalist says when we are all safely out of the swamp.
Still no wall though. Maybe there is no wall. Maybe there is simply the memory of a wall. It doesn’t matter because not one of us has ever seen a place so strange and beautiful.
A couple of guys run ahead of us on the narrow, dry path that we somehow missed. Just ahead, hidden in the strange greenery, a family rests after a lunch of stew and rice.
“You know what gets me?” the expat says. “You make this hike. You exhaust yourself climbing on a slippery path and then you get to the top and there’s some seventy-year old grandmother in slippers and a chador. Did they airlift her in? I just don’t get it.”
She’s right too. At the end of every hike in Iran is a seventy-year old woman picnicking with her family and offering a hot tea. She represents the pinnacle of a life of competitive picnicking. She has the perfect spot, in the perfect place, on the perfect day.
