That at least is how I felt on experiencing the sudden change in atmosphere. From the moment I cross the threshold I am surrounded by people who want to snap souvenir photos, welcome me, question me about my state of health, Iran, Europe, and the whole wide world. I am more interested in how to get to Bam, as it is almost midnight. But okay, first of all, sit down, drink a Hoffenberg lemon malt beer on the house. Welcome to Iran. More group photos, more good wishes.
And eventually a bus emerges from the darkness that really does go to Bam. It, too, smells as if someone has spilled a couple of canisters of diesel in the aisle. But that doesn’t worry me anymore; it drops me at my destination, and I don’t even have to pay.
EARTHQUAKES
“OH, SO YOU have been on one of the stinky busses,” says Akbar Panjali jovially, as he places a late-night plate of rice and chicken in front of me. “They are diesel smugglers; they put tanks where the luggage usually goes, even under the seats. They can carry up to five hundred gallons.” In Pakistan they pay seven times the price for Iranian diesel, and there have been no strict controls up to now. Business also flourishes in the other direction. In Bandar Abbas goods are smuggled in from the Gulf states. The villages around Bam are well situated as fueling stops for smugglers, as they are roughly halfway between the coast and the border.
“At the border you can see how the bus drivers quickly drop in on the police chief to deposit a couple million rials there,” says Akbar. “Many of the passengers aren’t even travelers, but accomplices.” A couple weeks prior to my episode, an Iranian smuggler bus crashed into a truck in Pakistan. A huge fireball and thirty-eight deaths. But criminals are willing to run the risk of traveling hundreds of miles on a bomb on wheels because it is still considerably safer for them to earn money from fuel than heroin or opium. Iran’s border guards act with utmost severity against the transport of drugs. The death penalty awaits those arrested, which is why there are often gun battles at the border.
Akbar is seventy-one, a cheerful soul with laugh lines and unkempt hair. He studied Persian literature and worked as an English teacher, which is why everyone here refers to him as “Akbar English.” Nowadays, he runs Akbar’s Tourist Guesthouse. The Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa are pictured on his sign outside, which seems a strange choice of inducement, considering one of Iran’s most famous monuments is only a couple minutes away by foot.
I contacted two couchsurfing members in Bam, but neither replied. You always need a Plan B when looking for places to stay for nothing, and Akbar was a very good Plan B. I feel this every time he says, “You’re veeery welcome,” extending the “e” almost excruciatingly. He’s been officially providing rooms for sixteen years, previously offering them on the quiet and relying on word of mouth recommendations, as he had no license. “Now I’m famous,” he announces. “It helps being in the guidebooks.”
At the moment, his fame doesn’t seem to be helping him much. I am the only guest, and the place seems to be half construction site, with the rest pretty run-down. “In earlier days, 70 per cent of my guests were car and motorbike tourists on their way to India, but there have been problems with Pakistan over the last couple of years, and not so many people pass by these days,” he adds.
I inquire whether it might have something to do with the dangers of kidnapping. “Bad things can happen everywhere, even in Hamburg or London,” he replies. People who run hostels in this part of Iran need to have a more relaxed relationship to danger than someone in, say, Normandy or New Hampshire. Akbar tells me that the last kidnapping, a Japanese man, took place three years ago. “They held him for a month, and I will never forget what he said on release: ‘I had a great time. There were endless supplies of hashish for nothing.’”
To: Hussein Kerman
Hi Hussein, how are you? Would it be possible to host me from tomorrow for one or two night? Would be great!
From: Hussein Kerman
Yes you can sleep, no problem
From: Mobina
Hi. Where is you? Please cam citi Harat. When cam back to alman?
To: Mobina
I will be in yazd in a few days. Where exactly is Harat?
From: Laila Hamburg
Hun! Hurraaaaah, just a couple of days now! How’s the trip been? See you very soon in Yazd!
Maybe the fears of tourists have so little effect on Akbar because he already has experience with an apocalypse. Because there was one event in his life that changed everything forever and split his life in two, into a Before and an After. Deep below the bed, with its somewhat hard mattress, on which I am now spending the night, the Arabian Plate is forced beneath the Eurasian Plate. On December 26, 2003, at 5:28 AM, there was so much pressure that the ground shook—6.5 on the Richter scale, a catastrophe that happens once a century. More than 26,000 people died in twelve seconds when half the city was flattened.
“Luckily, I was at my parents’ house, ten minutes away from here, when it happened,” says Akbar. Otherwise, he might have been killed, his Akbar Tourist Guesthouse collapsed. Two guests and his son’s best friend died in the rubble.
Even today, more than thirteen years later, traces of the tragedy in Bam cannot be missed. Not only in my accommodation, where renovation work is still incomplete. In the middle of town there are still the ruins of a mosque. Some rows of houses are broken by heaps of rubble, and in the ancient bazaar there are piles of debris, while the remaining bazaar units are still bare.
But the true memorial is the historical center with the citadel, Arg-e Bam, the largest adobe building in the world. Most of its light brown walls and watchtowers had withstood all kinds of weathers and battles for more than a thousand years, until an earthquake destroyed one of Iran’s greatest tourist attractions.
On a tour of its walls, which appear to have been made from compressed straw, you get the impression that the catastrophe not only robbed the city of its citadel walls but also of its soul. Despite this, it is a phenomenal location on the edge of a desert, where the midday heat with no shade can finish you off, and the dust leaves you clutching your throat. On the horizon, the snow-laden peaks of the thirteen-thousand-foot mountains loom.
Many buildings have already been restored. But even today, constructors clamber over the distinctive wooden scaffolding. The UNESCO World Heritage Foundation is helping finance the reconstruction. But this mixture of spotless reconstruction and total chaos, although impressive enough in its dimensions, fails to solve other problems. When you look at the pictures showing the same locations before the earthquake in the evening light, as romantic as One Thousand and One Nights, you cannot help feeling melancholic. There is a hushed atmosphere about the historical center of Bam, like a cemetery, with only the hammering of the laborers and the buzzing of flies breaking the silence.
KERMAN