Axis of Evil World Tour - An American's Travels in Iran, Iraq and North Korea by Scott Fisher

Author:Scott Fisher [Fisher, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Arrival

We landed at about midnight Iran time. Tehran’s dingy Mehrabad International Airport turned out to be surprisingly busy, not the Pyongyang-like backwater I’d imagined. Sitting near the front of the plane, I was one of the first off and inside to the immigration lines. Unlike most other international airports, Iran doesn’t have separate lines for Iranians and foreigners. Which confused me at first, thinking maybe I was missing a sign somewhere, or should have spent more time learning Farsi. After a few seconds of mindless staring though, my brain finally filtered through the jetlag and realized any line would be fine.

I checked over my documents while I waited, wondering if someone from the travel agency really would be there to pick me up. After a few minutes, I looked up and noticed the Koreans from my flight, apparently similarly confused by the lack of immigration signs, all standing behind me. They’d presumed I wasn’t Iranian and apparently figured I knew something about the correct line, or English, that they didn’t. So, to my amusement and some odd looks from the immigration clerks, ‘my’ line stretched nearly to the door, while the others stood almost empty.

As ‘blind leading the blind’ went through my mind, I finally got to the front. To say the lady working immigration froze in shock at seeing an American passport, on a flight from Korea nonetheless, doesn’t do her look justice. She was utterly and completely dumbstruck. When she finally came to her senses, she immediately showed my passport to the female clerk next to her. Which brought another shocked look. I was actually kind of surprised myself – the first people I meet in Iran, the very gatekeepers to the country, turn out to be women. And, I could see their faces. And, they obviously had to talk to me, both a man and a foreigner. In my ignorance I’d confused Persian Iran with Taliban Afghanistan.

After briefly consulting with her co-worker, the clerk finally got to work and found the giant Iranian visa freshly stamped in my passport. She began logging the info into a computer, while I stood clutching my giant stack of required documents. She was not in any way happy to see that passport, and was so flustered and irritated she kept asking the other clerk how to enter such a rarity into her (U.S. economic sanctions aside) Windows-based computer.

As soon as she got ready to ask me a question, I pushed some more documents through the little slot in the window. That sufficed for a little more typing, before we came to our first problem. She needed to know the name of my hotel. Unfortunately, the travel agency hadn’t provided that useful little nugget of info.

Fortunately, years of traveling through the hyper-anal airports of Japan had prepared me for this. Out of sheer boredom I'd once convinced a Japanese immigration official that the ‘Kevin’s place’ written on my immigration form was the name of a guest house; rather than simply my friend’s apartment – as the official had initially, and correctly, surmised.

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