Kish Island, Iran - Tuesday, Oct. 14
I can’t claim credit for the title of this entry. Used to describe the Muslim world’s delight at seeing the financial meltdown in the West, it first appeared in a New York Times blog written by my friend and colleague Stephen Farrell, that paper’s Baghdad correspondent.
Nonetheless, I thought I’d chip in with a few examples from The Tehran Times, the turgid government-run newspaper that is the only English reading I’ve come across on this island.
“The U.S. is slowly but surely being ravaged by demons of its own design,” correspondent Randeep Ramesh reported in a recent edition. “The U.S. has been gobbling up the world's resources – be it labor, capital or minerals – so that Americans can live beyond their means. That these might run out has never bothered U.S. leaders.”
In today’s edition, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini chipped in with a few thoughts of his own. “Liberal democracy, with all its political, economic and military power has been knocked to the ground before the eyes of all the world,” the Times quoted him as saying. “Today, the false bubble of money has popped in the Western world… and they themselves say that the era of U.S. hegemony has come to an end.”
Ayatollah Khameini would have you all know that “the ideology of Islamic thought” will gain from democracy’s downfall.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Counting ayatollahs
Kish Island, Iran - Monday, Oct. 13
As of today, I am an Iranian multimillionaire.
At dusk – nearly everything closes during the afternoon because of the 40C heat – I plunged into the thick and sweaty crowd at a currency exchange office inside one of Kish’s myriad duty-free shopping malls (which sell mostly cheap Chinese-made electronics and what appear to be knock-offs of Western-brand clothing) and emerged with an armful of Iranian rials.
Three hundred US dollars bought me nearly three million Iranian rials, most of them in crisp orange 50,000-rial notes. For those of you who like to view things from a geopolitical standpoint, it seems three Benjamin Franklins are worth a giant pile of Ayatollah Khomeinis.
After years of travelling through the Middle East with almost exclusively US currency in my wallet, I finally found a place that wouldn’t accept the greenback when I went to go pay the fee for my mainland Iranian visa today. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it seems, is unwilling to accept the Great Satan’s money, a currency even Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe had no trouble filling their coffers with.
An apologetic teller at the bank informed me that the payment could only be made in Euros or Iranian rials. Dropping his voice, he then proceeded to warn me that even though America was in financial crisis, I shouldn’t change too much of my dollars into Iranian money. “When you get to Tehran, people on the streets will take dollars, no problem,” he said conspiratorially. “Thank God for the US dollar.”
If I can’t wear knee breaches, I’m outta here.
Kish Island, Iran - Sunday, Oct. 12
Since arriving on Kish, I’d heard whispers of the Dariush Grand Hotel. If you walk out to the end of the long dock that stretches out into the crystal-clear waters of the Persian Gulf and look back at the island, the five-floor Dariush dominates the skyline.
Built by Iranian businessman Hussein Sabet, who made his fortune in the hotel business in Europe, the 200-room, $125-million Dariush is reputed to be the best hotel in Iran. It’s definitely the most audacious, with giant marble columns and statues built to recall the glory of ancient Persia, the empire that in 500 BC stretched across most of the modern Middle East, to North Africa and what is now Istanbul. The hotel is named after Darius, the man who ruled over the Persian Empire at its height, and the building’s entrance is modeled on the Gate of All Nations at Persepolis, the ancient imperial capital. The door is guarded by a pair of giant stone soldiers, accompanied by fantastical creatures that have the torsos of lions, eagles’ wings, and human heads.
The hotel’s architecture is actually a small act of defiance. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, references to the country’s pre-Islamic history (Islam came to Iran in the 7th Century AD) fell out of favour, with one prominent cleric even going so far as to suggest that the ruins at Persepolis, a United Nations World Heritage site on a desert plateau some 440 kilometres south of Tehran, should be razed.
It wasn’t, and the mullah’s have recently started to embrace Iran’s pre-Islamic history, understanding above all the tourist dollars that sites such as Persepolis can bring in. Now comes Mr. Sabet’s masterpiece, built on the half-finished shell of an unfinished hotel that started construction back when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi ruled here. The shah famously decided to turn the backwater fishing outpost into a playground for the country’s wealthy elite. A luxury hotel and a grand casino were built, as was an airport big enough to handle the shah’s private Concorde jet, which legendarily would fly in planeloads of prostitutes, and meals prepared at Paris restaurants.
Tempted by the fact the Dariush sports a pool table and no overt ban on knee breaches (as well as the fact as it cost the same as the military bunker I've been staying in up until now), I'm definitely switching digs.
The prisoners of Kish Island
Kish Island, Iran - Sunday, Oct. 12
It turns out that, besides me, the only other obvious foreigners on Kish Island are some 1,000 Filipinos. I’m the only one pretending to holiday. The frustrated Filipinos have been trapped here for weeks on end by a change in visa rules in the United Arab Emirates, where they work.
The UAE’s impressive economic boom has been fuelled by a very dark side, the abuse and exploitation of foreign labourers, most of them from the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Many of the foreign workers never get official status in the UAE, but choose to stay illegally, knowing that the money they can earn in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – whatever the atrocious conditions – is far better than what they can earn back home. Most visitors to the UAE are given two-month tourist visas on landing, which theoretically prohibit work, but which can be simply renewed by leaving the UAE for a day.
Because of its visa-free status, and because it’s relatively cheap compared to the rest of the Persian Gulf, Kish was a favoured destination for employers looking to send workers on one-day “visa runs.” And when the UAE’s visa rules changed this summer – requiring one-month gaps between entries for travelers of certain nationalities – news didn’t trickle down until hundreds of Filipinos were already in Kish, suddenly prevented from returning to their jobs in the UAE.
They’re a bedraggled lot, lining up each day at the Kish Airlines office, begging for a rare seat on one of the 26-seat Fokker F-50s that jet between Dubai and Kish several times a day. Some tell wild stories about needing to pick up corpses in Dubai that will decompose if they don’t get embalmed within 24 hours. Others just plead with the ticket saleswoman, telling her they’re about to lose their livelihoods if they can’t get back to the UAE soon.
“I just need to get off this godforsaken island!” a nearly crying man with a Pakistani accent shouted before storming out of the office, ticketless.
For the record, the UAE is far from alone in the Arab world in its treatment of foreign workers. Human Rights Watch recently did a very thorough report on the conditions some labourers live in, naming and shaming Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Morocco alongside the UAE as the worst abusers.
Ali Reza
Kish Island, Iran - Saturday, Oct. 18
At dinner tonight, I found myself thanking the higher power, my foreign editor, that been allowed to study Arabic long enough to at least be able to sound out the Persian-only menu in the hotel restaurant. Arabic and Persian use the same right-to-left script and, even more mercifully, a kebab is still spelled “kebab” in Farsi. A "Beebsee," or Pepsi, was as exciting beverage as I could find to wash it down with (there is no letter P in traditional Arabic script).
I’d been warned beforehand that many Iranians consider it odd to see someone dining alone, so I was only mildly surprised when a balding middle-aged man soon took one of the empty chairs at my underutilized table for four. In halting English that he’d learned two decades ago while working at a tourist hotel in his home city of Esfahan, he asked me where I came from, and then solemnly introduced himself as Ali Reza, a 50-year-old civil engineer. He was unmarried, and had no children. He liked to ride his bicycle and didn’t smoke. I didn’t ask him about any of this, he just told me one personal fact after another as if he wanted to use every English word he knew right there and then before he forgot any of them.
Ali is one of the estimated one million Iranian tourists who visit Kish each year, looking for sun and sand and a rare break from the strict Islamic laws in the rest of the country. It’s hardly Sodom or Gomorrah, but Kish is a place where Iranians can breathe a little easier without the religious police monitoring their every action. After dark, young couples cuddle together on the beach in contravention of the mullahs’ restrictions on socializing between unmarried couples. Headscarves are worn often only loosely, and it at least one case I saw, not at all.
Later, as Ali and I strolled around the hotel gardens past the empty swimming pool, Ali told me that he thought George W. Bush was “a good man” while “our president” (he didn’t name Mr. Ahmedinejad) “is crazy.”
When I prodded him to explain why, he switched the topic. We were coming to the end of the small path we’d been following and were about to join the much busier boardwalk along the gulf coast. “The weather is very good here,” Ali said loudly and to no one in particular. “No rain.”
At dinner tonight, I found myself thanking the higher power, my foreign editor, that been allowed to study Arabic long enough to at least be able to sound out the Persian-only menu in the hotel restaurant. Arabic and Persian use the same right-to-left script and, even more mercifully, a kebab is still spelled “kebab” in Farsi. A "Beebsee," or Pepsi, was as exciting beverage as I could find to wash it down with (there is no letter P in traditional Arabic script).
I’d been warned beforehand that many Iranians consider it odd to see someone dining alone, so I was only mildly surprised when a balding middle-aged man soon took one of the empty chairs at my underutilized table for four. In halting English that he’d learned two decades ago while working at a tourist hotel in his home city of Esfahan, he asked me where I came from, and then solemnly introduced himself as Ali Reza, a 50-year-old civil engineer. He was unmarried, and had no children. He liked to ride his bicycle and didn’t smoke. I didn’t ask him about any of this, he just told me one personal fact after another as if he wanted to use every English word he knew right there and then before he forgot any of them.
Ali is one of the estimated one million Iranian tourists who visit Kish each year, looking for sun and sand and a rare break from the strict Islamic laws in the rest of the country. It’s hardly Sodom or Gomorrah, but Kish is a place where Iranians can breathe a little easier without the religious police monitoring their every action. After dark, young couples cuddle together on the beach in contravention of the mullahs’ restrictions on socializing between unmarried couples. Headscarves are worn often only loosely, and it at least one case I saw, not at all.
Later, as Ali and I strolled around the hotel gardens past the empty swimming pool, Ali told me that he thought George W. Bush was “a good man” while “our president” (he didn’t name Mr. Ahmedinejad) “is crazy.”
When I prodded him to explain why, he switched the topic. We were coming to the end of the small path we’d been following and were about to join the much busier boardwalk along the gulf coast. “The weather is very good here,” Ali said loudly and to no one in particular. “No rain.”
Not without my dateline
Kish Island, Iran - Saturday, Oct. 11
After seven years of covering the Middle East and the ever-expanding “war on terror,” I finally set foot in Iran today. Yes, that place. The one with the crazed nuke-hungry mullahs and the crowds wishing death to America. The geographical centre of George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil.”
Following repeated efforts to secure a visa to travel to Tehran – and repeatedly rejections on the basis of both my nationality and my profession – I finally discovered a way into the Islamic Republic, or at least a corner of it, while flipping through an old copy of a Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East that has sat, to my wife’s chagrin, in the bathroom for most of the past three years. It was on page 228 that I had my revelation. That’s where I learned of the existence of Kish Island.
Kish Island, the well-thumbed book told me, was the only part of Iran that foreigners – even Canadian journalists – can enter without a visa. Then came the even more tantalizing part: once in Kish “head down to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where they can grant you a full tourist visa within 48 hours.”
So here I am. On Kish Island, a place that at once poses as both the Hawaii and the Hong Kong of the Islamic Republic, staying in a grey concrete block that looks more like a military bunker than the four-star hotel it alleges to be (that's the interior of my hotel room, top left). In the name of finally getting a visa to Iran, I’m pretending to be that rare breed of Western tourist who prefers destinations where alcohol is illegal and men and women must swim and sunbathe at separate, fenced-off beaches.
The swimming pool at the Shayan Hotel is as dry as the minibar, having been emptied many years ago to make sure no one swam where the opposite sex might catch an illicit glimpse of flesh.
Nonetheless, a green card in the room promises “Happy Day’s (sic) For You.” Inside the card are a set of nine rules. Rule No. 1: “Ladies are requested to respect Islamic covering.” Rule No. 2: “Gentlemen are requested not to wear knee breaches.”
I promise not to leave this island, dear reader, until I find out what a knee breach is.
The Road to Jerusalem
OK. So until now this was a Russia blog. But for the next three weeks it's going to dramatically change in character and become - wait for it - a travel blog.
That's right, I'm travelling across the Middle East for The Globe and Mail, which will be running my Road to Jerusalem blog on its website as well.
After spending much of the past seven years reporting from the region (I first landed here on Sept. 12, 2001) and covering not only the fall of Baghdad and the real war that followed, but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the rise of Hamas, the various failed peace processes and the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah - not to mention living in Jerusalem for the past 3 1/2 years and Beirut before that - I'm driving across the region to take stock of how people here were affected by the George W. Bush era and how they view an Obama or McCain presidency.
I'm starting in the southern corner of Iran, and will head from there via Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank to Jerusalem, the city that's arguably at the centre of it all.
I hope you enjoy this change of pace. Let me know what you think as I go along. And please check out my first newspaper report of the journey, which appeared yesterday.
That's right, I'm travelling across the Middle East for The Globe and Mail, which will be running my Road to Jerusalem blog on its website as well.
After spending much of the past seven years reporting from the region (I first landed here on Sept. 12, 2001) and covering not only the fall of Baghdad and the real war that followed, but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the rise of Hamas, the various failed peace processes and the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah - not to mention living in Jerusalem for the past 3 1/2 years and Beirut before that - I'm driving across the region to take stock of how people here were affected by the George W. Bush era and how they view an Obama or McCain presidency.
I'm starting in the southern corner of Iran, and will head from there via Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank to Jerusalem, the city that's arguably at the centre of it all.
I hope you enjoy this change of pace. Let me know what you think as I go along. And please check out my first newspaper report of the journey, which appeared yesterday.
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