Rock and Hard Places (37 page)

Another thought that occurs, as we wonder at what point our technical designation will change from “passengers” to “hostages,”
is that, despite the scoffing we’d heard in Tehran, it does look like the Caracas route has made some purchase on the local imagination. The plane is nearly full, though few aboard look dressed for the South American sun: most of the passengers are elderly women in religiously observant costumes and men in traditional Arab garb, a noticeable proportion of them blind and otherwise disabled. It does not take us long to discern that few, if any, of these people have sombreros in their checked-in luggage: they’re Syrian pilgrims, who’ve been visiting Shi’a shrines in Iran, and they’re only going as far as Damascus. As the 747’s engines come alive, and the cabin loudspeakers quote sonorously from the Koran, and the cabin screens fill with pictures of Mecca, Caracas seems even further away than it is.

We reach our first stop still having spent less time in the air than we have on the ground, even allowing for a circuitous route around the somewhat unpredictable airspace of Iraq. The couple of hours we wait in the transit lounge of Damascus International Airport are enlivened by the lesson in prevailing political realities offered by the souvenir stalls: alongside the t-shirts and keyrings emblazoned with the image of Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad are trinkets bearing the green and gold, clenched-fist-and-Kalashnikov logo of Hezbollah. Tempting though these are, the purchase is made resistible by the thought of the number of airport security procedures (Caracas, Frankfurt, Heathrow) still separating me from my home in London.

Our mood, as we brace ourselves to return to a much less populated aircraft, could not be characterised as optimistic. The interminable and unexplained delay in departing Tehran, though annoying, had hardly been surprising. Even prior to that, absolutely every stage of our booking, confirmation and check-in had been handled with truly fabulous incompetence—IranAir could only have got things more profoundly wrong if they’d checked me and Christopher in as cargo and issued boarding passes to our bags. By now, I am of the opinion that if Iran’s nuclear programme is run like Iran’s state airline, the day that Ahmadinejad fulfils his threat to wipe Israel off the map could be a bad one for Poland. However, upon reaching the aircraft’s door, something finally goes right—and wondrously so. A uniformed vision at the top of the stairs, perhaps recognising myself and Christopher as men whose will to live is ebbing perilously, ushers us into business
class in the nose of the plane. Our saviour is the Senior Flight Purser, Aryana Malekpour, and agreeably spacious though it is up forward, there’s plenty of room in the back, as well—Ms. Malekpour explains that there are only sixty passengers aboard, and that at any rate this flight, given the fuel load necessary for the fourteen-hour haul to Caracas, could carry no more than a hundred. There is only one other passenger in business class, a silver-haired cove of distinguished mien who turns out, when introductions are effected, to be Lebanon’s Consul to Venezuela.

After we reach cruising altitude, Ms. Malekpour dispenses a potted history of the aircraft along with our coffee. This 747 is called A4 Delta, and at thirty-two years it’s the oldest aircraft in IranAir’s fleet, though a recent overhaul is evident in the new pale blue, purple and pink paisley upholstery embracing the seats. Doubtless figuring that we’ll be spending a bunch of time together, she also introduces us to the crew—several of whom, the saintly Ms. Malekpour included, have been with IranAir as long as the plane, and can remember when New York and Los Angeles were all in a week’s work. In polar contrast to the ground-based contingent of IranAir, their in-flight staff are courteous, efficient, friendly, touchingly proud of their airline and their country and cheerfully talkative. All, that is, except one—he wears a brown suit, black sunglasses at all times, and reacts to my attempts at friendliness like he’d much rather be regarding me from the other end of a pair of toenail pliers. Like most undercover Middle Eastern intelligence operatives, he could scarcely be more obvious if he was wearing a t-shirt spangled with his agency’s logo, and this is perfectly deliberate—a police state must ensure that its subjects know they’re being policed (and they do know—a few crew members whisper requests not to report anything “political” they may have said, though not one of them utters a word that could be interpreted as disloyal to their airline, or their country).

When, to my considerable surprise, I’m led upstairs and onto the flight deck, I sit next to Flight Engineer Mohammed Reza Rafat. I ask him to outline difference between the pre-revolutionary IranAir of the Shah’s Iran, and the IranAir of the post-1979 Islamic Republic.

“Well, we don’t serve alcohol anymore,” he grins. “And, of course, the female crew had to cover up.”

While IranAir’s male staff sport generic, vaguely military, black and white uniforms, IranAir’s women are shrouded in an elaborate, but not ungraceful, dark blue and gold headdress.

“Also,” says Rafat, “the men had to stop wearing ties.”

I’d read that Khomeini objected to these on the grounds that they were offensively western.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” says Rafat, adjusting the folded newspaper blocking the sunlight beaming into the cockpit’s port window. “That’s just what we were told.”

At any rate, all the male aircrew maintain dutifully naked necks aside from the captain, James Farrahi—who is, as we swiftly learn, a man of firmly held beliefs. He initially refuses to be photographed for
Monocle
on the grounds that “I don’t like the English.” My efforts to make common cause with him on the grounds that I’m Australian fall upon stony ground. “There is no difference,” he harumphs. When I ask him to elaborate, he accuses England of “screwing the world up with their conspiracies.” (The UK ranks second to the US in Iran’s official menagerie of bêtes noir—sort of the Great Satan’s Little Helper; specifically, Iranians blame Britain, quite rightly, for its role in the 1953 coup d’etat which, with CIA connivance, removed secular nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and paved the way for the succession of dictatorial thuggery and theocratic foolishness which has misruled Iran ever since.) After a few cups of coffee, Christopher and I are able to persuade him a) that neither of us bear much, if any, personal responsibility for overthrowing Iran’s last vaguely sane government, and b) more importantly, for our purposes, to pose for a picture.

Back in economy class, I meet a few Syrian contract labourers emigrating for building jobs in South America, but most of the passengers are middle-class Iranian professionals, hoping to take advantage of the tax concessions offered by Ahmadinejad to encourage business links with Venezuela. They ask me what I thought of Tehran, which is a potentially tricky moment, as what I think is that Tehran is about the least pleasant big city I can recall visiting, containing as it does everything that is bad about urban living (crowds, noise, traffic, filth) and redeemed by absolutely nothing that is good about it (freedom, opportunity, diversity, tolerance). However, I rarely lie, for the reason that I’m no good at it—I’m terrible at making things up, and even worse at delivering the
falsehood convincingly—and so I tell them a version of the truth, which is that I hadn’t much cared for it, but was sure it had hidden charms that take a while to flower, and so forth.

“No,” says someone. “It is a terrible place. Next time you come to Iran, you must visit Shiraz.”

“And Esfahan,” says another. “My family are from Esfahan. You can stay with them.”

“And Qom,” offers another, suggesting the Iranian holy city and spiritual heart of Khomeini’s revolution. “The religious guys are a bit weird, but it’s very interesting.”

I mention that during my brief stay in Tehran, our compulsory minder had taken us to visit Khomeini’s vast and still unfinished mausoleum. This elicits the sort of patronising chuckles that a Londoner might make at hearing some rube’s wide-eyed tales of visiting Madame Tussaud’s. I ask one of my new friends—a grave, sharply suited management type—why he thinks IranAir have launched this new route.

“You ask,” he retorts, in perfect English and a stentorian baritone, “why this flight is happening?”

Yes, I reiterate.

“This flight is happening,” he declares, “because of something very important that our two great countries have in common.”

Sensing a punchline in need of a set-up, I ask him what, exactly.

“Crazy presidents,” he replies.

I ink this quote gratefully into my notebook with a promise that I won’t attach his name.

“I didn’t,” he reminds me, returning to his newspaper, “say anything at all.”

The return fare for the Tehran-Caracas route, another passenger tells me, is US$1500. He adds that there is a Lufthansa option via Frankfurt, which is only a little bit more expensive, so I ask whether his choice is informed at all by patriotic ardour.

“No,” he says. “I like the space on board this one. And there’s a really nice atmosphere.”

And he’s right. With so few aboard, and so much space, people—passengers and underemployed crew alike—meander and chat. Some visit the onboard prayer room, in which a screen displays a computerised graphic indicating the direction of Mecca. There is little else available
in the way of distraction. IranAir offers none of the fripperies of modern air travel—no in-flight games, no seat-back movies, and only a couple of (entirely ignored) Iranian family comedies on the big screens, alternating with the SkyMap chronicling our progress across the Atlantic. There is an inflight magazine,
Homa
—named for the griffin-like creature of Persian mythology that also serves as IranAir’s tailfin motif—but it’s a drab melange of travel guide hackery unriveting even by the standards of inflight magazines. The halal food is pretty good, though—buttery rice with meat and vegetables.

Surprisingly, but rather delightfully, this lack of the usual amusements proves an unalloyed blessing as our unlikely journey around half the globe unfurls. The absence of the usual vacuous distractions—and the lack of any mood-altering agent stronger than Iran’s Coca-Cola substitute Zam Zam—promotes an unusual focus on what a glorious thing air travel really is. We live in a world in which any middle-class wage earner can skip across the planet in less than a day, and we contrive to take this miracle for granted. Worse still, we actually complain about it (I mean, I did myself, only a few paragraphs ago). We whine about the food, moan about the queues, bitch about the legroom, sulk about being compelled to perform the dance of seven veils—or, rather, the dance of jacket, belt and shoes—at security. We’ve become so settled into a default position of reacting to flying like it’s detention that we’ve forgotten that roaring across the sky at 1,000 kilometres an hour is about the coolest thing we ever get to do, the moment at which we are in closest contact with the possibilities of human imagination. It is astonishing, really, that we as a breed have reached a point where, given a choice, we’d rather watch
Friends
than the tops of clouds, or take Richard Curtis movies over the sun dipping behind the Cordillera de la Costa mountains that shield Caracas from the sea. The relationship between Iran and Venezuela may strike many as worrisome, but it has produced one of the great romantic, quixotic, travel-for-the-silly-sake-of-it experiences presently available.

Caracas’s airport, like Venezuela’s currency and any number of Venezuelan locations, is named after Simon Bolivar. It is, in every respect, a long way from Tehran: new, clean, spacious, as much like a mall with a runway attached as any major airport in Europe, and the large numbers of armed, uniformed men are at least friendly.
For flight IR744’s pair of infidel passengers, Caracas also offers the welcome prospect of a restorative beer or several. Mighty forces appear determined to torment us further, however. The bars and bright lights of Caracas, in theory just thirteen miles over the hills, are in fact two and a half hours away, at the end of a traffic jam of such hilarious length that it could almost have been imported from Tehran.

 

 

 

A
NOTHER ADVENTURE PROMPTED by a phone call from Andrew Tuck at
Monocle
. “The road to Damascus,” he declared. “Everybody knows what it means, but nobody knows what it’s like. Go and find out.”

I was happy to do this, because I’m always happy for a reason to visit Beirut in particular, and the Middle East in general—not necessarily for any rugged, righteous, bullet-chewing, seeker-of-truth-in-valley-of-death foreign correspondent reasons, but because the weather is lovely, the food fantastic, the scenery magnificent, the wine delectable, the women beautiful and the people in general supremely courteous and hospitable. If the Arabs could collectively grasp the wisdom of putting their lunatics and criminals in asylums and prisons, instead of installing them in their parliaments and palaces, they’d be the envy of all humanity.

As it happened, my peregrination along the Road to Damascus did prompt an epiphany of sorts, and it went like this. There are few things that the professionally opinionated enjoy more than a few hundred words’ fulminating at the ignorance of the general public. My, how we love a good fulminate. We spend hours anxiously scanning news wires, searching for the latest poll which reveals that x percent of the population can’t name their own president, that y percent think Afghanistan is where Gandalf lived, or that $
percent don’t know the letters of the alphabet. From this raw material, we sculpt the prose equivalent of an accusingly pointing finger.

The assumption underlying these self-righteous tirades (and I should know; I’ve written a few) is that it’s A Bad Thing that so many people know and care so little about politics. Mostly, this is an assumption to which I subscribe. However, the great thing about travelling is that one’s assumptions are continually being prodded in the sternum and asked who they think they are, and in this excursion to Lebanon and Syria I found myself wondering whether the bovine complacency often demonstrated by large swathes of first-world electorates is really a problem—and whether, instead, popular indifference to politics should rank alongside literacy and child health as measures of national prosperity.