Welcome to Iran: the holy city of Mashhad, by way of Serakhs

From Merv to Serakhs

In the morning, after breakfast with my roommates, I set out to find a taxi to the border at Serakhs. I probably could have squeezed in a visit to the regional museum (which is supposed to be quite good), but share taxis typically leave in the morning and I wanted to make sure I would be able to make it all the way to Mashhad that day. The taxi lot is basically the parking lot in front of the train station, near the bus station, and I was able to find a driver without too much difficulty—we just had to wait for additional passengers.

I'm something of a Coke addict, so while waiting I bought some samsas from the food vendors next to the station, and also picked up a bottle of Coke. This is a bit of a weird purchase, especially since I was low on manat, but I wasn't sure if Coke, as a western brand, would be available in long-isolated Iran (it turns out I shouldn't have worried, as both Coke and Pepsi have continued to exist since their  introduction, likely before the revolution).

Although Mary doesn't look to be that far from Serakhs, don't discount how much farther things seem when the roads are horrible. Although even the main roads in Turkmenistan are surprisingly bad for a petrol country, the side roads are even worse, with lots of potholes that result in cars weaving from side to side to dodge them. Most of the ride to Serakhs was on exactly these kind of roads, and it took about three hours to get to Serakhs. We were dropped off a short distance from the immigration post, as there was a huge queue of trucks and cars lined up before the border.

Crossing the border

Leaving Turkmenistan was relatively painless, aside from again-mandatory border shuttle that we had to take, for the extortionate sum of $2, for a road that is about 1.5 kilometers long.

On the Iranian side, things were considerably more complicated, and there a huge number of people in the waiting area. I'm not quite sure how things are supposed to work, but you give your passport to someone, then take a seat in a large waiting area. And then you wait. And wait. And then you'll be summoned, asked a few questions, and then told to sit and wait some more. One of the customs officers—an older, stern looking guy with a grey mustache—talked to himself in Farsi while he looked at my documents, then beamed at me and said "I love you!" before he resumed muttering to himself. I think it might have been the only thing he knew how to say in English, and the contrast between his otherwise grim demeanor and the warmth with which he said it was amusing. He then gestured that I should go sit down again.

I was eventually summoned into a commander's office, where I answered some questions and was stamped in shortly thereafter—it appears he was out or busy before then, and for some reason I needed to speak with him. In any event, it actually took significantly longer to process me than it did to process locals, and I suspect that if you entered at a busier border that is more accustomed to foreigners things would be substantially easier.

The Iranian side of the border compound is pretty big, with lots of various buildings and inspection points—much more organized and professional than the rather perfunctory border posts of Central Asian countries. One of the interesting things I noticed was a large steel water reservoir with spigots and on each side, as a kind of public water fountain, with one side for women and another for men. Once I made it outside the border area, I stopped by the gate and fired up my netbook. I had downloaded an old version of the Lonely Planet Iran (this was the first country for which I didn't have a hard copy of LP), and hoped to find some useful information on how to get to Mashhad, but it honestly wasn't of much help.

Arriving overland usually makes the transition between countries and places much smoother, but in all honestly the difference between Turkmenistan and Iran was even greater than the difference between China and Kyrgyzstan (going between the CIS 'stans is relatively easy in comparison)—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the differences made it more challenging. In Iran everything looks different. There is no Soviet-style architecture but a lot of narrow, low-rise concrete storefronts with glass windows running the width of them; no Cyrillic, and little Latin, but lots of Arabic script; the people look different, with lots of facial hair for men and hijabs for women; and decent infrastructure with French cars.

I was to quickly learn that Iranian drivers are crazy, but this wasn't immediately apparent as Serakhs seemed strangely dead when I headed into the city, and I wasn't sure where I should change money. Of course, the fact that most signs were in Arabic script didn't help matters. I wandered around the city for a while, hoping to find a bus station (or a friendly local to offer to help), but no such luck (this is likely because, as I later learned, I pass as Iranian—if you look white or western you'll have no problem attracting copious attention and inquiries), so I walked back towards the border point. Although I hadn't seen an share taxis nearby, I figured that they must congregate somewhere nearby. It turns out that I was correct, as there is a gas station along the main road to Mashhad, across from the park that separates the border point from the city, and cars to Mashhad congregate at the roadside there.

As in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, Iran subsidizes gasoline. Not to the extreme extent that Turkmenistan did, but it is still very cheap, which has a salutary effect on transportation prices (as did the massive devaluation of the rial that occurred in early 2012—it dropped from about 1,000 rial to the US dollar to about 3,000 to the USD, largely as a result of increased economic sanctions). I had little idea how much it should cost to get to Mashhad, but I was able to get there for the paltry sum of $3. Again, it helped that the driver wasn't a professional driver but just a private individual going to Mashhad and looking to defray costs, and it may have helped that I had to pay in dollars and they seemed unsure of what exchange rate to apply.

One day in Khorog: an oasis of progressiveness

GBAO: the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast

Basically all of the Pamirs and the entire southeastern knob of Tajikistan falls within the administrative region known as Gorno-Badakhshan. And if ever there was a part of the country that could be said to contain nothing but rocks and water, it would be the GBAO, which occupies 45% of Tajikistan but has only 220,000 people (about 3% of the population).

Pamiris are Ismaili Shias, while most Tajiks are Sunni

The region is not only geographically distinct, but ethnically and religiously as well. The northeastern part of the GBAO, along the Pamir Highway from the Kyrgyz border until at least Murghab, is mainly Kyrgyz, while the western GBAO and areas near Afghanistan (which are significantly lower, though still above 2,000 meters) are mainly Pamiri. Pamiris have their own languages, but like Dari and Tajik, these languages are minor variants of Farsi and seem to be mutually intelligible for the most part. The main point of distinction between Pamiris and the Tajik is religious: while lowland Tajiks are Sunni, like 90% of Muslims in the world, Pamiris are Shia—and more specifically, Ismaili (which are only 20% of Shias).

Attending university in Calgary, I knew quite a few Ismailis: we had a sizeable population of Gujarati Ismailis who worked as traders and settled in East Africa, but were then expelled from countries like Uganda after they gained independence (Indian merchants being convenient scapegoats). Many seem to have somehow made their way to Calgary. Indeed, the beloved mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, is an Ismaili Muslim of Tanzanian extraction.

So who are the Ismaili's? Well, here's an excerpt from a great piece on Ismaili Islam on Paul's Travel Blog:

The Tajik Pamirs and northern Pakistan share not only mountainous terrain and certain ethnic/cultural links but also religion: Ismaili Islam. The Ismailis are Shiite Muslims who believe that the true seventh Imam was a man named Ismail rather than his younger brother Musa, as the Twelver Shiites (such as those of Iran) believe. While during certain periods, such as the Cairo-based Fatimid Empire, Ismailis were a powerful force, today they form a small minority of Muslims, often scattered in remote mountainous terrain.

The historical distinction between Ismailis and other Shiites may seem minor, but, over time, this simple succession dispute has led to a universe of divergence, as Ismailis have become among the most progressive of the Islamic sects, in stark contrast to the Shiites of Iran. Indeed, the distinction between Ismailis and other Muslims has grown so great that one (Sunni) Kyrgyz woman in Tajikistan told us that the Tajik Pamiris were not even Muslim. Of course, despite the strong lingering of pre-Islamic beliefs and traditions the Ismaili Pamiris are in fact Muslim, as are the Ismaili Hunzas of northern Pakistan, but it is true that the Ismaili worldview of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is clearly a world apart from some other sects of Islam, and, to this outsider, far more appealing.

Ismailis are also different from most other Muslims in that they have the Aga Khan as a living spiritual advisor, whom they see as a direct descendant of the seventh Imam, and more importantly they believe that he is able to interpret the Quran in the modern context. I suppose this might make him something like the Pope, but the Aga Khan is quite different than the Pope in that he is an extremely modern man (in this he more resembles the Dalai Lama), was born in Switzerland, and is something of a playboy. Imagine Tony Stark as the leader of a branch of Islam and you're not too far off. I mean, his parents were divorced and his father then married Rita Hayworth, which tells you a lot about his family and their values—especially given that his grandfather was the prior Aga Khan and passed on his duties to his grandson because he wanted even more modernity from the future leader.

The net effect of having a branch of Islam being led by this Swiss-born spiritual leader is that Ismailis are hugely progressive by the standards of just about any religion, and the hugely wealthy Aga Khan remains close to his followers and spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year through his Aga Khan Foundation and Aga Khan Development Network to advance the development of his people and their surrounding communities.

The impact of the Aga Khan and the magnitude of his contributions are most apparent in the GBAO—and in Khorog in particular—as so many of the things that make the town so special have been funded by the Aga Khan. From quite literally building bridges that connect communities and countries, to providing food aid during the civil war, to spending in the medical community, to providing education, to hearing people in the streets tell you that they do things (or don't do things, like drugs) because of the guidance of the Aga Khan. One area where you see a real difference is in how women are treated. Unlike in the ultra-conservative Fann Mountains, women play a real role in civil society and assume positions of leadership within families. Girls are not second-class citizens, women don't run away from even the most fleeting contact with men, and there seems to be no thought of denying them education because of their sex. It's no coincidence that the homestay I stayed at is known as Lalmo's homestay, and not Lalmo's husband's homestay: women are empowered to a startling degree.

The post-Independence Civil War

Now, in the paragraph above, I alluded to the civil war. Tajikistan is the only one of the Central Asian CIS countries that devolved into civil war following independence from the crumbling Soviet Union, and given the cultural and logistical differences between the GBAO and the rest of the country perhaps it's no surprise that Badakhshanis and the lowland Tajiks were on opposing sides... or that the lowlanders won.

The current President, Emomali Rahmon, came to power as a result of the civil war, and he has basically been the only leader that an independent Tajikistan has ever known. In the wake of the civil war it seems that Rahmon granted government positions to a number of warlords and opposition leaders in a attempt to placate them and ensure a measure of government support—something that was probably of special interest given the strategic importance of the GBAO given its long borders with China and especially Afghanistan.

Despite these concessions, there has been a long history of tensions between the Pamiris and lowland Tajiks. Part of this tensions is religious (many Tajiks think that Ismaili Islam isn't a pure or legitimate form of Islam, epsecially since it views the Quran as open to interpretation by the Aga Khan) and part of it is a resentment by the Pamiris that the government treats them unfavourably (you certainly hear people saying that there were better services during the Soviet era, and although you hear this in lots of former second-world countries, in the Pamirs I think there is the suspicion that the decline has been due to them being Pamiris and not lowland Tajiks). Virtually everyone in the GBAO will self-identify primarily as something other than Tajik, be it Kyrgyz or Pamiri.

First impressions: walking from the Airport to Lalmo's

I don't know what I was expecting from Khorog. Something high and harsh, maybe. Small and rough. And definitely running north-south along the border with Afghanistan. On pretty much all fronts I was surprised. Although Khorog is at an elevation of over 2,100 meters, the town is surprisingly green and full of trees. And for late October, it was a lot warmer than I expected, and pleasant to walk around in the sun. Heck, this would be better weather than one would expect in Calgary, and the climate also supports a greater range of trees. Looking at weather profiles for Khorog, however, it seems like a remarkably temperate city, with the average high in October of 18°C (65°F)—only in January is the average high below freezing.

And despite the harrowing road journey from Dushanbe, Khorog didn't feel as isolated as I expected. The markets were well stocked—certainly much more so than I saw in Kyrgyz Alay Valley communities like Sary Mogul, Sary Tash, and Daroot Korgon. Maybe this shouldn't be so surprising, as it actually lies on the closest road to China, which would run through the Pamir border of Qolma before running through Murghab and Khorog on the way to Dushanbe.

Among the ubiquitous Chinese goods at the market there were some distinctly Pamiri items like huge and bulky socks and knitted toques ("knit cap" in American). Perhaps the only way the town revealed its isolation was in the food situation, as there didn't seem to be many restaurants.

An  old Soviet-era social-realism style painting on a pole.

The "Hitler" look is apparently respectable in Tajikistan. Or maybe it demands respect. Or fear. Or something. Based on some things I later saw in Murghab, this guy appears to be some sort of government official.

Khorog lies along the northern and southern slopes of the Gunt River, just before it joins the north-south flowing Pyanj river, which forms the border with Afghanistan.The Gunt almost seems bigger than the Pyanj.