|
Two months on the road and away from home, it sure feels a whole lot more than 2 months. Now one full month of travel in the Middle-East including
Iran, Syria and a bit of Jordan. Looking back on the first travel month we must say that we experienced the 2nd month as really different from the 1st. We where just starting then and travel resembled a lot like the
(4-6wk) roadtrips we've made in previous years.
The biggest difference is of course the time factor, a 4 week trip starts and ends in the same period, always making some kind of travel loop through one or
more countries. After the 2nd month we still can't oversee the 3-4 months we still have left, making a circle or loop hard to picture. Questions like: where will we be in about a month? How will our live 'on the
road' be
like? Will it be harder or easier than we experienced it till now? Ofcourse we've prepared a travel loop on a map, but it's so huge we still can't picture the experience in our heads. Before the start of
our trip we just looked at our travel loop in a '4 week' travel mode. This mode has vanished completely and sometimes gives us the feeling as we where drifting in time far
away from a distant (western) world we used to live in.
One thing which has become very clear the past month is that travelling for large periods of time through different countries is hard work. We've heard
it before from other full-time travellers but now we can fully comprehend what this means. Because of the constant change in environment, culture, people, local customs and not to forget the never ending variety of
small scams, it takes a huge amount of our energy to adapt and sometimes protect ourselves from these changes. Many times we've looked at eachother after dinner with pale white faces, admitting to eachother to be
totally utterly wasted. Somehow we sleep much much more than at home, sometimes up to 12 hours regardless of the heat.
Half-way the 2nd month we also realised that we where travelling too fast. The day to
day rhythm of arriving at places and leaving them the following day drained ourselves quite a bit. We've changed that now allowing ourselves to stay at a place a bit longer for some reading, walking around or to
type a summary like this. Ofcourse the latter was also a remainder of the '4 week' travel mode of the previous weeks.
Just two days ago it suddenly emerged to us both that we've never seen so much of
eachother before in one stretch of time. It sounded kind of strange at first, because our relationship goes back a real long time. But more important it feels like we've stepped closer to eachother. Somehow we know
better how things and events in our trip affect eachother, how we manage to emotionally deal with the thrills and sometimes horrors of our journey.
Live in the Middle-East as for as we've seen it sure
differs from our western live in many ways. Most eye-catching, as we've experienced it, is the rural live being self-regulating, not so much caged by strict government laws as we know it in Holland. For instance;
Build a bigger house? Buy the materials and start working, no need for extensive local government approval. If the neighbours don't like it, just have them over for tea and negotiate a deal over dinner. Want to
start a small business, like selling fruits,vegetables or a small eatery? Just make sure your environment approves of it and you're off. Violated some traffic law (if any exists), talk to the police officer and
invite him for tea or offer him a small piece of your business. (which of course you have).
On the other hand, extensive legal help or government safety-nets if your business adventure goes wrong, the house
collapses somehow, or having a dispute with some-one about a purchase are clearly not present. We'll be very very surprised to hear about any Middle-East society worrying about the (financial and legal) well-being
of the average consumer as we know it in our western world. The first and in most cases only safety net is the family, forming a tightly knit and far reaching network around any person we've met sofar.
And
of course the Middle-East is a mans world, all public live exists mainly of men. One amazing and contrasting exception however where two very western looking female Turkish border officers (No scarf, no chador)
dealing with all traffic between Iran and the Turkish border. This small transit area, of course was one with many intense long stares of men, eyes almost popping out with disbelief and amazement looking at those
female border officers. We'd almost get a proud feeling about those women doing their job with authority over men in a public middle-east area.
And yes the staring is something of which we both had to get
used too very much. Imagine all male eyes in an average small town street being pointed at you *all* the time. Not only because you're from the west but also female, and not to forget with a very strange looking
car. Reactions are very diverse, kids useally let their emotions run free and approach us with big eyes and high-pitched squeaky voices hello-ing away into infinity. Men mostly sit in groups interrupting their chat
getting themselves really comfortable looking at us, our car and what we're upto, which is in most cases is getting some errands. Women mostly give us one very quick look and go on with their business at that
moment. A reaction we can understand intensely, because a female making (even accidental) eye-contact with any man, specially from out of town, is literally making a request "to get married". Ofcourse in
the bigger cities it's all a bit less extreme because of the volume of people moving in and out.
A big treat for us are the many sincere and sometimes extremely polite reactions on our presence. The many many
many many invitations for tea at any time of the day are hard to turn down each time again. If we sat down every time we would have consumed a few cubic meters of tea so far. But again, every time we do sit down
it's a treat although we even can't understand most of the things being said to us. Sometimes some-one from the neighbourhood speaks a bit English, German or French and sits down with us exchanging facts about live
in both our countries.
Overall, contact between people in Middle-East countries is very intense and is something we also had to get used too. It's almost a 24hr activity, a one second glare outside the
camper in the morning can result in an intense ceremony of being greeted and of course an invitation to drink tea. Probably the people outside where so curious about who's living in there they watched our door very
closely not to miss the event of someone coming out. The tea drinking is the starting point of many other invitations which each time surprise us again. The one time that Janine was invited over by a Syrian women
into her house to drink tea with in a room packed with other women from the neighbourhood was a nice and surprising experience. And we where just passing by to get some things for dinner.
After two months of
living out in the 'open' we've seen many commercial 'package' tourists stare at us like we're crazy so far away from home travelling by our own means. What if something bad happens? Who's going to help you then? Yes
we'll be on our own not 'protected' by any travel organisation or travel group taking care of things. At first these thoughts are provoking, specially if you're moving your car through the downtown traffic melt-down
of for instance Damascus. As a passenger it must be big relief not to be behind the wheel at such a moment. But emotionally it feels like we've been there before, moving yourself onto a 5000 meter high mountain pass
in the Himalayas is also not the most safest place to be in.
Basically we experience that back home we're living in an over-protected and over-regulated environment, the nearest facility (you name it) is
never too far away. And in most cases of trouble there's always something or somebody to fall back on (or blame shift). But how do all those people in other less developed countries survive? How did our grand grand
parents survive in the early 1900's? And what about travel in those days? Live was hard, but it was not all bad afterall. We feel very lucky that we're able to travel like the way we do now. The things we've seen
and the experiences we've had so far outweigh the horrors by miles. We feel that taking the 'safe' way by buying one of the many many overland package trips down the silk road will take most of the real thrills
away. All things are taken care of, such as where to sleep and how to get your food or for instance what to do when you're sick. In this we find the real challenge, we've met very interesting people and stayed at
incredible places and have gone through strange and exhilarating situations. And also because we're not a large group of people, the locals are far more willing and eager to talk to us.
The decision to
backtrack out of Iran was one of those challenges, it was hard and sour to do so. Surely a commercial package tour would have taken us all the way through Iran even to China if we wanted too but we feel we wouldn't
have experienced the real thing. Simply having the pictures of the main sights is not the thing we're after. Travelling in the 'open' by our own means requires some sort of balance with the surroundings. Our car
with a high western profile in Iran tipped the balance and confronted us with the way we travel: 'out in the open'. Just two people with an incredibly interesting western car in an almost sealed off country.
Numerous of times we found ourselves in hideous road situations being stared at by another driver too occupied with us than the traffic ahead and behind. The experience drained us to the bone, and the decision to
back-track was the best thing for us to do.
Probably we would have coped better with the intense attention in Iran if we travelled in a bigger group of fellow travellers, making it less easier to approach
us. Also it would probably have been a lot easier if we could have parked at a hotel in the evening, but unfortunately most of the Hotels are downtown and in most cases don't have the space to (actually!) hide our
car. A less eye-catching car would also have done the trick of attracting less attention. Anyway, getting zero sleep in the evening and night is bound to produce a traffic accident in the suicide traffic of Iran.
Looking at the situation from the Iranian side, we really can picture the interest in western people. Iran is virtually a closed country and a large portion of the people are young (because of a missing
generation because of the war with Iraq) and very eager to learn about live outside Iran. Finding two western people in the neighbourhood isn't a better chance to learn about live outside from first hand.
Again we really hope for the people of Iran the country will open up in the near future allowing more personal freedom for the Iranians and the possibility to travel more freely. We hope to be back some day, again
by our own means but somehow more adapted to the situation inside Iran.
To end our September summary, we quote Ted Simon in his latest travellings: "The interruptions are the journey". Something
we've experienced as a fact of live in our 2nd month on the road.
|
|
