From the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf
Nov 12, 2015Traveling by train in Iran is super easy! You just go to a travel agency (there’s one on almost any block in any major city), hopefully find someone in there who speaks decent English, and present them with a list of your desired destinations and dates. Iran uses its own calendar and so quite a lot of time is taken up by the travel agent sorting out and converting your Gregorian dates to the Iranian ones. Once that task is complete, there’s usually a little back and forth shifting of said dates, as not all trains run every day or every night. Then you pay your fees — the train tickets are very cheap, by the way — and you pick up your tickets on the way out.
The travel agent tells you to arrive an hour prior to departure, and we always did, but 55 minutes of this hour are spent buying snacks at the train station, eating the snacks because you have no willpower to wait for later, talking to fellow travellers, and getting a stamp on your ticket by some (usually very nice) police officers because you’re a foreigner. Then, once the train is ready, there’s an announcement, and everyone rushes to the tracks and finds their designated wagons and seats.
I took the picture above at Tehran Railway Station, and thankfully this was not our train. These ladies sure were in a hurry to get on board. And you’d better not mess with women in chadors, they have very strong elbows.
This was our first train, a cozy night train from Tehran to Esfahan.
The train was fully packed, as you can easily see on this chart. If you’re a psychic.
I really liked this guy in our compartment, Saa’id. He was so enthusiastic to meet us and to talk to us in English that he was very disappointed when we got ready for bed. “I won’t be able to sleep all night! Why? Because I’m just so happy that I’ve met you! We don’t get many tourists in Iran, and so I was hoping to talk to you guys all through the night!”
After a couple of days in Esfahan, we jumped on a train to Bandar Abbas, by the Persian Gulf. I was excited for this one because it started at 2.15 PM and there was ample time to photograph during daytime. These are the small pleasures of a travel photographer on the road. Or the tracks, I should say.
You can’t escape this guy, not even in your own private compartment. Not even if you’re traveling first class and get your own snacks and cute tea set.
During our train travels, we were mostly the only tourists on board and the Persian passengers were so excited to come and talk to us. Most of the time the conversations didn’t go any further than “Which country? Ah, Switzerland! Switzerland good country!!!” But I talked to the lady above for quite a while and she showed me a bunch of pictures of her kids and her house.
I started feeling bad when after a while I was all talked out and had to decline invitations to join passengers for chai or a meal in their compartments. Iranians are the most hospitable people on the planet. They will share your last piece of bread with you. They will call their daughter who speaks a little English on the phone and then hand the phone to you and she will ask you if you could please please come and stay with her at her house when you arrive, or at least please chat with her on What’s App in the future. It was heartbreaking to see how Iranians thirst for contact with foreigners. I was almost embarrassed at the amount of open-heartedness I was met with on those train rides.
This was our last train ride, an “express” train from Mashad to Tehran. (The “express” is relative.) I think this is a Chinese-made train and it was the most uncomfortable of all of the trains we took, however we received a free breakfast and lunch, all wrapped in plastic. Most passengers slept on this train ride. I was busy photographing them while they slept, reading, watching the landscape roll by and longing to finally, finally arrive in Tehran.
These trips are some of my favorite memories from Iran. The atmosphere on board was always relaxed and quiet, and I immediately felt at ease with the train crew and the people in our compartment. A train in Iran is kind of a semi-private location, and my fellow travelers often told me to take off my headscarf, seeing how I struggled to handle my luggage and snap pictures while keeping it islamic at the same time. However, I never saw any other female passengers take off theirs, but it was nice and liberating not having to wear mine, and I felt safe from Revolutionary Guards.
PS. You can re-license all of these pictures through my agency KEYSTONE, or contact me directly if you want to publish my photos from Iran.
