The thought of women in Iran wearing bikinis was something I found very hard to picture.
Our first priority was finding a place to stay where we could dump our backpacks, and pretty soon a local approached us with an offer of a home stay. Apparently, he had a place a few minutes away and offered to take one of us on the back of his little motorbike to check it out. Ricardo wasn’t too keen on this, so it was decided I’d jump on, while Ricardo remained with the backpacks.
I clung on for dear life as we sped along, swerving in and out of cars to get there. It was in a nicer part of town near a big hotel, which apparently used to be Ramsar’s main casino in the days before the revolution.
The apartment was a nice enough place, but he wanted far too much for it at IR300,000, about thirty bucks. I tried to negotiate but he could smell those tourist dollars and was reluctant to drop the price. We’d traveled a good couple of miles on his bike to get here, and as I didn’t want to forfeit my ride back, I said I’d have to discuss it with Ricardo. The return journey was terrible, and I swear we nearly got hit twice. I got off the bike on shaky legs and gave Ricardo the news. We both agreed to look elsewhere. On seeing the deal slipping away from him, the owner miraculously dropped his price to IR70,000. Not only that, but he said he’d throw in a taxi ride, which he’d pay for, so both of us could get there. This was more like it, so we agreed and shook on the deal.
He hailed a taxi for us, which followed closely behind his bike. This time he led us along a different route and we turned onto a dead-end street in a different, shadier part of town. I turned to Ricardo and told him we weren’t going the right way. He looked at me concerned and said, “This isn’t good!” And it wasn’t. We followed along behind the guy’s bike twisting this way and that until we arrived at a dilapidated, half-built house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It looked very ghetto.
He tried to make out like it was all an honest mistake, but his English was too good for that excuse. I wasn’t happy at getting scammed—and after looking at the interior of the place was even less so. It was filthy, even for someone used to sleeping on the side of the road, and contained just one horribly stained double bed. As much as I liked Ricardo, I wasn’t snuggling up in the same bed with him. I let the guy on the bike know I was pissed off and told him that he’d wasted his time and ours, and that we weren’t interested.
The taxi driver now demanded an extortionate payment, but the guy on the bike refused to pay anything despite his promise to the contrary. A bit of a stand off ensued. It would have been one thing if the taxi driver was just asking us for a normal fare, but it was clearly bumped up several hundred percent since we were foreigners. And what’s more, biker boy had given us his word that he’d be paying for the taxi anyway, so we were being ripped off on both fronts.
Ricardo played the part of Switzerland and remained neutral. It all got a bit on the heated side, but I wasn’t particularly bothered and was willing to stand my ground. Ricardo didn’t share my enthusiasm for this approach and was clearly uncomfortable.
“Let’s just tell them both to get lost and walk out of here,” I said to Ricardo. He didn’t like this option.
“Let’s just pay them, Jamie,” he said more intelligently. “Look at the area; it’s not good.” After a moment’s further reflection, I conceded. It wasn’t worth getting into any trouble over, which was of course the last thing we wanted in Iran. I thrust a note into the driver’s hand and we started walking. Halfway back to the main road, the guy on the bike sped past and deliberately swerved toward us, scowling.
“What a prick,” I thought.
So much for the guidebook’s assertion that people in Ramsar are very friendly and like to see foreigners. Like to fleece foreigners more like it.
We walked to a hotel along the main road and got a wonderful, spotlessly clean and reasonably priced modern room with two single beds, a fridge, TV, and two chairs still covered in their factory plastic wrappings— something surprisingly common in Iran. The bathroom was a proper “wet room” with a high-powered shower and that rare luxury in this part of the world, a sit down toilet. We were both delighted. We threw our packs on the floor and flicked on the TV for the hell of it. On screen were more clips from the Iran-Iraq War just in case anybody was trying to forget about it.
We turned it off and went out. The beach and the Caspian Sea were calling our names, so we headed in their general direction. What we thought would be a quick five-minute stroll turned out to be a walk of a couple of miles and not a very scenic one at that. As we finally got closer to the Caspian, we passed row upon row of huge, opulent-looking houses, their gardens completely overgrown, and their outside walls made of nasty cement block. There was just no synergy to these homes; they looked expensive but at the same time cheap and unattractive.
When we got to the water, it was late afternoon. Although technically a lake, the Caspian looked for all the world like a sea, with fishermen lined along the front and boats going by just off shore. It would have been a nice spot, but it was covered with trash, both on the gravelly shore and in the water. We were both very disappointed. A nice-looking restaurant jutted out into the water like a tiny pier, which we thought a suitable enough place to grab a drink. Both of us ordered
We sat on the balcony looking out to sea as trash floated gracefully past. We both wished we hadn’t wasted a whole day in coming here. As we sat chatting, I noticed a guy and a girl in their late teens discreetly stroking each other’s thighs beneath their table. I couldn’t help but look and wondered how difficult it must be to be a young person with such ridiculous restrictions on dating. My mind wandered and I probably stared too long, because the girl saw me looking their way. She stopped stroking her boyfriend’s thigh immediately and looked very uncomfortable.
Ricardo started to read up on the Caspian in his guidebook and gave me the lowdown on the place. Apparently, the Caspian was the biggest lake in the world, covering over 140,000 square miles (larger than Germany) and measuring 752 miles from north to south and between 130 miles and 271 miles from east to west. It was five times larger than the next biggest lake, Lake Superior, and contained 44 percent of all the water in the world’s lakes. Its water was salty, although only about a third as salty as the sea, and it had no outlet into the ocean. Five countries bordered the Caspian: Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
The Caspian was in very poor health ecologically, although we didn’t need to read about that—all we had to do was just look at the crap floating past. It was under threat from shipping, the development of ports, industrial chemical waste, oil and gas exploration, broken oil and gas pipelines, and severe overfishing, particularly of its once huge caviar stocks. And perhaps most interesting of all, the oil and gas in the Caspian Basin is estimated to be worth an incredible 11 to 12 trillion dollars.
Cruising past us now was a fair-sized yacht whose occupants gave us a friendly wave. We returned the gesture and in doing so I remembered, and recalled for Ricardo, a time back in London when I’d been the one waving from a yacht but in a slightly different manner.
My brother Matt and I, along with my friend Mark and his friend Gary, had been sharing a well-earned post- work drink in a pub on London’s River Thames, overlooking the permanently moored Second World War battleship HMS
After several bladders full of liquid courage, I suggested that we try to crash the party. Mark was up for the challenge. We were still wearing suits from work, so looked relatively smart despite being only nineteen and twenty at the time.
Leading to the yacht was a long gangplank where several of the boat’s impeccably dressed staff were standing to meet and greet guests. “Let’s just walk up and straight past them as if we own the thing,” I said to Mark. He agreed.
We decided to button up our suit jackets as if this somehow made us look smarter and more successful, then strode confidently up the gangplank. Mark gave a little approving nod of the head to the guy who looked in charge, as if to say, “Well done, my man. Keep up the good work.”
I was sure we were about to get rumbled, but the staff member gave a gracious nod in response. Before we knew it, we were on the yacht proper. We couldn’t believe it, and by the looks on the faces of Matt and Gary, who were staring openmouthed from the pub, neither could they.
We headed to the party. Once we were mingling with the great and the good, it was easy to gain further access to the yacht’s interior. Inside was the height of opulence with ridiculously thick carpets, lavish furnishings, and private bars in all the rooms. On one floor, there was even a framed photo of the Queen with, presumably, the owner of the yacht. It was unlike any official photo I’d ever seen of the Queen, in that she wasn’t just smiling but
