Day 204: Ardabil – Bandar Anzali (بندرانزلی)

Oct 24 - Wake up in the morning mist of Ardabil, by far the coldest place we’ve been to in Iran. Take the highway east through Mir and up into the mountains. Here the brown fields give way to green hills, and progressively more vegetation before heading through a long tunnel. On the east side we emerge into dark green slopes and abundant trees. The road follows a canyon that forms the border of Iran and Azerbaijan, noted by the chain link fence on the north side of the road. There are no connections between the two countries here, and the fence in places is completely overgrown with vines. A lot of hairpin turns going down, dodging trucks, until reaching the lowlands bordering the Caspian Sea and the border town of Astara.

A bit about the Caspian. Though technically it is a lake, it is saline. The salinity is 1.2%, about a third of average ocean water. It is the largest inland sea in the world, or largest lake if you want to call it one. It is one of the remnants of the Paratethys Sea that includes the Aral Sea, a water body that separated from the even larger Tethys Sea about 34 million years ago, when a number of mountain ranges formed, including the Alborz. We have been looking at the sedimentary rocks formed by the Tethys Sea in NW Iran and also in eastern Georgia. The most well-known aquatic resident is the sturgeon. The sea has been shrinking over time, due to diversion (for irrigation) of the Volga River in Russia. Hence the coastline is currently at about 20 meters below sea level. Most of the shrinkage is noticeable outside Iran to the north, where the sea is very shallow. The part off Iran is much deeper, reaching 1000 meters. The position of the sea and the Alborz mountains to the south have created a very intense wet climate, seen nowhere else in Iran. This zone receives about 1 meter of rainfall a year, easily ten times more than most places. Perhaps because it is such a novelty, the coastline is immensely popular with Iranians for tourism, and is only about four-hour drive from Tehran.

Go off the main coastal highway at Gisum NP. Here, a side road goes through a deciduous forest to a wide, dark gray sandy beach. In summer this would be packed, but now it is almost empty. There is a cold wind and the water does not look especially inviting.

Onward to Bandar Anzali, where we walk around town for a bit.

In addition to the omnipresent photos of Iran-Iraq War martyrs, another photo seen all across Iran is the image of Qasem Soleimani. He was the leader of the Quds Force, a branch of the Revolutionary Guard that deals with foreign affairs and one of the most powerful people in Iran. He was killed in 2020 by a drone strike conducted by the US while he was in Iraq. In the renditions seen on billboards here, he always has a sort of charismatic grin and a neatly trimmed beard.

Take a speedboat into Anzali Lagoon.

Tonight is special as we are able to visit a friend of Janet’s from her work in Caracas. During her time working for the Venezuelan government geologic services department (in 2005), they received a mission from the corresponding offices of Iran. Among the people who came was a geoscientist named Panthea. They became friends and have corresponded electronically since. So today we visited her and her family at their home in Bandar Anzali. She puts on a wonderful meal of traditional food and brings over some guests.

Her English teacher comes by, and plays some songs, both American and Iranian, on his guitar. Though he says he does not like discussing politics, it happens anyway, which I’m sure is an issue in most Iranian households at the moment. The one opinion he expresses which seems incongruous with everything else is his high regard of Donald Trump. I ask for him to explain that in detail. In short, he feels that under the previous presidential administration of the US, the attitude was ‘the best of any US policy’ with regards to Iran. I ask if he knows anything else, such as Trump’s oft stated opinions about countries in general outside of a few select, rich European nations, or his commonly expressed affection for leaders who generally do not respect the election process. He does not seem to have much opinion or knowledge of this. He than says something about Jimmy Carter and Biden being a cabal of evildoers and acting together against Iran, and I realize that we have devolved into some odd conspiracy theory that is not worth exploring further.

So, in the same sense that American presidents are not elected according to their foreign policy promises, but rather what they propose domestically, those same presidents are often viewed outside the US solely by their specific foreign policy decisions.

There are more pictures and discussions we had during the visit, but I am only mentioning a few. For the well-being of all involved, I will not put the rest here in a public-access domain. Sadly, this is the current situation in Iran.

There is also a thirteen-year old here, visiting from the neighborhood, who also speaks English well. She talks with that clear, slow accent I hear from many Iranians. She doesn’t seem enthused about much of her environment in Bandar Anzali, and is clearly frustrated with the road ahead. In other words, bored with life as many teenagers claim to be. I’ve been told this is common, that young people, with any sense of what life is like outside Iran, have no interest in the philosophy that underpins the current political leadership. In a much larger sense, this younger generation is not at all suited to carry ‘the Islamic Republic’ forward. It is no wonder that such effort is made to deny the populace from access to social media and foreign news sites in general (I’ve found that news sources such as CNN are unavailable in most cities). It is a very crude effort that betrays itself as not understanding where the world (and its own people) are headed.

I ask Omid about this later, and he confirms that there are a significant number of young people who seem intent on ignoring the more traditional manifestations of Iranian life. While benefiting the idea of moving to a more progressive government, there are drawbacks. Nowruz, by far the biggest holiday of Iran, and which pre-dates Islam by thousands of years, can also be seen by youth as an uninteresting remnant of the past. Christmas trees are bought not because of any attachment to the holiday, but because they represent the West and something ‘modern’. There is a profound sadness to this, in a country boasting millennia of history and a clear understanding of their origins, to gradually drift away because of something so petty. The current government has only exacerbated this by doing things like closing the entrance to the Tomb of Cyrus at Nowruz, because they want to downplay holidays that aren’t Islamic (the tomb was a huge draw on this holiday before the targeted closure).