Getting Into Iran
The adventure to get to the adventure
During the long, boring months of Covid lockdown, I thought a lot about places I wanted to go that would require extraordinary effort.
Iran was at the top of that list, and had been, for many years. But I always put it off, wishfully thinking that Iran and the USA would someday normalize relations and make my travel plans immeasurably easier. I won’t tip my hand as to which government I think has been more responsible for not respecting my selfish wishes, but here we are in 2023 with no end of acrimony in sight.
I began planning a trip there about two years before my intended launch date.
Most countries, while not having the greatest relationship with Iran, at least have it easy when it comes to tourist visas and freedom of movement within the country. But there are three countries currently denied any leniency: Canada, the UK, and the USA.
It didn’t take long to sketch out what I had to do. It was intimidating but possible.
First, I had to accept the notion that I (and the family members I would travel with) were suspected spies, straight off the bat. We would not be allowed any time without supervision, and not be at liberty to choose where we went without official approval.
There are tour companies on hand to sort out approved itineraries and the requisite ‘supervision’. The ones I searched in the USA and Europe were well out of my price range.
So I turned to companies in Tehran. They offered the same goods, but cheaper. A tour arranged through them would yield an approved applicant number, and this number was to be submitted with the visa application to the Iran embassy of my choice. The final decision, however, was the whim of whoever was at work that day, perhaps influenced by whatever recent political news was trending.
I spent the better part of a year researching these companies and eventually cultivating a relationship with one of them. They were always enthusiastic about our chances of getting in, but part of me assumed that they were just blind marketing.
I took two nine-day itineraries with them and merged them in a way that made one long, seamless trip through the central and western parts of the country. We established an exact entry date and which embassy I would visit to pay for and get the final paperwork.
We had to write up and submit detailed resumes, not just of jobs, but personal history, links to any and all internet sites we owned, social media presence, and an essay about why we wanted to be in Iran.
Then I sat on the project and did nothing for about six months, except to plan other travel both before and after.
About five months before my intended arrival date, it was time to take the first risk, which was to send payment to the tour operator and get the coveted application approval number. Tour prices had shot up since the first quotes, a result of continued US and EU sanctions.
It is not legal to pay anyone in Iran using a US bank account. This part was the most difficult and frustrating of the whole visa process, navigating how and where I could get funds from me to them. The shifting ground of sanctions made things worse. I was travelling in Eastern Europe at this point, so the trials and tribulations related to payment were an unwelcome distraction. After many failed attempts, we hit upon one that worked.
Now I just had to trust that this tour was legit and there would be no international incident closing Iran’s borders to US citizens.
On September 16, 2022, a 22-year old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died from injuries inflicted by the morality police in Tehran when they caught her ‘not wearing her hijab correctly’. It was the last straw for many young people in Iran and protests erupted once her death became known.
We were already in Istanbul, days from going to the Iranian embassy to finalize our visas. When I saw the burning cars and chaos of angry chanting and marching in cities across Iran on the news, I speculated we would be pulling the plug on the trip. I wondered if it would be worth it to even show up at the embassy. Having just emerged from a Covid lockdown, maybe they would now go into a political one.
Our tour operator, with whom I had been texting by WhatsApp every so often over the last month, suddenly went dark. I inferred that social media and all email servers, already under tight reign in Iran, had been shut down altogether.
I sat with my wife in our hotel room and said we needed to decide right then if we were going forward with the plan or just walk away. I was almost sure she would choose the latter.
She surprised me by saying she still wanted to go. Her risk tolerance is usually lower than mine, so I was cheered that we were on the same page.
It took two days to get into the doors of the embassy, in Sultanahmet, Istanbul. But after that, it was pretty much a standard take-a-number-and-wait process. We dressed up for it, my wife in a black abaya and my daughter wearing a headscarf. We paid for the visas and got out of there.
We were fortunate to get it done that day. The next day expat women from Iran and other countries began protesting outside this embassy, some cutting their hair in the street to mock the hijab laws and block the entrance.
The last detail was the dreaded Covid test, administered in a small clinic near our hotel. As Murphy’s Law would have it, this was the first time any country had asked for one in our last eight months of travel, and I had just gotten over a bout of Covid three weeks earlier.
Miraculously, we all came back negative.
The first leg of our flight was Istanbul to Dubai. It left late at night. The Flydubai ticketing agent saw our final destination of Shiraz, looked at our passports, and was clearly at a loss for what to do. We stood there for a long time while he conferred with someone on the phone. Finally, he issued the boarding passes but said, rather ominously,
“You are required to speak to the immigration police when you arrive in Shiraz.”
“Don’t you just mean we go through immigration like normal?”
“I don’t really know what happens there. They just told me that,” he admitted, shrugging.
Armed with this morsel of uncertainty, we went to the departure lounge. On a more positive note, after a week of silence, I finally received a text response from our tour operator. My message was Can you confirm that someone will meet us at the Shiraz airport? To which he simply said Yes. I found out later that it had become nearly impossible for anyone inside Iran to communicate with those outside.
In the Dubai International Airport transit lounge, I did my best not to look at the TV screens. I didn’t want to see how bad the protests were getting or how the US government was reacting. We would soon arrive in a country where we had no usable credit cards, cash, or embassy to seek help if things went sideways.
On the shuttle bus to our final flight, a group of Japanese women, all bubbly and chatty, were showing off their recent henna tattoos, obviously excited about their upcoming tour of Shiraz. They had a way of infecting the other passengers with happy energy. It lifted my mood and I decided everything was going to work out fine.
We passed over the dry and dusty Zagros mountain range, which covers much of southwestern Iran and has been the birthplace of more than one ancient empire. The Iranian women on board begrudgingly began donning their hijabs, waiting until the last minute before landing to do so.
At the immigration window in Shiraz airport, the officer inspected our passports, stamped our visas (printed on a separate piece of paper), and, without a pause smiled and said cheerfully,
“Welcome to Iran!”
And that was it. We were in.
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