Thursday, June 13, 2013

No visa to Iran

Written in a georgian home, OzugretiIn the morning we wake up early for a good breakfest and we're away towards Ardesen.

My tablet has a full batteries again, both of them and that doesn't happen that often. Until now I didn't deplate the battery a single time but in the harshest times it got to 30% of the primary battery and the secondary one completly depleted.

We were running down the hill inside the back of our host's pickup truck. The truck was speeding through the randomly paved and steep roads picking children on the way.


We disembarked in central Ardesen and started a quest for wifi. I forgot to mention that our guests didn't have the internet. We try to get to a wifi spot for obvious reasons and also because we need to know the status of our iranian visa. So far, the consulate didn't send us anything. The deadline is in a few days.
It was incredibly hard to find a wifi spot. People offered us computers, they gave us tea and talked to us about a million things but no way to connect. Besides their good will, the people didn't know they even had a wifi let alone a wifi password. After countless attempts we made our way into a high school. Some of the teachers spoke english (victory!) and they called the english teachers to make the communication flawless. They invited us for food into the school canteen so we got our free lunch but still no wifi.
We ended up getting wifi in front of a store which sold chainsaws. They knew their wifi password and we got our internet. No news about our visa anyway.
So we got out of Ardesen, to some city called Of, between Rize and Trabzon.
Still time to visit some mountains so we wanted to hitchhike further into the mainland. Before we even started a young couple very much in love stopped and we rode with them until Uzungol.
The next day we rode with them high into the mountains, we reached the snow in 2500 meters and didn't even 19062013Today we hitchhike to Trabzon. The stress is rushing through our veins. Will we get our visa? There were times we wondered about how it'll go and elaborated various hypothesis, some more realistic than others. I was wondering weather Iran will discover that I'm also french. It's not that hard to search my email and discover tons of french forum posts and whatnot and probably not too difficult to figure out that I also have a French passport. And Iranians don't like double nationalities and they seem to like the french even less.Or they could just have forgotten to ask us some information needed for the visa and we'll have to wait one more week. Don't I know administrative officials are useless as hell, I've lived in France long enough.So we entered this iranian embassy after eating brunch with our last driver (another free meal) at a local restaurant, it was really great food.
There was a woman who, I am sorry to say would look her best in a burka and had an obvious hormonal problem. She asked us for a reference number, how the hell are we supposed to know that? The last guy a week ago asked us the same question at first but when we told him we had no such thing he didn't seem to care that much and just took scans of our passports to send to Tehran.
The woman came back after a while and told us just this:
"No reply from Teheran. No visa."
When we asked why and what should we do she just said "No visa, I don't know. This month no visa maybe next month visa." At least she should learn proper english when you work at an embassy.
Next month, easy for her to say, we have to cross Iran, we can't wait a month for it. We don't even want to stay in their stupid country, at least not right now and not in our current mood. We just need to cross it and be on our way.
No visa to Iran

We've heard such wonderful things about the Trabzon consulate, now they just seem to be incompetant assholes with no clue whatsoever.They should at least have known that we don't stand a chance without that reference number or they should at least have sent us an email to say that Teheran was not responding, they said so much the first time.
So we searched for a wifi spot again and signed up with key2persia, a travel agency which obtains these reference numbers.
We asked them if we could retrieve our visa in Yerevan, Armenia. This way we can at least travel east and leave Turkey behind even though it's full of good memories.

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