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It’s been a while, but I’m back with another set of travel blogs. I’ve taken a couple of trips since Easter Island, but mostly to more “vanilla” places that I didn’t bother writing up. This trip is definitely worth blogging though - these posts document my trip to Iran in March of 2019!
Long-time readers of this blog (do those exist?) will know that this was my second attempt at visiting the country. I had tried going in Spring 2017, but was foiled by the inconvenient election and subsequent actions of a Mr. Donald J. Trump. Spoiler alert: second time’s the charm! This time, I was traveling with Richard, hereinafter referred to as Dore, a friend from work. As with previous series, these will mostly be a collection of funny stories, interesting happenings, and thoughts about the country, and less a play-by-play. Though I may make an effort to give more travel advice than usual though, given how comparatively little info there is about traveling to Iran.
Iran had been high on my travel bucket list for a while before this trip finally happened. A couple of things about the country that I think make it particularly worth visiting / interesting:
Several people have expressed surprise that Americans are even allowed to visit Iran. Aside from previously mentioned periods of reciprocal banning, we are able to visit as tourists. But, one must go with an officially-sanctioned tour group and guide. This requirement also applies to the Canada and UK. Our company of choice was Key2Persia which seemed to have the most favorable reviews on the interwebs. More about them later.
The visa application process started uneventfully, though strangely they required us to send in our resumes. It was my first time updating mine since starting at Jane Street! I think this is to catch journalists, revolutionaries, and such? I saw some bad stories on the internet about folks working for BBC-affiliated TV series being denied. Regardless, after some delay, first I then Dore received the all important invitation code from the MFA (Ministry of Foreign affairs). This is a sort-of pre-approval, after which actually getting the visa is usually a formality. The next and final step was sending our passports to the “Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the United States.” This is located at the Pakistani embassy, as there hasn’t been an Iranian embassy since our countries had a little diplomatic spat in 1979. We received these codes around the 2018 holiday season, so it took us a bit of time to get our passports sent in. Then, in early February, I received a call from a mysterious number. Googling it revealed that it came from the Pakistani Embassy…this was not a good sign. And indeed, it turned out we needed to apply for our visas within 30 days of receiving the authorization code. Including the time taken sending in our application, I missed it by something like a single day. Irritatingly, our tour company had not known about this constraint / told us about it. So, I remained in visa limbo for quite a while, as our they tried to reapply for my authorization code. Given that it’d taken 40+ days the first time, I wasn’t particularly optimistic that things were going to work out. And of course with my luck, the days after I found this out were the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. This was sort of nice as its resulted in some interesting coverage in the Western news media of the Revolution and its effects. But of course, all governmental offices in Iran were closed for several days. Thankfully the story has a happy ending, as just two weeks later my visa was reauthorized, and I received my passport in the mail soon after.
The actual business of flying there was more straightforward. We booked an open-jaw itinerary on Qatar Airways flying into Tehran and out of Shiraz, transiting in Doha both ways.