Iris Veldwijk is from Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, but she can rarely be found there. She is more likely to be seen at the side of a road or highway, holding out her thumb and hoping for a ride to her next destination.
Veldwijk, 24, first hitchhiked while studying in Denmark. Her roommate was a regular hitchhiker so she first traveled with her and then decided to try it on her own. She began hitchhiking around the world three years ago and has visited 59 countries so far. She used her savings when she first started, but recently began working while she travels, often in hostels or for other businesses that cater to travelers. She has been traveling non-stop for more than 20 months, and writes about her experiences on her blog mindofahitchhiker.
She made the decision to visit Iran when she was in Jordan. She discovered she had to travel back to Turkey to get a one-month tourist visa. “I would have gone to Iran a couple of months earlier if the visa had not been a hassle,” Veldwijk told IranWire via Skype from Spain.
After getting the visa, she went through Armenia to Iran. “I was hitchhiking with Armenian friends,” she says. “They were worried about me. They tried to change my mind. They said that hitchhiking in Iran would be dangerous. My last ride in Armenia was from two Russian guys, who dropped me off at the border.”
She arrived at the border when it was dark and too late to cross, so she checked into a hotel. She entered Iran the following day. “I had a kebab at the border and I got food poisoning,” she says. “So my first five days in Iran were not very pleasant.” Veldwijk says she does not usually stay in paid accommodation for long periods of time, but because she was sick, she had to stay in a mosaferkhaneh, or budget hotel.
On her way to Tabriz she met a group of German travelers, who offered her a ride. They were camping and she stayed with them one night. The next day, they dropped her off in Tabriz.
An Iranian couple picked her up on her way to Zanjan. “They were very nice. The woman spoke very good English. She explained some of the rules in Iran to me, especially about roads. She told me that hitchhiking is not common and that it would be better to get a ride in a car that has a woman in it.”
The Iranian couple dropped her at the female dormitory at the University of Zanjan. “They let me sleep there for a night,” Veldwijk says. “It was so fun — all the girls from the other rooms gathered around me. They were curious about what I was doing there. One of them spoke English and translated for all of them. Everybody danced in their pyjamas before going to bed. It’s too bad I don’t have photos of them, but I understand that they obviously wouldn’t want me to publish them.”
The following day, she headed off to Tehran, standing on the roadside and hoping for a ride. A truck stopped for her and she got in, but she was worried it was not a good idea. “I didn’t feel safe. I showed him the ring on my finger and told him I was married,” she says. She asked him to drop her off on the highway. “A nice woman, who was called Kobra, picked me up and dropped me off at the train station.”
She got the train to Tehran, where she stayed with an Iranian friend she had met in Armenia a couple of weeks earlier. “Tehran is a huge city. I usually got the subway in, and stayed in the women-only coaches. People got on to the trains with bags and sold almost everything on the train.”
Veldwijk then hitchhiked from Tehran to Chaloos, a city in the northern part of the country close to the Caspian Sea. “It was my dream to see and swim in the Caspian Sea. I kept my clothes on and went in to the water. After that, a woman on the beach held up a towel for me to change behind. I was 100 per cent naked in Iran near the sea.”
She next went back to Tehran and from Tehran, traveled by bus to Bandar Abbas in the south. After Bandar Abbas, Veldwijk visited Qeshm island, Shiraz, Isfahan, Kashan, Urmia and then went on to Turkey. In Qeshm, she met a German-Polish couple and hitchhiked with them for part of her journey.
“I had been told to avoid hitchhiking to Bandar Abbas. But next time I go to Iran, I will hitchhike every route. I felt safe there.” She says she found it easier in some ways than hitchhiking in Europe. “Usually in Europe if a car stops and I say no, people get offended, but in Iran they expect you to say no, so it’s easier. I could choose my rides. Also, there are so many women in Iran who own cars and drive by themselves.” She says she often got into cars with women and children in them, something that she does not usually experience in Europe, apart from in Poland and France. “Usually women who have a kid in the car will avoid picking up a hitchhiker.”
When talking about the friends she made, she says she found out a lot about Iranian young people. She says she was surprised by some of the mindsets and beliefs she came across. “Many Iranian young people are atheists. They don’t believe in any greater power. I also met a lot of people who were trying to go to the US and looking for a way to get a green card.”
During her travels, Veldwijk was never stopped by the police. In fact, once Iranian police officers helped her to find a ride. “I was waiting on a highway to go to Shiraz. Police came up to me and stopped a bus for me. I don’t know how, but I explained to them that I needed a free ride. They probably didn’t understand what I was doing.” She says the police stopped a car and asked the male driver a question. Then they told her he was going to Shiraz and she could get a ride from him. “It was strange for me, because I’d heard that the Iranian police didn’t let women sit next to men in cars, but that wasn’t true.”
Veldwijk says she has lots of friends in Iran now, so she won’t need to pay for accommodation at all when she comes back, which she plans to do. She thinks one of the reasons it is so safe is because there are so few international tourists.
“Iranians respect international visitors and welcome them,” she says, adding that most people actually ignored her and men did not shout out to her. “When I entered the city of Van in Turkey, the catcalls started. At that moment I told myself: Welcome back to the real world.”
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