It was rather complicated to leave Yazd as by mistake Miha took one of David's sandals (they look exactly the same) so we couldn't leave in time as by the time we realized the mistake Miha was already out somewhere, sightseeing :)
So we waited for him, we laughed at each other and we said goodbye to all the backpackers and hoped to reach Kerman by evening. Kerman lies close to the Pakistani border already, so this was our last planned stop in Iran. We started hurrying up a little because the heat started getting really unbearable under the scarf, having long sleeves etc. (being dressed from head-to-toe). But in the end we turned out to stay for longer than we expected..
huh...Kerman. Or host(ess), Atefe is an English teacher and also a tourist guide as her second job. She has a wonderful little daughter who spiced up our two days we spent there with car-top dancing and some hide-and-seek!
Atefe completely rearranged her day for us, she organized a car and arranged a substitute teacher for her evening English class, just to be able to take us to the nearby desert, the Kaluts. It lies 150 kms from Kerman, but still considered to be "near Kerman". Big country, compared to Hungary.
OK, de gave money for the petrol, turned on some music of Celine Dion and hit the road. Which means getting out of the heat of Kerman up to the moderate-tempered mountains and from there down to the burning heat of the desert. We tried to go at a reasonable time not to get cooked, have a picnic in the sunset but this still proved unbearable for me. David enjoyed it as he just gave me his stuff and told me "be back in a minute" and started running in the endless desert! :)
As soon as you arrive to this place a nice billboard welcomes you to the hottest desert of Earth. According to measurements the temperature can reach 65 degrees Celsius (which is right), if you go out around noon in the summer. No, I wouldn't advise that even to my family. It's a fact that when we went there again the next day early afternoon, we measured 51 degrees in the shade (!). Oh, yes, why we went back there. It happened so that we were just walking around among the sand dunes on our first night in Kerman, and we glanced a 4WD in a distance and some random people in the middle of nowhere. They were making a movie. The producer came to us and started asking questions. They just finished their dusk-time shot at that time. The title of the movie is Tourist (coming to the Iranian theatres in November!), and it's about the friendship of an Iranian and a German boy, how they start quarreling and make peace again in the end. It's not as bad a storyline as I supposed in the beginning. Iran is a closed country with few tourists, so they needed some foreigner-looking people really hard. We could completely fulfill that criteria. So the producer and the director asked us to come back to the shooting the next day to take part in some scene with a bunch of other tourists. As it turned out they also got other 3-4 tourists besides us, so we pitied them and we agreed. And of course this whole thing was pretty cool :)
BUT. It turned out that the following scene will also be filmed in the desert in the daytime. Ouch.
We talked through everything with Atefe, as being her guests it's rude to just get away when getting a better offer. But she understood and she helped us by translating between us and the crew. So we went back home as we came (but first we danced some in the night), packed our stuff and waited for the VIP car which took us to the village back in the mountains, where the crew stayed. They gave us a late night dinner and we sang and showed us some local Iranian dances. They insisted on us singing some Hungarian song so we sang "Boci boci tarka", a very basic children's song :) They liked it a lot! We had an excellent time and maybe this was the first time in Iran when we felt that the hand of all the strict rules and laws of politics cannot reach us. We spent our second-to-last day in Iran in the company of loose, proud Iranian men.
In return for our cooperation we got a free bus ticket to the Pakistani border, along with some water and food. The next morning everyone was wide awake, eating some original Iranian breakfast on a long "table" (plastic sheet) stretched on the floor. Then we hopped on the bus and started working!
We drank the cold water all day, I never had so much water like that day. It was more than 5 liters for sure. We had to act in crowds in two scenes, one of them in an abandoned caravanserai, and the other out in the deep desert at the place where we met them in the previous night. Both times they made us wear disgusting clothes, I don't understand why they have this images of foreigners (I hope it was just the normal exaggregation used in movies). And then came the truck packed with camels, needed for the second scene. I was very happy at first, but only until seeing that people kicking down those unfortunate tied-up animals from the truck. For instance, David's camel got wild, tearing off the rope attached to his nose, started weeping and fluttering with his bloody nose when they started recording. And my camel's mouth was a bit dirty because it had eaten his own excrement and he even smudged it to David's t-shirt. many times!... :) I've never seen David so pissed like that :) Okay, I understand that. But it was funny :)
Menwhile the sun came up, went down, made us degrees and comfortably hot air... an experience. Try it for yourself!
Go ------->Pakistan-->---->
