Tour Guide, Shiraz, Iran
| 3 mins read
It's about 10 years that I am travelling and exploring the cities of Iran and neighbour countries most of the time. I can say it's the hardest thing to find a place in Iran if you want to find it by yourself.
In Iran, most of the streets are former paths that just have gotten wider so that vehicles can drive through them. There used to be twisty, messy and narrow alleys for walking and passing by animals. They were built this way because of geographical reasons. These kinds of alleys make longer shadows and lead winds in deserty and hot areas. So towns developed through time without having major changes in their maps. That's why you get lost easily here and might lose direction.
Asking directions from random people on the street is a very common interaction here in Iran. Even when you are a traveler yourself, people might stop you to ask an address. Almost no one feels bugged when they are being questioned about directions. People are ok with it and it's totally normal. Imagine a passer is walking on the sidewalk and is talking with his/her phone, then a car stops (sometimes in the middle of the street not pulling over even a bit!), the window goes down, the driver shouts: Excuse me, mister! where is blah blah street? After a sec, the passer notices the driver is talking to him/her. How do you guess s/he will react? I can tell you, s/he would tell through the phone: I'll call you later! then gets closer to the driver and tells them the direction.
Iranians would love to help travellers. But as you can guess, it doesn't work very well all the time. The driver probably should stop and ask again after two intersections.
Thanks to Google Maps, I don't need to deal with these kinds of problems! I just ask directions on the street when I want to use it as an ice breaker and start a conversation with an old man in a Bazaar. Sometimes asking addresses from people makes them feel helpful and beneficent.
There are still many missing things on maps here such as streets, businesses, locations, and even some villages. I enjoy inserting them to the map and I encourage others to do it as well. So whenever someone calls me on the street and asks me addresses, I get closer to them and tell them: Open your Google Maps.