In 2022, I decided to go to Iran to climb Damavand, the highest mountain in Iran and the highest volcano in Asia.
Alone.
I was 30, I had never been to the Middle East before, and I had never climbed anything close to 5,610 metres.
A lot of people told me not to go.
Which of course made me even more curious.
I did have my own doubts. Was travelling to Iran somehow supporting the Islamic regime? Was going there alone actually a good idea?
But as a good physics PhD student, I was simply too curious not to find out for myself.
Because of sanctions, my Danish bank cards wouldn't work in Iran, and neither would my Danish SIM card. So before leaving, I withdrew a lot of cash, went to a Middle Eastern shop in Copenhagen and bought some clothes and a headscarf, and spent hours on YouTube trying to learn how to wear it.
Are you sure you're going to Tehran?
At Istanbul Airport, it slowly started to dawn on me that maybe what I was doing wasn't completely normal.
The staff kept insisting that I was going the wrong way.
“Are you sure you're going to Tehran?”
Yes.
After an extra thorough check, I eventually got on the plane. I seemed to be the only Western woman travelling alone.
That was when I got really nervous.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
Luckily, there was a young, handsome Iranian guy sitting close to me who kept smiling kindly at me. Apparently that was enough to stop me from running off the plane again.
But I remember having this little voice in my head asking whether maybe, this time, I had gone a bit too far with my solo adventures.
I arrived in Tehran in the middle of the night. The handsome guy from the plane helped me find passport control, and afterwards I got help buying a local SIM card.
The next day, I was supposed to meet an Iranian couple who had replied to a Facebook post I had made because I was trying to figure out where to find camping gas.
First, though, I had around ten hours to wait at the airport.
Somewhere during those ten hours I started to relax.
Also, at that point, there wasn't really any way back.
The Iranian hippies
Eventually, the couple picked me up.
We drove north in an old car that broke down once on the way. It seemed fairly fragile, but somehow it held together.
The couple I stayed with were Iranian hippies who tried to live as self-sufficiently as possible. This included growing their own hash.
We had a lot of conversations about Iran and the rest of the world.
They were against the Islamic regime, but they were also critical of the US and Europe. They didn't dream of Iran becoming Western. They wanted their own Iranian way.
After a lot of history lessons, good food, some acclimatisation for me and a few joints, I left for Damavand.
In the mountains we are all free
I had never climbed anything this high before. Definitely not alone.
I had packed food for seven or eight days because Google hadn't been particularly helpful in telling me how long this was actually going to take.
When I arrived at basecamp, I met two women and a man.
One of the women spoke a little English, and one of the first things she said to me was:
“Take it off! Take it off!”
She was pointing at the headscarf covering my hair.
“In the mountains we are all free.”
So I took it off.
I followed them up to the camp at around 4,000 metres. There was a big mountain hut where they were staying together with lots of other Iranian climbers. I pitched my tent nearby.
I had carried all this food up the mountain, but I barely got the chance to eat any of it because everyone kept sharing their food with me.
Some people drank alcohol. Some women wore headscarves. Some people prayed. Others didn't.
Somehow, up there, all of that seemed less important.
We were all just on the same mountain.
That night was incredibly cold, and I started to feel the altitude.
Still, I decided to continue towards the summit with the three of them the next morning, even though another day of acclimatisation probably would have been the sensible choice.
We got up at 3 am.
There were a lot of vertical metres ahead of us.
It was not easy.
The altitude hit us differently, and at some point I became so cold from waiting that I had to leave the group and continue on my own.
Later, I caught up with a large group of Iranian men.
None of them spoke English.
I didn't speak Persian.
But they were extremely happy to have me in their group, so I joined them and we continued towards the summit together.
We reached the top.
5,610 metres.
And everyone made it safely back down.
The woman on the train
After recovering from the mountain, I went back to stay with the hippie couple for a bit. Then I hitchhiked to Tehran and spent another ten days travelling around Iran alone.
I met up with the handsome guy from the plane again.
And I started meeting people who changed the way I thought about the country.
Several times when I took the train, a woman would sit down next to me and start talking to me.
They didn't ask for pity. There was actually a lot of pride in the way they spoke about Iran.
But they wanted me to understand something.
“We are not the Islamic Republic.”
One woman told me that her biggest dream was to be allowed to play the flute in public.
She taught flute in secret.
She asked me to go home and tell people about it.
I met another young woman who dreamed of becoming a tattoo artist and asked if I wanted to take LSD with her.
And again and again I met people who invited me into their homes, helped me, fed me and shared parts of their lives with me.
I had arrived in Iran wondering if maybe everyone back home had been right.
Maybe I was naive.
Maybe travelling there alone was a terrible idea.
But when I think about that trip now, those aren't the things I remember.
I remember the people.
The couple who picked up a complete stranger from the airport because she needed camping gas.
The food that kept appearing in front of me on Damavand even though I had brought enough for a week.
A group of men I couldn't speak to, but somehow climbed a 5,610 metre mountain with.
Women on trains who wanted me to understand something about their country that they felt wasn't reaching the outside world.
And I remember standing on a mountain with a woman I had just met, who pointed at my headscarf and told me to take it off.
“In the mountains we are all free.”