Since getting back to Canada, our site has been getting a lot of search traffic on the topic of our journey from Turkey over­land into Iran. I’ve also had people on other web­sites I fre­quent ask me ques­tions about this par­tic­u­lar border cross­ing. This post is just meant for those folks looking for more inform­a­tion on this topic. When we were in Turkey, we went through our own period of uncer­tainty once we decided to cross into Iran. There is not a lot of info out there about how to do it.

Here’s what we did to arrange Iranian visas in Turkey, in mid-2010:

1. Arranged for Iranian Visas through a third-party Iranian visa agency (Touran Zamin)

There’s a few other agen­cies offer­ing this service but after reading online reviews, Touran Zamin seemed to be the most highly regarded overall. In our exper­i­ence, they were very prompt and friendly. We had some ques­tions about the intric­a­cies of the visas (more on that below), and they did their best to explain things. What these guys do is to contact the Iranian gov­ern­ment min­istry respons­ible for issuing visas, and submit an applic­a­tion on your behalf to have your visa pre-approved by the min­istry. They will then issue an approval number to you and to the Iranian embassy or con­su­late of your choice. You simply bring that number to the con­su­late after a certain date, and they will issue your visa, no real ques­tions asked. Touran Zamin prom­ises some­thing like a 10-day turn­around, after which (if approved) you can go to the embassy and get your visa. In our case, they delivered it in about a week, and we were approved on our first try.

If you are not approved, I have read that you can apply again and your pre­vi­ous failed applic­a­tion shouldn’t count against you. The situ­ation with tourist visa approvals has changed several times over the past ten years during moments of dip­lo­matic squabbles between Iran and western coun­tries. The min­istry has been known to reject applic­a­tions from foreign nation­als of spe­cific coun­tries during these times. To be fair, the West given Iran a pretty tough go of things in a lot of ways. Diplomacy is always a two-way street.

Special note: Americans cannot cur­rently visit Iran as inde­pend­ent trav­el­lers due to obvious dip­lo­matic issues between the two coun­tries. However, Americans are allowed to visit as part of an Iranian-organized guided tour group. Unfortunately, I can’t say any­thing about these tours, except that my mother-in-law went on a trip like that several years ago and has never said any­thing bad about it. Also: an Israeli stamp in your pass­port will nix your travel plans to Iran, and vice versa, as far as I know.

You can always skip the middle man (Touran Zamin), and just apply to the embassy dir­ectly, but then they submit that applic­a­tion to the min­istry, and the process is sup­posedly much longer (weeks to months). You can also apply for a visa from the Iranian Embassy in your home country, but this is appar­ently another drawn out process, taking months some­times. As far as I can tell, going through one of the visa agen­cies is the quick­est pos­sible way.

All of this was done by email and through the Touran Zamin website, except that inter­na­tional sanc­tions have cut Iran off from the inter­na­tional mon­et­ary sytem, so Touran Zamin, as an Iranian company, cannot accept credit cards. Instead they ask you to submit their fee to a German bank account. Once you provide a track­ing number to them for the payment, they release your approval code by email. Sound like a bad spy movie? It gets more com­plic­ated from here...

2. Paid the Visa Agency fee through a bank

We tried several Turkish banks, in the hopes that we could give them the German account number and the fee, and they could do the trans­fer for us for an addi­tional bank fee. This involved a few hours of hoofing it around Antalya. If you’ve ever been to Antalya, you’ll know that there are many, many things more fun to see and do in Antalya than visit its banks. So I hope this post can save you from wasting your time as we did. Basically, they all said no.

We needed to have an account with them to do it, and although we had the option of opening one (which sur­prised me), we didn’t think that made much sense. In the end we went through our own bank back in Canada. I believe if you have a European bank account, you won’t have these issues.

For us, because we are Canadian, the German bank number Touran Zamin gave us did not play nice with our own North American banking system (for one thing, the number of digits in a bank account is dif­fer­ent). We had hoped to put the payment through online, but we actu­ally had to get in touch with our bank back home by phone and email, includ­ing some faxes and signed papers, in order to trans­fer the fee. We weren’t really in a rush, so all of this occurred over about three weeks. If you are in a hurry, you should be able to do it in less than two.

Total Cost For Visa Agency Deal:

• 35 Euros (for each visa) to Touran Zamin for visa approval service*
• $15 charge from our bank for the transfer
• $20-ish incid­ental costs for things like Internet, inter­na­tional phone cards and faxes
• A wasted after­noon in beau­ti­ful Antalya

*Note: this fee is just the agency fee, and is on top of the actual visa fee you pay later at the embassy.

3. Arranged to pick up our Iranian Visas at the Iranian Embassy in Ankara, Turkey

The other nice thing about going through an agency is that you can arrange to pick up your visa at any Iranian embassy in the world (I think). For us, we told Touran Zamin that we would be able to get them in Ankara, Turkey’s capital city. I’ve heard that the Ankara Embassy (Iran’s main embassy in Turkey) is one of the best places to go. People have been known to get them in smaller cities closer to the border, but I’ve also heard mixed things about the success in those embassies. We chose to play it safe. I can’t give you much advice for coun­tries other than Turkey, but I believe the process would be similar.

Total Cost For Arranging Visas in Ankara:

• 20 Euros (for each visa) to Touran Zamin for them to arrange to get the visa at a spe­cific embassy

4. Spent three days in Ankara seeing the sites and jumping through bur­eau­cratic hoops

It took three days, and five visits to the Embassy to finally get the visas.

You need a few things to actu­ally get the visa. Make sure you have them before going to the embassy:

• pass­ports
• pass­port photos (bring a couple copies minimum)
• pass­port pho­to­cop­ies (bring a couple copies minimum)
• visa fee

We woke our first morning in Ankara intent on finding a copy place and pass­port pho­to­graphy studio and then heading to the embassy to pick up our visas. We figured we could be done wrangling our visas by dinner time. Imagine how proud of ourselves we were after asking dir­ec­tions led to us to what we needed in less than an hour. Unfortunately, our luck didn’t hold much after that.

The copy shop we found ( a small inter­net cafe with a photocopier/scanner) offered a couple of chal­lenges. Apparently, Canadian pass­ports have secur­ity fea­tures which makes them come out unread­able on pho­to­cop­ies. Luckily, we had pho­to­graphed our pass­ports before leaving Canada, and emailed these pic­tures to ourselves as backups. So instead, we logged into our email and printed these photos.

The photo place was just around the corner, and we got some usable, but very unflat­ter­ing head­shots of ourselves in Iranian visa size (I can’t remem­ber what this is, but the photo studio knew). Special Note: Iran is an Islamic theo­cracy. Women are expec­ted to keep Hijab (wearing a head­scarf and cov­er­ing their arms and legs), includ­ing in their visa photos. The family at the photo studio got quite a kick out of seeing Laura figure out how to put hers on for the first time.

It was about a 30 min. walk to the Embassy, and as we approached I reached into my bag to get all of our papers out and ready. We stopped for a moment so Laura could put on her scarf. This is when I real­ized that I left my pass­port at the copy place in the guy’s scanner. I jogged the 3 km back to the copy place, cursing my blatant stu­pid­ity every step of the way. Luckily, our friend at the copy shop was neither dis­hon­est, nor par­tic­u­larly aware that he had my pass­port in his scanner. I sheep­ishly asked for the pass­port, and then jogged back to the embassy, while Laura waited patiently in a park. It was only now, after ringing the bell fruit­lessly at the embassy gate, that we learned from a passing Turk that the embassy was closed that day for a holiday. So we trudged back toward the hotel, along the same three kilo­metre route I had just run. It seemed a fitting con­clu­sion to a bungling day.

The next day we did it all again, only this time we had what we needed and knew where to go.

Total Cost For Visa Paperwork:

• Probably $20 for pass­port copies, Internet access, and photos (I don’t recall how many Turkish Lira, but it wasn’t any more than this)

5. Finally got into the Embassy

The embassy was a bit  of an exper­i­ence. We were buzzed in through a big gate, and then buzzed in through a second secur­ity area where we signed in with a bored looking secur­ity guard, before being ushered into a waiting room. There were several Iranians sitting in creeky old chairs, exist­ing in what appeared to be various stages of bur­eau­cratic limbo. Nobody was speak­ing. A TV in the corner blared Iranian national TV, cutting out to loud and blurry static more often than showing clear pic­tures. Nobody turned it down or off.

Paintings of Iran’s revolu­tion­ary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini and his suc­cessor, Ayatollah Khamenie, stared down at us. One wall was a giant one-way window.

There was no number system, and no appar­ent order for who was to be called next. Our only glimpse into offi­cial­dom was two rein­forced glass windows with surly looking mous­tached offi­cials behind them. We didn’t want to be rude, so we weren’t sure if we should go to the windows or wait to be called. One of the women in the waiting room made a helpful gesture to beckon us to go ahead and approach one of the windows, so we did.

The man turned out to be friend­lier than he looked, espe­cially after we told him that we planned to go to Tabriz, one of several Iranian cities we had mem­or­ized based on maps in our guide­book. Since we weren’t plan­ning on being Iran for several more weeks, we really didn’t know much about Tabriz or most of the other cities we recited. Our trip was too off-the-cuff to plan that far ahead. We had just read some­where that the Embassy would want to know your loose itin­er­ary, so we had mem­or­ized one.

“Tabriz! That is my city!” he said with obvious pleas­ure. “It is very beau­ti­ful. Most beau­ti­ful place in Iran.”

Once the man from Tabriz learned that we had a pre-approval number from the min­istry, he dis­patched someone to fetch our file. After a bit of waiting he called us up again and told us that we would have to pay a fee, leave our pass­ports, and come back in ten days to collect our visas. Laura and I looked at each other. Disappointment clear on both of our faces. Ten days! We had sched­uled some flights out of Turkey within the week (it’s a long story) and the pro­spect of spend­ing ten more days waiting around Ankara wasn’t really in the plan. I very politely explained this, and asked if there was any­thing the man from Tabriz could do. He went away again, ostens­ibly to speak to a super­ior, and came back to tell us that if we paid the fee and left our pass­ports today, we could pick up our visas tomor­row. He gave us dir­ec­tions to a bank down the street where we could pay our fee. We thanked him pro­fusely and stressed just how much we were looking forward to seeing the unri­valled beauty of Tabriz.

6. Paid the visa fee at a local bank; got our Iranian Visas

Again, Iran is cut off from the inter­na­tional mon­et­ary system, so don’t expect to be able to whip out your credit card and get things done. In fact, they don’t accept cash either, at least not at the embassy dir­ectly. Instead you have to go down to a local bank to make a deposit into their account. The embassy will give you a slip of paper that you can give the teller. This didn’t take very long, but I believe we had to pay some more fees to the bank on top of our visa fees. We did all of this in Turkish cur­rency (I think... it may have been Euros). You have to bring the deposit receipt back to the embassy, as well as drop off your passport.

Content that we were finally getting things done, we dropped off our pass­ports with a plan to return the next day. After our first four visits, by now we had our route to the embassy all figured out, and had no prob­lems arriv­ing early in the day to collect our visas. True to his word, the man from Tabriz had everything ready for us, and we left him with our grat­it­ude and one last comment about the fabled beauty of his home city.

Total Cost For Actual Visa Fee:

• It’s funny; I can’t remem­ber for sure. I think it was around $170 each. If I can dig this info up some­where, I will update this. It doesn’t matter much anyway, this fee is dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent nation­al­it­ies. I think we also paid a small fee to the bank for the transaction.

7. Travelled to Van, in Eastern Turkey to arrange a bus ride across the border

Although our trip took us out of Turkey and then back again before we headed east, most trav­el­lers will likely want to use their visas sooner. The visas are good for three months from date of issue. Train and bus travel in Turkey is excel­lent, although the dis­tances are often longer than they seem. We even­tu­ally made it to Van by train, where we bought some bus tickets to cross the border into Iran. I don’t remem­ber what the bus cost to go from Van to Orumiyeh, Iran, but it wasn’t par­tic­u­larly expens­ive. Maybe equi­val­ent to 20 or 40 dollars each. It was about an eight hour drive, and we were the only west­ern­ers on the bus. We chatted politely with some of the mostly Iranian pas­sen­gers. We learned the man from Tabriz is not the only Iranian who believes his home is the most beau­ti­ful part of the country. We also got our first taste of very pleas­ant Iranian hos­pit­al­ity, with offers of shared food and polite conversation.

8. Had one of the easiest border cross­ings ever, and really enjoyed our time in Iran

The border cross­ing itself was, frankly, a breeze, although we were a little con­cerned about our visas. Because we had waited close to the three month period of valid­ity before cross­ing the border (the visas can be used for up to three months after getting them), we were con­cerned that if that period ran out while we were in the country, that our visas would be offi­cially expired. I know that’s a little con­fus­ing, and it’s because we are talking about two things: our visas were 30-day visas, meaning we could stay in Iran for up to 30 days. But they also had a valid­ity period of three months. This is the window of time that begins when you get the visa in your pass­port, and ends when you cross the border into Iran. If you don’t cross the border within that 3 months, you will have to apply for a new visa.

I was con­cerned that since we would be cross­ing the border only a couple of days before the end of this window that we would have prob­lems. We didn’t. And you prob­ably won’t either. This was one area where I could find very little info online, and I was admit­tedly con­cerned leading up to our border cross­ing. I scoured the Lonely Planet forums to little avail and even asked Touran Zamin by email what they thought. They replied that they were “pretty sure” it would be fine, but a worst case scen­ario would involve extend­ing our visas in Iran before they expire.

I asked the border guards, but the only thing they cared about is that our visas were valid when they stamped it. They said not to worry about any­thing and to enjoy our 30 days in Iran. Although we got called into a special line for for­eign­ers, and spoke briefly with a couple of border offi­cials in a small office space, they were all very friendly, and pro­cessed us in less than twenty minutes. We met a pair of German motor­cyc­lists who were also cross­ing into Iran, and from what I could tell, they were pro­cessed very fast as well. Our entire bus pulled out of there in under 30 minutes, and we were in!

A couple more notes on travel in Iran:

1. Yes, you need to bring cash into Iran. There are no bank machines in the country that can access the inter­na­tional mon­et­ary system. I’ve heard it’s pos­sible to get credit card advances in some of the biggest hotels in Tehran, but it’s not easy or advis­able to rely on this. Traveller’s cheques aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. We brought a com­bin­a­tion of American dollars and Euros, split up and tucked away in various places on us and in our bags. I believe it was less than $3000, and we left the country with money left after thirty days.

2. Iran is really friendly, so bring some small gifts or pic­tures from home to show people. The lan­guage barrier, when it exists, is usually not enough to stop people from trying to welcome you to their country. Pictures etc. make great con­ver­sa­tion helpers and break the awk­ward­ness of not being able to say much.

3. Expect to be sur­prised: whatever your expect­a­tions of Iran, just know that you prob­ably have it all wrong. Not very many coun­tries have had so much baloney said about them in the western media, espe­cially where so much of that is pro­pa­ganda and lies and fool­ish­ness. Years of sanc­tions and hard-nosed foreign policy have pun­ished the people of Iran unfairly, crip­pling the kind of eco­nomic devel­op­ment and cul­tural exchange that could benefit Iranians and break down these ste­reo­types. These policies have been utter fail­ures, imple­men­ted in order to weaken a dis­taste­ful regime, but often strength­en­ing it instead. Try not to act sur­prised the first time someone says “Ahmadinejad is Terrorist!” to you on the street. Sentiment among Iran’s 70-million people is as diverse as you’d expect.

It is a fas­cin­at­ing country, with mil­len­nia of his­tor­ical and cul­tural her­it­age. It is also easily the most friendly country we’ve visited. I hope this helps some of you get there. If you have spe­cific ques­tions, post them in the com­ments below.

Cheers,
Chris Beauchamp

p.s. — Enjoy a few more pic­tures, just because. You can see a bunch more in our Iran posts from during our trip. Search the archives at the top of the page, or click here.