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I arrived in Tehran after a long days travelling from Dorset. I had an indirect flight from London to Istanbul, where I had a five-hour wait for a connecting flight to Tehran. Five hours at any airport is a long time and it was with relief that the departures board finally indicated that my flight was ready for boarding. The flight only took two hours and thirty-five minutes and landed at Mehrabad International Airport at 01.30 on Sunday morning. When planning this trip I found that most international flights arrived in Tehran in the middle of the night. It wasn't ideal, but then again I guessed that taxi drivers and hoteliers in the city would be used to tourists arriving at strange hours of the night, and my arrival was probably not exceptional.
I stepped down the steps of the aircraft into the pleasantly warm night air and set foot at last, after all these months of planning, on the Islamic Republics soil. A short trip in an airport bus deposited us outside the arrivals hall, where all the locals ran to the immigration desk to beat the queues. I walked casually preparing myself mentally for the onslaught of Iranian bureaucracy at the immigration control and customs. As it turned out a breathed through the formalities, not having to answer a single question at immigration. Obviously the battle had taken place the previous month at the embassy in London to obtain the visa. While waiting for my luggage to appear on the carousel I changed US$100 at the branch of the Melli Bank. I left with a very large wad of 10,000 rial notes and was glad I didn't change any more as I very soon ran out of places to hide it. The exchange rate was 8,335 rials to the dollar.
Despite it being 02.00 in the morning the airport was packed with people. I made my way to the taxi kiosk to buy a ticket for downtown. The kiosk is a brilliant idea, as you no longer had to deal and negotiate with individual drivers. 30,000 rials paid for the trip. Unfortunately when the drivers heard that I wanted to go to the Hotel Mashad on Amir Kabir Street, they all refused to take me. It turned out that the drivers would get a commission from most hotels for dropping off guests from the airport. Of course the drivers knew that they wouldn't get any commission from taking me to a cheap place like the Hotel Mashad. Eventually a driver decided to take me and I climbed into a white Paykan, the national car of Iran and headed into the city.
The Paykan is to cars what the Klashnikof is to guns. The cars are unstoppable and even if they do breakdown, anyone can fix them on the side of the road. The car is an exact replica of the old British car, the Hillman Hunter, which went out of production in Britain decades ago. Only a few years ago up to 90% of cars on Iranian roads were Paykans, although today I believe that production of this classic Middle Eastern car has ceased. Imports are beginning to replace it; the Kia Pride seems to be a popular choice amongst Iranian motorists. The paint shop department at the Paykan factory must have had the same philosophy as Henry Ford; you can have any colour Paykan you want as long as it's white. This gave the chaotic streets of Tehran an unusual uniformity, as identical Paykans, in various states of disrepair battled for the finite road space available.
Arriving in the middle of the night saved me the trauma of Tehran traffic. For a few hours at least, that would have to wait until daylight that morning. I picked up a few clues as the taxi shot through one red traffic light after another. The driver commented that the police are sleeping, so people drive however they like. The journey didn't take long as the roads were clear and the traffic moved freely and quickly. Along the way the driver tried endlessly to get me to change my mind about which hotel to stay at. Every other sentence he would tell me that the Hotel Mashad is shit. 'It is shit, shit, shit! Why you want to stay there? Look here is a nice four star hotel, only US$50 a night!' The journey continued like that the whole way stopping in front of smart hotels, where he would proceed again to tell me how great this hotel was and how shit the Hotel Mashad was. Finally we arrived outside the Hotel Mashad on Amir Kabir Street.
'Look, the place is shit. You don't want to stay here, I can take you to a nice hotel for only US$50 a night', the driver explained, almost pleading with me in a last ditch effort to get me to change my mind. 'Yes, but this hotel is only US$3 a night, that is why I stay here. My friends recommend it to me, they say it is very good', I reply, still smiling despite the lateness of the hour.
With a resigned look the driver gave up and opened the boot and I retrieved my backpack. Just then the window on the first floor opened and the manager looked out, saw me and rushed down to unlock the door. I took a double room and by 02.45 collapsed on a rather rock-hard bed and tried to sleep. As I would soon find out travelling around the country from hotel to hotel, the majority of beds were as hard as concrete and the pillows were more the density of sandbags than goose down. I thought that after such a long and tiring day I would have been asleep in a moment, but it seemed to take hours, my head spinning with ideas and thoughts about Iran before I finally fell asleep.
During the night I dreamed of this thunderous noise but soon woke to realise that it wasn't a dream but the five lanes of traffic on the street below me. I crawled up the bed at around 07.30 and peered through the threadbare curtains at the chaotic street below. When I arrived last night there wasn't another car on the street, now the traffic could hardly move as a huge swathe of vehicles fought its way along Amir Kabir Street. I did my best to try and catch a few more hours' sleep but I couldn't win against the noise from the street. By 09.30 I gave up and my first day in Tehran began.
My first priority was to move to a quieter room at the back of the hotel away from the street; the noise from the traffic was deafening. Once this was done I went to visit the offices of the Mountaineering Federation to find out some information about guides and trekking on Mt Damavand in the Alborz Mountains, north of Tehran. I hadn't managed to find much information on trekking this mountain before I left home and thought that the federation offices would be the best place to start asking questions. The helpful manager from the hotel also accompanied me that morning to their offices next to the Shahid Shirudi Sports Centre on a side street off Mofatteh Street.
We walked out of the hotel and were hit by this wall of noise, it was quite shocking the level of noise as five lanes of traffic thundered past, every truck, bus, car and motorbike fighting for every inch of road space. To talk to anyone on the street you had to almost shout to make yourself heard. Before we could go anywhere, we first had the challenge of crossing the road to reach a taxi parked on the opposite side. In any normal city this task would not pose too many problems, but this was Tehran and crossing a road is a life or death situation. Crossing the road is definitely not for the faint-hearted or those with a nervous disposition. The only way to do it is to have faith in Allah and step into the road and weave through the passing traffic as it swerves around you, while keeping an eye out for any vehicles coming up the wrong side of the road (taxis reversing is a common hazard). Hesitation is lethal and you have to keep inching your way through the traffic with a definite sense of purpose. This is so that the drivers know that you are going to walk in front of their car and that no matter how much they hoot at you they are going to have to go around you. Once you make it to the pavement on the other side, check for motorbikes, and then you're safe until the next crossing.
I can honestly say that I have never seen such bad traffic and driving as that in Tehran. I can only compare it to the chaos of Damascus, the total disregard of road rules of Beirut and the volume of traffic of Cairo, all thrown together in a city of ten million plus people. The worst offenders were the motorbikes; they seemed to be exempt from any laws. They rode on the wrong side of the road; up one-way streets the wrong way (even at night with no headlights!) and even rode along pavements when there wasn't enough room on the road. Every vehicle fought for every inch of road space, even if it meant travelling on the wrong side of the road against the oncoming traffic. Right of way was determined by whoever got their bumper in front first. Traffic lights were only obeyed if a policeman stood at the intersection; otherwise it was a free for all. Every street was a cacophony of car horns and whistles, all competing to be heard above the constant drone of motorbike and car engines. Amongst all this traffic you also had traders wheeling handcarts with impossible loads along the streets and pedestrians trying to cross from one side of the road to the other. Standing at a major intersection in Tehran is definitely a spectator sport; I would recommend the intersection of Sa'di Street and Jomhuri-ye Eslami Avenue.
Into this chaos I set off in a taxi, a Paykan of course, to the Federation offices and saw in daylight for the first time the metropolis of Tehran. My first impressions of the city were very negative; it is a grim, polluted, unappealing place. There is a complete lack of any proper planning, the uninspiring architecture of concrete apartment and office blocks sprawling across the city just add to the ugliness of this chronically overcrowded city. Despite this, though, it did hold my fascination; I think mainly because the city still did function in it's own enigmatic way, despite so much going against it. The citizens of Tehran make up what the city lacks in cultural heritage, except for the excellent museums. They are the most friendly, helpful and hospitable people I have ever met in a capital city.
After battling through the traffic my taxi finally arrived outside the Federation offices, after reversing down the one-way street to get there. The hotel manager pointed out the offices for me and I walked in to be met by Homyuan, the secretary of the Federation. The small offices were covered in posters of mountains, Damavand and Everest seemed to dominate the walls, together with portraits of some climbers; there was also a scale model of Damavand sitting on another small table in the corner. Homyuan, a smart, clean-shaven man probably in his late thirties spoke excellent English. We sat down at a large, highly polished wooden table and after a short discussion I agreed to take a guide from the Federation. The four-day expedition to Mt Damavand would cost US$50 a day; I would pay expenses for food, transport and accommodation directly to the guide. We planned to leave for the mountain on Tuesday at 08.00, today was Sunday, which gave me a day in the city where I decided I would visit Mt Tochal for a warm up climb and to help acclimatise to the altitude I would encounter on Mt Damavand.
Just as I was about to leave two guys from Singapore walked into the office, Joe and Alex. They had undertaken the mammoth task of cycling from London to New Zealand, I think they had got fed up of cycling around in circles in Singapore and wanted to go for a real bike ride. I was suitably impressed with their undertaking, which had so far taken almost six months to reach this point from London. Joe, the more outgoing of the cycling duo, was old friends with Homyuan and had called in on their way through Tehran to say hello. Their friendship goes back to the Iranian Everest expedition in 1998 where Joe managed to land the job in charge of satellite communications at base camp, where he camped for three months with the rest of the Iranian team. Homuyan took the three of us out to lunch at a local restaurant just down the street after which, I walked back to the hotel to help orientate myself in the city.
Later that evening Joe and Alex arrived at the hotel and checked in. It turned out that they were experiencing problems obtaining visas from the Pakistani embassy. The problem was that the Pakistanis wanted a letter of recommendation from the Singaporean embassy to support their visa application; there is no Singaporean embassy in Tehran, the nearest being in Dubai. It looked like the cycling duo was going to have a few enforced rest days in the city trying to resolve this problem.
Early on Monday morning I walked the short distance to Emam Khomeini Square and one of the cities local bus stations, the start of my day trip to Mt Tochal. Today would be my baptism of fire in learning the ways of Tehran's public transport system. I needed to find bus number 145, which runs to Tajrish Square in the north of city. Of course there wasn't a number 145 bus anywhere to be seen (I can read Arabic numerals, an invaluable skill in situations like this). So I opted for plan B and stood around looking lost until a young, smartly dressed man who could speak broken English asked me where I wanted to go and then shepherded me onto the bus parked in front of me. Forty or so minutes later the bus terminated at Tajrish Square, well to be exact a few hundred metres from the square. A kind taxi driver, a rare thing in Iran where the hospitality and friendliness of the population doesn't stretch as far as taxi drivers, gave me a free lift to the share-taxi terminal I needed at Tajrish Square. A short while later I was at last at the edge of Tehran, the Alborz Mountains rising above me, the chaos of the city below me. I found the north of Tehran to be far more pleasant than the south, where I had based myself in the city. The north appeared greener, many of the streets were lined with eucalyptus trees and the whole area just seemed cleaner and less cluttered, although the traffic was just as bad.
I walked along the long, winding road, past the teashops and snack bars to the base station of the tele-cabin, a good warm up before I commenced my climb up the mountain. I had heard that the tele-cabin doesn't operate on Mondays, my sources were correct, so I decided instead to just climb to the top tele-cabin station, rather than trying to reach the summit of Mt Tochal at 3,962m. After the intense heat of the summer the mountains were barren, just dust and rocks and the dried remains of a few plants that had tried to grow in the inhospitable summer climate. There is an unmade road, which winds its way tortuously up the side of the mountain, roughly following the route of the tele-cabin, connecting the mid-stations. I found the road easily enough and after only fifty or so metres found a well-trodden footpath following the ridge of the mountain to the first mid-station. I left the fairly gentle gradient of the road and began climbing up the steep, rocky path. I was shocked at how soon I found myself out of breath, my heart rate doing overtime and my head going dizzy. I stopped to rest, sweat dripping from my forehead as the sun relentlessly beat down; I worried about my ability to tackle Mt Damavand in a couple of days time. After a while I continued, slowly plodding up the side of the mountain my body soon becoming accustomed to this climate and altitude.
It took an hour of steady climbing up the well-defined path to reach the first mid-station, which was eerily quiet as the giant machinery of the tele-cabin lay motionless. Sitting at a table alongside the mid-station were three elderly gentlemen, kitted out in hiking gear, admiring the view of Tehran, which stretched away into the distance below us. I stopped for a quick chat while I snacked on some biscuits and bananas; all three were retired engineers in their seventies, living in Tehran. They looked pleased to see me climbing up the mountain and were interested to hear where I was from and what I thought of their country. As we sat there I was overwhelmed by the peace and tranquillity of the mountain; below us we could still hear the distant roar of the traffic. It felt great to be out of the polluted, noisy city and back in the fresh mountain air. After a pleasant conversation for about fifteen minutes I said good-bye and on parting to continue my climb up the mountain, they gave me some sweets.
I continued following the road for a short distance before finding the path again heading up a ridge. An hour or so later the gradient of the path levelled out as the path looped around a large valley to finally reach the top station. I found instead that this was another mid-station (contrary to what my guidebook had told me) and the pylons of the tele-cabin continued marching up the side of the desolate mountain. I stood at the mid-station, the towering mountains surrounding me and Tehran hidden from view by a large ridge of rock. Tehran now seemed like a distant memory far away at the foot of the mountain. During the winter this mountain is a popular ski resort for those residents of Tehran who can afford to ski. Chairlifts stretched up the mountain, today lying idle as they waited for the first snows of winter. I appeared to be the only hiker today, this far up the mountain; the only other people around were workers carrying out maintenance on the cables of the next section of the tele-cabin.
Soon the owner, who offered me a cup of tea, invited me into the mountain restaurant next to the tele-cabin station. The restaurant was closed, the cavernous interior dark and empty; I could have been in any alpine restaurant in the mountains of Europe, it had that ski resort atmosphere. The workers were having a late lunch and I joined three Afghans with my cup of tea. Their meal didn't look that appetising, a plate of boiled rice with a couple of fried eggs. One of the Afghans could speak some basic English and soon started asking questions, which he translated to his friends as they quickly ate their rice and eggs while staring intently at me. The conversation never got further than the usual, where are you from, why are you here, what work do you do etc.
The afternoon was getting late, it had just gone three, so I offered to pay for my tea, which the owner duly accepted, charging me an extortionate amount that probably paid for the Afghans dinner as well. I began the descent to the city and after an hour and forty minutes found myself back in the chaos of Tehran looking for a share taxi to take me back to Tajrish Square. I travelled south across the city during rush-hour, the traffic hardly moved and the 8km journey took me almost two hours, it would have been quicker to walk. I finally arrived back at the hotel exhausted but confident now for my attempt on the summit of Mt Damavand.
That evening I joined Joe and Alex, the two Singaporean cyclists, for a bite to eat. We didn't find anything more exciting locally than a hamburger shop near Emam Khomeini Square. Afterwards we walked to Park-e Shahr, an oasis of calm in this frenetic city, and discovered the Sofre Khane Sonnati Sangalag, a traditional teahouse. The concrete, rectangular building looked ugly from the outside, but inside was attractively decorated. The walls were lined with bed-couches, each covered with a carpet and large cushions. Down the middle were tables and chairs and in the centre a small fountain where a small shoal of goldfish eked out an existence in a mere couple of inches of water. We ordered a pot of tea and stretched out on the couches, a perfect way to end a hard day walking in the mountains.
I made an early start on Tuesday morning, leaving some luggage locked up at the hotel that I didn't need for the mountain expedition and took a taxi to the Mountaineering Federation's offices. I had arranged to meet my guide at 08.00 at the offices. When I arrived Homayoun, whom I had arranged this expedition with a couple of days ago, was not at the office, but my arrival was expected. I sat in the main office next to the dusty polystyrene model of Mt Damavand and sipped a cup of tea while I waited for my guide to arrive. I didn't have to wait long until a small, slim man with a moustache and a balding head walked into the office and I was introduced to Hamid Bagerpour, my guide. We left the office almost as soon as we were introduced and began our journey to Mt Damavand, but first, we had to get out of Tehran through the morning traffic chaos.
We seemed to walk almost as far as we rode in share taxis to find our way out of the city. I followed behind Hamid as he led the way along crowded pavements and across the roads through the chaotic traffic carrying my backpack while Hamid just carried his small daypack. I soon found that Hamid could not speak much more than basic English, so we walked and travelled in taxis in relative silence. I did found out though that he had climbed to the summit of Mt Everest during Iran's 1998 expedition. I felt suitably impressed; this was the first person I had ever met face to face who had climbed the highest mountain in the world. With mountain experience like this I thought that he would make an ideal guide for my more modest expedition to Mt Damavand. At Emam Hossein Square we took the electric trolleybus towards the eastern bus station from where we finally took a share taxi out through the suburbs and along the A01 road through the Alborz Mountains.
There were three other passengers plus the driver in the car, an old burgundy coloured Peugeot, an unusual car in Iran where almost 90% of cars were white Paykans. Hamid and another passenger, a young student, sat in the back with me while two older men shared the front seat next to the driver. I soon found out that the standard of driving outside the urban capital of Tehran was no better or safer. Now I found myself travelling along a road, which twisted its way through the mountains and across a high mountain pass, with sheer, vertical drops to deep valleys only inches away. There still seemed to be a complete disregard for any road rules as everyone drove on whatever spare piece of tarmac they could find, even if that meant travelling on the wrong side of the road. I sat in the back trying to enjoy the harsh, barren mountain scenery and put my trust in our driver to get us to our destination safely. The young student offered Hamid and myself some seeds from a bag, which he was snacking on. Everyone seemed to pass the time while travelling in Iran by cracking seeds between their teeth. I hadn't quite grasped the correct way of eating these seeds and happily munched away on my handful of seeds until I ended up with a mouthful of seed husks, which I found difficult to swallow. It was only when the student offered me another handful of seeds, which I tried to refuse still attempting to swallow the dry husks in my mouth, that I realised my error. I looked at Hamid happily cracking the seeds in his mouth, extracting the kernel and throwing the husk onto the floor. Suddenly I felt very stupid and hoped that no one in the taxi had noticed as I pretended to throw husks out of the window. It still took a while to master this delicate eating practice and I never managed to crack open a melon seed cleanly.
After travelling for over an hour from Tehran I finally saw my first view of Mt Damavand as we stopped at a teahouse in a small town for some refreshment. I climbed out of the taxi and stared up at the mountain, a towering conical shaped volcano, the summit covered in patches of ice. From where I stood it looked an awful long way to the top, I'm sure I would be muttering some expletives in the next couple of days as I slogged up the mountain into the thin air. After a while I went and sat down on a bed couch with the other passengers on a patio outside the teahouse and enjoyed a cup of tea, while the driver busied himself dusting and polishing his car. After our tea break we continued on towards the mountain, the road following a deep valley until Hamid and myself were dropped off at the junction to the small town of Reyneh. We took a local share taxi along a small winding road until we reached Reyneh, perched high up on the side of the valley.
The taxi dropped us outside a small grocery shop, where the owner, a stout, elderly man with greying hair, welcomed us. The owner and Hamid were good friends and we dropped our luggage in the storeroom at the back of the shop before sitting down to rest. At first glance Reyneh seemed deserted, the wide main street looked out of place in this small town with very little traffic. After spending the last few days in Tehran the silence of Reyneh was an absolute joy; the quiet was only occasionally broken when an old dilapidated vehicle slowly made its way along the main street. Hamid asked me if meat would be okay for lunch. I said yes and Hamid left and walked down the road to a butchers shop. Presently he returned with a carrier bag and we went next door to a small, local restaurant and into a cluttered back room, which served as the kitchen, although it hardly looked like what I would describe as a kitchen. We sat on a hard wooden bench and Hamid emptied the contents of the carrier bag onto a plastic tray; lying on the tray now, in a small pool of blood, was a liver, two kidneys and a heart. Hamid set to work with a knife butchering the offal and turning it all into bite size pieces to make kebabs. By the time he had finished and skewered the lumps of meat his hands were dripping with blood. Lunch suddenly didn't seem that appealing as Hamid barbequed the skewers over a gas stove hidden amongst the kitchen clutter of pots and pans. Shortly the kebabs were served on a large plate accompanied by the standard Iranian bread lavash, which was unleavened and stale with the texture of cardboard. The only saviour to this carnivore's lunch was a raw onion, which managed to disguise the strong flavours of the offal. The two of us sat in silence on a wooden bench in the dimly lit room as we munched through the small mountain of meat Hamid had cooked. I sincerely hoped that his cooking on the mountain over the next few days would be more inspiring.
After struggling over the last few pieces of meat and running out of onion I proclaimed that I was full and couldn't eat any more. We returned to the grocery store to buy provisions for the trek. There was not much choice in this small shop halfway up the side of a mountain and we made do with some spaghetti, tins of beans and soup, more of the stale bread, goat's cheese and biscuits. We now waited for another one of Hamid's friends to arrive to give us a lift to the small settlement of Gusfand Sara, where we would spend the night before starting our climb up Mt Damavand the next morning. Mustapha shortly pulled up outside the grocery store in a battered, light blue pick-up truck, which appeared to be held together with dirt and dust. Mustapha was middle-aged, the sharp features of his face weathered, his eyes slightly bulging from their sockets and his hair a wild tangle. He stepped from his truck wearing a blue boiler suit and could hardly walk as he staggered across the pavement and hauled himself up the steps into the shop. He walked with a looping gait; one of his legs was bent at an awkward angle, which he had to manhandle over any obstacle. I presumed that his disability must have been caused by polio. In the back of the pick-up was a large oil tank and some other miscellaneous pieces of machinery, oil leaking everywhere. There was hardly enough room to squeeze our luggage and supplies into the back, which also included a large barrel of water.
We followed the road out of Reyneh; I was concerned about Mustapha's ability to drive, especially along this twisting mountain road, but somehow he managed. We soon turned off the tarred road and followed a dirt track, which zigzagged up the side of the mountain, a billowing cloud of dust following us. It was a slow and very bumpy drive, the pick-ups engine whining and the suspension groaning with every rut and pothole we hit. At last we reached Gusfand Sara and the pick-up came to shuddering stop in a cloud of dust; it was now late afternoon. This place was far from civilisation and the only clue that I was at my destination, the small mosque in front of me that I had read about being a place where climbers could spend the night before heading up the mountain.
I expected Gusfand Sara to be a small mountain village, but it was far from that. There were only two buildings of any size, the mosque built from local volcanic stone with a metal roof, surrounded by a green fence; the other a long rectangular concrete building with a flat roof and the words, I love you, spray painted on the side. Dotted amongst the ridges of rock and boulders were some extremely basic stone shelters, home to a handful of peasants who herded goats on the side of the mountain. It looked an inhospitable place, as the wind whipped up some dust forcing me to turn my head downwind to avoid getting a face full of dust. Shortly an old man, wrapped in a blanket hobbled with a walking stick towards us together with a young boy, Ali, who would help us on our climb, and greeted us. Once we had unloaded our gear, placing it next to Ali's weather beaten tent, complete with bent poles, Mustapha departed and silence returned to the settlement as the pickup disappeared back down the mountain. Now the only sounds came from the occasional heehaw of a lonely donkey and the wind, as the nylon of Ali's tent flapped in the gusts.
Soon the daylight began to fade and the temperature too began to drop quickly, especially as we were now at an altitude of approximately 2,950m. Hamid, Ali and myself took shelter in Ali's tent for the night and Ali began preparing some spaghetti for dinner. The three of us huddled inside the tent around a gas stove, where Ali placed a large pot and began cooking. Hamid showed me some of his photos of the mountain and past climbs, including a photo of a young climber, Hussein from Tehran, who had died of a heart attack on the mountain earlier in the year. He showed me the photo, almost with pride pronouncing, 'Mort, mort!' over and over again. He had helped to bring the body, wrapped in the young mans sleeping bag, down the mountain with the aid of a donkey, probably the one which I could hear braying occasionally somewhere out in the darkness. Another one of his photos featured a small flock of goats high up on the mountain their tongues hanging loosely from their mouths, again mort, and this time asphyxiated by the sulphur fumes.
Meanwhile Ali cooked. The culinary events, which ensued, still amaze me, but as I was a guest I didn't like to say anything and just sat on the dusty old carpet and watched. Ali brought the pot to the boil, and dropped a half-kilo bag of spaghetti in to the boiling water. Next he emptied a small can of tomato puree into the boiling water and replaced the lid and let it boil. After about ten minutes he removed the pot from the stove and took it outside to drain, pouring away any flavour the tomato puree would give tonight's dinner. I thought that dinner would now be served, but no, Ali placed the pot back on the stove and continued cooking the spaghetti, the pot now dry and the spaghetti ready to eat. I kept thinking to myself, the spaghetti is going to burn, but still Ali continued cooking it. After a quarter hour or so he lifted the lid and then placed a sheet of unleavened bread tightly over the spaghetti and again continued to cook it. Almost twenty minutes later Ali removed the pot and Hamid took over, frying an onion and then mixing in a tin of tuna; at last dinner was served. Hamid and Ali eagerly lifted the lid on the spaghetti and scraped away on the bottom breaking off large chunks of burnt spaghetti, which they handed to me as though it was some kind of delicacy. I finally refused this culinary treat; I drew the line at pretending that burnt spaghetti was delicious. Hamid and Ali shrugged as though I was stupid; I just ate what moist spaghetti was left in the pot with some fired onion and tuna on the side.
After dinner there was nothing else to do except sleep, so I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag and tried to forget about Ali's odd spaghetti recipe and think about the climb ahead of me tomorrow. Outside in the dark I could hear dogs pacing around the tent. I didn't sleep well that night, the ground was hard and rocky and the wind had picked up, the nylon of the tent flapping noisily. In the middle of the night I felt the weight of a small animal running over my sleeping bag, it must have been a rat as during the night I could hear them scurrying around in Ali's cardboard boxes where he stored his food.
The night slowly slipped past and soon I began to notice the blue nylon of the tent lighten as the sun creped towards the horizon, heralding the start of another day. Hamid's breakfast was again an unusual mixture; bread, goats cheese and honey. I just stuck to the bread and honey washed down with some sweet black tea. It took a while for Hamid to get organised but at 09.50 we were ready to depart and start our ascent of the mountain.
Ali set off ahead of us carrying some of our supplies to the mountain shelter, which would be our destination for the day; some 1,200m vertical climb up the mountain. I followed Hamid as he led the way along a dusty path from the mosque up towards a volcanic ridge. From here the path zigzagged up the mountain following the ridge; we climbed upwards at a fairly steady pace, walking slow enough so as not to get out of breath. The gradient was fairly steep, but the zigzagging path took a lot of the strain out of the vertical climb. The weather looked good, the summit of the mountain towering upwards to a deep, blue sky, some light, wispy cloud occasionally brushing past the mountain. The wind though had picked up since yesterday, which added a chill to the air; at times the gusts were very strong, blowing clouds of dust across the side of the mountain. The mountain was barren just dust and rocks; any vegetation had long since died in the intense heat of the summer sun; the dried stems of the poppies rattled together in the gusts of wind. Not a drop of water flowed off the mountain and the gullies and streams were dry, the smooth carved rocks the only clue that water once did flow down this mountain. It wasn't the most scenic mountain I had climbed but the surrounding views were spectacular as other 4,000m plus peaks of the Alborz Mountains surrounded me.
We stopped for three breaks on the way up to the shelter. After the third break Hamid increased his pace, as though he was anxious to get to the shelter and gradually left me behind until I found myself alone slowly plodding up the mountain. The final climb to the shelter was steep and rocky and by the time I arrived, three and a quarter hours after leaving the mosque, Hamid had made himself at home. He was busy chatting to the caretaker, an old man with a carefully trimmed moustache and a friendly face wearing a bright yellow waterproof suit, torn on one side.
The shelter had more the appearance of a Nissen hut, the outside walls painted yellow and the semi-circular roof bright orange. It sat on a terrace, slightly hidden by the ridge of rock we had followed up from the mosque. A couple of flags flapped violently in the wind, which was now bitterly cold as I stood outside the shelter at an altitude of 4,150m. The inside of the shelter was painted light blue, roughly constructed bunk beds lined both walls with a small corridor running down the middle. It was fairly dark inside, the only light coming from some small windows beside the door. We were the first trekkers of the day to arrive at the shelter and Hamid and I placed our backpacks on top of the bunks. The shelter was a mess, despite having a caretaker in residence, it didn't appear that cleaning was high on his agenda; he spent the majority of his time listening to a pocket radio with some earphones. I went for a stroll around the shelter, soon discovering the latrines, just down the slope; they were not pleasant, both of them overflowing with excrement. Above the shelter were small clearings in the rocks where previous climbers had pitched their tents, each pitch having a roughly built stonewall protecting the tent from the incessant wind from the west. I found a sheltered spot on a rare patch of hardy grass, slightly sheltered from the cold wind and soaked up what warmth I could from the sun.
I had found the climb to this altitude fairly easy, I could not feel any oncoming effects of altitude sickness or any shortness of breath. This ability to adapt from my life at sea level somewhat surprised me; I would have expected some effects of the thin air, like a headache. I usually suffer most from the altitude while I try to sleep, as my breathing slows down I find myself waking suddenly in the middle of the night short of breath. As I lay in the sun, Hamid and Ali emptied the two oil drums of rubbish outside the shelters door and carried it off across the side of the mountain. They dumped it all amongst the boulders and set fire to it, a long finger of smoke now snaked up the side of the mountain. The afternoon slipped by and eventually as the heat from the sun weakened I retreated back into the dimly lit, grubby, cold shelter. Ali had returned back down the mountain and three students from Tehran had arrived during the afternoon and had made themselves at home on the opposite bunks. There really isn't much to do in a mountain shelter, especially when you don't share a common language with the other guests; I wish I had brought a book to read to help pass the time.
As the sun set, casting an orange glow across the tiny windows, two more climbers arrived. A few minutes later and the mountain was enveloped by night; the darkness inside the shelter only broken by the beams of torches and the blue glow of stoves as we all set about cooking dinner for the night. Hamid redeemed himself that night with his cooking, a thick bean soup; or maybe the altitude was effecting me and anything edible up here in this cold, dark outpost of civilisation would of tasted good. Once we had all finished cooking the roar of the stoves was replaced by the howling of the wind outside.
At 19.30 I popped outside to go to the toilet, the wind blew at gale force, my Gore-Tex jacket flapping noisily. I stared up at the night sky and the thousands of stars hanging above the mountains and then glanced at the summit I would tackle tomorrow. What I saw disturbed me; the summit was covered in cloud, which in the moonlight I could see racing across the flank of the mountain. The weather looked like it was turning for the worse as though a storm was brewing. Once back in the shelter I shivered uncontrollably, the freezing wind had cut right through me. I climbed into my sleeping bag, fully clothed to try and keep warm and lay on my back and waited for sleep to overtake me. It was a long wait and when sleep finally did arrive it was only for short snatches. The cold kept me awake as well as the wind, which sounded like a jet engine blasting the shelter. Through all this Hamid laid on the bunk next to me, sound asleep snoring. We were not alone in the shelter; we shared it with rodents, which didn't surprise me. After the previous night with rats in Ali's tent I now had mice running over the hood of my sleeping bag.
Despite all this I managed some sleep and woke surprised at 06.30 to the sound of people getting up in the shelter. We should of started our ascent to the summit at 06.00 but Hamid still lay fast asleep and all but two of the other five climbers were still wrapped up in their sleeping bags. The weather had beaten us, only two of the students went for the summit that morning; the first storm of the winter had hit Mt Damavand. I ventured out of the shelter to check the situation with the weather. It was unpleasant, thick cloud covered the summit and a light misty drizzle blew in the ferocious wind, chilling me to the bone despite the four layers of clothing I wore. The summit was another 1,500m above us, if conditions were hardly bearable here it would be extreme at the summit, something I was not prepared for. We waited until 10.00 to see if the weather abated; it didn't and I agreed with Hamid's decision to abandon the climb and return to the road head at Gusfand Sara.
The weather is one thing you cannot plan for and although I felt disappointment at not achieving my goal of climbing to the summit I knew that it wasn't because I was unfit, or injured or suffering from altitude sickness. Damavand is a big mountain, which people sometimes under estimate and people die trying to reach the summit every year, as Hamid's photo collection and stories proved. The mountain will always be there and there will always be another day.
We were back at Gusfand Sara by midday and were met by Ali. He had packed away his tent because of the storm, a very wise move and had decamped into the long rectangular concrete building next to the mosque. Here we waited for a couple of hours for Mustapha to return in his pickup to give us a lift back to the main highway. Hamid made lunch and managed to rustle up another liver to make kebabs. The wait for Mustapha seemed endless. A herd of goats came down from the mountain, passing us and on down the road, the hundreds of hoofs kicking up a cloud of dust. I sat and watched the goats disappear until I saw another cloud of dust in the distance and then coming slowly around a corner a blue pickup; it was Mustapha with my transport away from this bleak, barren mountainside
Hamid loaded up the pickup with gear, which had been stored in the mosque, to take back to the Mountaineering Federation offices in Tehran. There wasn't much room left in the pickup by the time he had finished and Hamid and I squeezed into the cab while Ali and another young lad rode on top of the luggage in the back. Once back down in the valley on the main road Hamid arranged with a truck driver to take Ali and myself to the next town; Ali would now be my guide to get back to Tehran. After hitching with the truck driver we took another two share taxis to reach the city, from where a couple of bus rides took us to Haft-e Tir Square, a few hundred metres up the road from the federation offices. By now it was 18.30 and dark when we finally met up with Hamid again.
The two of us sat down to sort out money, I knew that this would be a problem and hadn't been looking forward to it. The deal arranged with Homayoun was that I would pay the Federation for the guide, which I had and I would settle the rest of the expenses directly with the guide, Hamid. Hamid and been banding around a figure of US$150 for my expenses, which I knew was extortionate as I had been keeping an eye on how much everything cost. I asked him to break down the expenses; transport to the mountain, food, accommodation, Ali's pay for being an impromptu porter, return transport etc. I agreed with the breakdown and the total of 80,000 rials and gave Hamid 100,000 rials, which included a tip. He just stared at the money I gave him in disbelief and gave it back, pointing to the total on his breakdown, 80,000. The language barrier was too great to sort out this confusion so Hamid phoned Homayoun to translate. After a lengthy conversation I finally gathered that the price Hamid had quoted was in tomans.
I since learned that there is a strange practice in Iran when it comes to dealing with prices. The Iranian unit of currency is the rial but a toman (not a unit of currency, but which only exists in language and not in reality) is worth ten rials. Therefore, the cost of Hamid's expenses were in fact 800,000 rials, over US$150! This was down right robbery. So when quizzing him about the breakdown of expenses, taking the cost of the transport back from the mountain, which I knew only cost 15,500 rials and which Hamid had written down as 16,000 suddenly turned into 160,000 a 1000% mark up. I refused to pay and Hamid lost his temper, pacing up and down angrily making more phone calls to Homayoun. I told him to calm down, if anyone should be getting angry it should be me, after all I was the one being robbed. Eventually Hamid demanded US$60, which was still too much, but I paid to put an end to the argument and we parted on bad terms.
The next leg of my journey would take me the furthest distance from Tehran, to the oasis town of Bam in the southeast of the country, just past the Payeh Mountains. I wanted to take the train for this long journey as far as Kerman and from there take a bus to Bam. I had returned from Mt Damavand on Thursday evening and had checked back into the Mashad Hotel on Amir Kabir Street after my unfriendly parting with Hamid. The two Singaporean cyclists, Alex and Jo whom I had met before departing for Mt Damavand had checked out; I presumed that their Pakistan visa fiasco had been sorted out and that they were now on the long road southwest to Zahedan. That evening I made some enquiries about the train schedules and soon found out that the next train to Kerman wasn't due to leave until Sunday evening; this gave me a slight headache as to what I would do with myself for the next three days in Tehran.
That evening, at the hotel I met Ben, a young Canadian lad who had spent the past few months in Yemen studying Arabic. He had been thinking about going to climb Mt Damavand, so we stopped and chatted for a while. Tomorrow, he and a South African, Andrew planned to go to Mt Tochal for the day. Still suffering from my disappointment at not reaching the summit of any mountain so far on this trip I decided to join them for the day; I agreed to meet Ben at the reception desk at 08.00 in the morning. He shortly left to go to a party with some new friends he had met in the city and I retired to my room to catch up on some sleep after my uncomfortable nights spent on Mt Damavand.
The following morning Ben was nowhere to be seen, I found out from the hotel manager that he had never returned home last night from the party. I soon met Andrew though and the two of us set off, retracing my footsteps from earlier that week to the Tochal telecabin. Being a Friday the whole of Tehran had shut down and the roads were the quietest I had seen them, it almost felt as though I was in a different city. The telecabin was operating today and large crowds of people were gathered around the bottom of the mountain, a steady stream of people taking the telecabin up the mountain, while others hiked along the dirt road, which snaked upwards. We bought a ticket to the top station, the point I had reached on my previous climb, and from there hiked to the summit. We followed the dirt road up from the top station at a steady pace. The weather had deteriorated since my last visit to this mountain and as we neared the summit, after climbing for almost two hours, we were caught in a cold, windy snow shower. It seemed strange that only a few hours ago we were running around Tehran in t-shirts feeling hot, now here we were wrapped up in fleeces and Gore-Tex jackets bracing ourselves against a biting wind. The final slog up to the summit was hard and I could definitely notice that we were climbing at altitude as I gasped to fill my lungs with the thin air. At last I stood at the summit of Mt Tochal, a respectful 3,962m above sea level.
We climbed back down as far as the mid-station of the telecabin and from there rode back down to the base of the mountain and made our way by share taxi and bus back into the city centre. It was dark by the time we reached Ferdosi Square and stopped for a well-deserved dinner and some fruit shakes.
There are some good museums in the city, about the only attractions worth stopping to visit in this metropolis. I spent a couple of hours wandering around the excellent National Museum of Iran. The collection included pottery, ceramics and carvings arranged in date order recovered from some of the most important archaeological sites in the country, including Persepolis, Shush and Rey. The carvings from Persepolis were the highlight for me. It was hard to imagine that these carvings were 2,500 years old; it looked as though an artisan had only finished working on them yesterday. It also helped that by coincidence I arrived at the same time a British tour group were being led around the museum. I followed a couple of steps behind learning a lot more than if I had only read the cards on the displays, which were not that informative. The most unusual exhibit had to be the Salt Man, a miner who had died at Zanjan in the 3rd or 4th century and whose body had been preserved by the salt. In a glass case a withered face stared out complete with long white hair and beard, together with his leather boots, tools and a walnut.
I also visited the National Jewels Museum housed in the vaults of the central branch of the Bank Melli on Ferdosi Street. Armed guards patrolled the gates and the entrance along the side of the building. Security was tight and everyone was searched as they entered. I queued to purchase a ticket and then walked through a metal detector and down the stairs to the basement vault. The vault was dimly lit and glass display cases lined all the walls. We were warned as we entered not to touch any of the display cases, as this would set off the alarms. Security guards hovered around in the dark corners of the vault watching us as we gazed at the impressive array of jewels on display. Every ten miutes or so the defeaning alarms would go off; I'm sure it was the security guys doing this as I saw one give a display case a nudge, which set off the alarms. I never expected to find such a huge collection of jewels here in Tehran. Some of the many highlights were the Darya-ye Nur (Sea of light), a 182 carat pink diamond reputed to be the largest uncut diamond in the world. The Globe of Jewels, made in 1869, weighing 34kg and made out of 51,366 precious stones (who counted them all? Probably an insurance agent) is a sparkling masterpeice that has to be seen.
My three days in Tehran slipped past quicker than I thought. Soon it was Sunday evening and I took a taxi south, through the pain-stakingly slow, sea of rush-hour traffic to Rah-Ahan Square and the central train station. I expected the train station to be a similar chaotic mess as the rest of the city but was surprised to found an orderly, but very busy station. A huge chandelier hung in the main hall of this modern looking, functional building; there were signs in English, and a large and informative departures board. I sat on the floor, as all the seats were taken and waited for my train to begin boarding. Twenty minutes before departure we were called to board the train. At the entrance to the platforms I was stopped by the police and briefly escorted to a small office nearby to have my passport and ticket inspected. I think I was stopped more out of curiosity than security and soon the police wished me a nice journey and I joined the crowd heading along the platform to find my sleeping berth for the night's journey. Wherever I went in Iran people stopped to talk to me, eager to find where I was from, why I was in Iran and what I thought of the country. The attention was often too much and if I stopped to say hello to everyone I would never have got anything else done during the day.
There was very little fuss or chaos as everyone boarded the train, very different from the many train journeys I had taken on the African continent. This station almost ran with European efficiency and at exactly 19.20 the train departed on its journey of just over 1,000km to Kerman. I settled into my rather cramped six berth, first class compartment and met my travelling companions for this leg of my journey. Lying in one of the top bunks was Hussein, an old man with a thin, bony and unshaven face. He read a newspaper and occasionally joined in with the conversation the other four passengers were having. These included Ali, another old man wearing a smart blue shirt and trousers sitting bolt upright next to me. He didn't look very well as he stared into the middle distance in a fixed gaze and showed signs of possibly multiple-sclerosis. His hands trembled quite noticeably, especially when he fiddled with the foil wrapping of some pills he took, washed down with a small bottle of water. Sitting opposite me was Hamid, a student in his early twenties who carried as part of his luggage, a traditional Persian guitar. It wasn't long only he began entertaining us with some tunes, which caught the ear of another passenger passing in the corridor who joined us and played as well. The two of them spent most of the evening playing the guitar and learning from each other while keeping the rest of us enthralled with their musical ability. Masood, in his thirties who looked very Afghan with sharp facial features, seemed rather indifferent to my presence at first but by the end of the trip we were good friends. The most annoying passenger, but the most ordinary looking was Mohammed. He was a businessman, in his late thirties, early forties wearing a business suit and heavy rimmed glasses on a rather podgy face. He had that slight overweight businessmen look, his stomach bulging over the belt of his trousers.
Nobody in the compartment could speak any English; it was Masood who did the introductions for me. Between us though we could understand each other in a basic way. When Mohammed found out that I was English, his face beamed in a rather annoying Benny Hill way, and he shouted out, 'Manchester!' followed by, 'Chelsea!' and finally, 'Beckham!' They were the only three words he said to me for the next fourteen hours of our journey to Kerman. After the first two hours it became very tedious. He would catch my attention as though he had something important to say and then shout out, 'Beckham!' Finally he disappeared with Masood and Hussein to the restaurant car for the evening. I made myself at home for the night in the other top bunk and found myself asleep surprisingly quickly as the train rattled down the tracks through the night.
I woke just after sunrise and went and stood out in the corridor while the others slept. I gazed out of the window at the passing scenery, an endless barren rocky desert with a backdrop of jagged, harsh looking mountains. It looked as though we were far from any signs of civilisation. At 08.10 we slowly pulled into Zarand, our first stop of the morning. By now everyone in the compartment was awake. Mohammed had appeared and greeted me by saying, 'Chelsea!' Once he had disappeared along the corridor to the toilet at the end of the carriage Masood looked at him and then looked at me and pointed at his head. At least it wasn't only me who thought that Mohammed was acting slightly mad. By 09.30 we had arrived at our destination, Kerman the train inching its way along the platform until it finally came to a halt with a screech of brakes. A mad rush followed as everyone poured out onto the platform and made their way through the station building and out into the large car park. The station was in fact 8km outside of Kerman. Most of the stations in Iran are a long distance from the towns they serve, often in the middle of nowhere and Kerman was no exception. Masood grabbed my arm and dragged me through the crowds and onto one of the many waiting shuttle busses to the city. He even paid my bus fare and made sure I got off the bus at the right place, Azadi Square. At Azadi Square we shook hands and parted with big smiles and went our separate ways. It was strange; when I first boarded the train last night Masood seemed the most hostile towards me, now he was the only one helping me find my way into the city.
In hindsight I should have at least stopped for a night in Kerman and explored the bazaar and had a cup of tea at one of the fine teahouses. Instead I took a share taxi from Azadi Square to the bus terminal, eager to complete the remaining 200km of my journey to Bam, this historic city in the desert. I had a few hours to wait for before the 13.00 local bus to Bam departed. The bus trip took most of the afternoon; local busses are not the fastest way to get around the country. I sat next to a young boy who began asking me the usual questions in his broken English. He passed the answers back along the bus to the other passengers; I turned around and saw them all leaning into the aisle listening to his translation of my answers. The bus finally terminated late in the afternoon at a traffic circle outside the centre of town by the Restaurant Arg 2000. The first taxi driver who approached me offered to take me to Emam Khomeini Square for 50,000 rials; after walking around the traffic circle I found a share taxi for 2,000 rials.
On the short trip into Bam, about 3km, the driver opened a box of Mozafati dates, which Bam is famous for and offered them to me. I have to admit I do have a fondness for dates and congratulated myself for arriving in Bam during the harvest season. These dates were huge and sweet, three or four times the size of the dates we get at home in the run up to Christmas, which are imported mostly from Tunisia. At the bustling Emam Khomeini Square, next to the town's small bazaar, I finally gained my bearings and realised that I had just driven past the guesthouse I intended to stay at. I walked back along the road to 17 Shahrivar Square, where I turned off towards Sayeh Jamal od-Din Street and Akbar's Tourist Guest House, arriving as the last rays of sun illuminated the town in a warm glow. I slipped off my boots before entering the guesthouse and received a warm welcome and a cup of tea from Mr Akbar, the owner before being shown to a dorm room for 25,000 rials a night.
There were plenty of travellers at the guesthouse from all corners of the world. I soon met Jane a very independent Australian with her very cute three-year-old daughter Noa. There was also a couple from Hong Kong and a lone Japanese traveller. That evening two German cyclists, Andreas and Marcel, whom I had met in Tehran arrived; they had hitch-hiked on the back of a truck some of the way hoping to meet up with the two Singaporeans, Alex and Jo in a couple of days time. A Swiss couple on a motorbike checked in too that evening on their way from China back to Europe. It seemed like everyone who was touring through this country was suddenly in Bam. When I woke up on my first morning I discovered that Andrew, the South African I had climbed Mt Tochal with, had arrived on an overnight bus from Shiraz. He stopped in Bam long enough to see the old city before continuing on an arduous bus journey to Quetta in Pakistan.
Bam is an oasis town situated south of the Dasht-e Lut, a sand and stone desert covering some 150,000sq km of the central Iranian plateau and southwest of the Payeh Mountains. It is a much quieter place than the 80,000 population would suggest and about as different as the metropolis of Tehran as you could possibly get. Most of the streets were lined with trees, eucalyptus and date palms; crystal clear spring water ran along roadside channels, irrigating the many gardens around the town. Away from the modern concrete buildings of the commercial district in the centre, there were still many traditional mud-brick buildings and gardens enclosed by mud-brick walls, some crumbling from neglect. I found a very different atmosphere in Bam compared to Tehran. The community appeared very conservative and religion the focus point of daily life. The fashionable headscarves of Tehran were replaced completely by the traditional black chador, an image I had expected to see everywhere before I arrived in this country. Bam is most famous for it's old city, Arg-e Bam, a site well worth making a detour to this far corner of the country to see.
The old city is in the northeast corner of modern Bam surrounded by huge fortified mud-brick walls and covers an area of approximately half a square kilometre. The city is thought to either date back around two thousand years to the time of the Parthian Empire or fifteen hundred years to the Sassanian Empire. However old the city is as I walked along the narrow lanes and twisting alleys I was soon overcome by the sense of history of the city, which seemed to ooze from every building. Today the old city is deserted but it didn't take much of a leap of the imagination to see how this was once a busy, bustling, thriving city. The main gateway leads straight to the bazaar, stretching 115m into the city. The bazaars position here was strategic, it allowed outsiders to enter the city for trade, while keeping them away from the residential areas. Dominating the skyline, sitting on a rocky hill in the northeast of the city is the impressive citadel, looking almost like a fairytale desert castle. It has to be the finest mud-brick building I have visited, the architecture was truly magical. The lines of the walls flowed organically with the rocky hill the citadel sat on. Row upon row of battlements filled the sky stretching up towards the tower, the highest point of the citadel and a wonderful vantage point for views across the city and surrounding desert. From the top of the citadel I looked down on the domed roofs of the garrison and the stables, which once housed three hundred horses, the whole building a masterpiece of design. On the rooftops of the houses below the citadel, badgirs (wind towers) reached up into the sky all facing north to catch the wind and provide an early form of air-conditioning for the residents of the city. Badgirs are still in use today in many of the desert cities of Iran, giving these cities a unique skyline.
Encircling the old city are the fortified city walls lined with battlements and about thirty-six towers. The ramparts, dating from approximately the 9th century, stretch for 2km around the city and are only broken by the citadel. Before the Arab conquest and the arrival of Islam as the state religion Bam was a very multicultural city. The residents consisted of a mix of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians and evidence of this can be seen at the ancient synagogue, just south of the gatehouse to the citadel. A much larger mosque is situated in the south of the city, with a beautiful multi-domed roof. I spent a whole day in the city wandering around the alleyways where the echoes of my footsteps mingled with the echoes of history. The silence and peace just added to the atmosphere of this most remarkable city.
I met up with Jane and little Noa for lunch at the teahouse above the gates to the citadel. This is a wonderful atmospheric teahouse, beautifully decorated inside. We sat on a bed couch on the small balcony at the top of steps leading to the entrance and enjoyed a pot of tea and some delicious date cookies. For lunch we had a bowl of pureed aubergine, mixed with herbs and topped with sour cream, a traditional Iranian dish, which was delicious with freshly baked bread. The food here may have been a bit pricey compared to other restaurants, but it was very good and worth every rial. Jane went back to the guesthouse in the afternoon with Noa, for her afternoon sleep. I ended up asleep as well on the bed couch at the teahouse for the next two hours, at last with a stomach full of good food. By the time I woke, cloud had begun to gather on the horizon and there was no sun set that evening. I returned though the following afternoon at about 16.00 to witness a perfect setting sun cast it's orange glow over the city and the citadel, bringing the buildings to life in long shadows and warm ochre colours. It was worth returning to see.
The following evening, just as a group of us were getting ready to leave the guesthouse to venture into town to find a restaurant Alex and Jo suddenly arrived on their bicycles. They both looked absolutely exhausted after cycling the 198km from Kerman in a day, against some tough winds, which blow relentlessly across the desert plains. We hardly gave them enough time to gather their breath before we dragged them out to dinner with us. We were all eager to hear about their cycling adventures from Tehran and the obstacles that lay ahead cycling through the lawless province of Baluchestan and across the Pakistani border to Quetta. Two months later three western tourists, two German and one Irish were kidnapped cycling this route near the town of Nosratabad, between Bam and Zahedan. We returned to the guesthouse in a taxi, seven of us in a Paykan and Jo still on his bicycle; his bicycle almost seemed to be part of him now he had cycled so far.
A day later, it was with a heavy heart that I left this diverse, welcoming group of people and continued my journey alone, thanking Mr Akbar for his hospitality over the last few days and catching a taxi at dawn to the impromptu public transport terminal at the Restaurant Arg 2000 traffic circle.
My journey continued from Bam to the Persian Gulf coast and the busiest port in the country, Bandar-e Abbas. From Bam there is only one direct bus to Bandar-e Abbas a day, which leaves in the middle of the night. Mr Akbar recommended travelling during the day taking share taxis and local busses from town to town, as the scenery along the way to the coast is spectacular. A day earlier Mr Akbar offered me a lift as far as Jiroft as he was going there to meet some friends, but I declined wanting to spend an extra day in Bam instead. So early on this Thursday morning I waited by the Restaurant Arg 2000 traffic circle for a share taxi to fill up for the journey to Jiroft. I didn't have to wait for long, there were plenty of people setting off on journeys early in the morning and soon I was squeezed into the back of a Paykan with four other passengers and was on my way south to the coast.
As we left Bam we passed a couple of Japanese cyclists who had stopped in Bam for a night, the only cyclists I met who were heading towards Europe and winter. The taxi soon turned off the main Bam to Kerman road and headed south, the road stretching straight across the desert to the dramatic mountain range of Kuh-e Jebal Barez. From here the road twisted its way through the rugged mountains passing small, traditional villages perched on the mountainsides and green valleys and small-cultivated fields. The views were some of the best I'd seen so far on my trip through Iran and I thought of Mr Akbar and his advice about travelling this route in daylight; he was definitely right. It didn't take long to reach Jiroft where after a quick argument with the driver over the fare, again I was charged the 'tourist rate', I found another taxi for the next leg of my journey to Kahnuj. The road from Jiroft left the mountains behind and continued over flatter desert terrain. I was squeezed into the front seat of the taxi next to the window with another passenger between the young driver and me. I began to notice the temperature rise as the sun rose higher into the sky and we drove further south through the desert. The wind blowing in through the windows began to feel hot and I soon began to doze off in the heat listening to the hypnotic Koran readings on the radio.
When we arrived in the larger town of Kahnuj I asked the driver to drop me off somewhere where I could catch a local bus for the final, and longest leg of my journey today, to Bandar-e Abbas. The driver stopped along the main, four-laned road in the centre of town and pointed across the road where a couple of local busses, some taxis and a crowd of people were gathered and said, 'Bandar-e Abbas.' After waiting no more than a quarter of an hour on the bus I was again on my way. The journey and my connections today were working far better than I could of ever hoped for and it now looked like I would be arriving at my destination by early afternoon. As we continued south the heat continued to build until it became almost unbearable and extremely uncomfortable in the stuffy, cramped bus. The scenery had again changed and now resembled nothing more than a wasteland; there was no longer any beauty of the previous deserts and mountains I had travelled through from Bam. Along all the roads in Iran are police checkpoints and the road to Bandar-e Abbas had the most rigorous police checks I came across on my whole trip around the country. As well as Bandar-e Abbas being the busiest port in the country it is also the biggest port for smugglers, a problem the police are well aware of. At the checkpoints as we were all lined up beside the bus in the searing heat to have our papers checked. I looked very much out of place, the only white face amongst a group of approximately two dozen other passengers, a mix of local Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans and women wearing veils and chadors. As we waited patiently in the heat the police thoroughly searched our bus for any contraband before letting us continue on our way.
At 13.00 we arrived in the bustling, modern, concrete suburbs of Bandar-e Abbas and were dropped off on an anonymous street some distance from the centre of town. I joined four other passengers from the bus and chartered a taxi downtown. It took a while to gain my bearings as we travelled for some distance along a large, busy road. Eventually we crossed a small river and then passed a stadium, I could now pinpoint where I was on a photocopy of a street map I had in my pocket. The taxi dropped us at 17 Shahrivar Square, from where I began walking to find a cheap hotel. I didn't walk far until I found sweat dripping from me uncontrollable, quickly soaking my t-shirt and trousers. The heat and humidity by the coast was intense and almost unbearable, very different from the dry heat of the inland deserts I had become used to. I walked up to Asad Abadi Street looking for the Hotel Hormozgan but walked straight past it, missing the small, faded sign written in English. Eventually the owner of a small barbershop helped me out and pointed out the hotel for me. I wondered how I had managed to miss it, as it was exactly where my map said it was; I blamed the sudden, crushing heat of the coast for my lapse of concentration and failure of navigation.
The Hotel Hormozan was definitely a cheap and tatty option in a modern but rundown concrete building. Next-door is the Safa Hotel, which had recently bought the Hormozan; this explained why the hotel didn't live up to my expectations after reading a review of it in my guidebook. I took a room without air-conditioning; it was noisy as it overlooked the main street and the wobbly ceiling fan made a noise resembling that of a helicopter coming in to land. I rested for a while before heading out to explore my new surroundings.
Bandar-e Abbas is a large town with a population of 360,000 and has a history dating back to 1622 when Shah Abbas I founded it; today nothing remains of this history except it's name. In recent times, during the Iran, Iraq war, when it was considered too dangerous for shipping to reach the ports further north along the coast, Bandar-e Abbas became the major port along the northern shores of the Gulf. There has been a lot of investment in expanding and improving the port facilities here. There is a diversely mixed population living in the port town, including minorities of Arabs, black Africans and a small community of Hindus who have a temple in the centre of town next to Velavat Square.
I went for a walk around the centre of town down to the jetty to check out details about boats going to Hormoz Island. From there I strolled along Taleqani Boulevard, taking a detour through the bazaar hoping for a respite from the heat under the small covered alleys. Most businesses were still closed for the siesta, which along the coast lasts from mid-day until five in the late afternoon. A little further along the boulevard beside the beach is a small park, which is supposed to be an open-air teahouse; it too was deserted, except for a couple of elderly men sleeping on sheets of cardboard under a tree. Opposite the park is a huge, drab concrete building, the unfinished mosque, which dominates the shoreline and will one day have the highest iwans in the country. I soon concluded that there is nothing in this town to do or see as a tourist, I had only come here to use the town as a base for visiting nearby Hormoz Island in the Straits of Hormoz. I returned to the hotel and cooled down in the small, air-conditioned reception room watching basketball on television.
The next day was Friday and early in the morning the town was quiet. I decided to make an early start to Hormoz Island to try and avoid the heat of the day. I left the hotel just before seven and walked the short distance to the boat jetty. Still at this early hour of the morning as I walked along the deserted streets I sweated. At the jetty there were a few people milling around and a speedboat with about eighteen passengers aboard moored along side the jetty ready to depart for Hormoz. The boat owner told me that the fare was 8,000 rials as I climbed aboard. Before I could even squeeze into a seat on the boat the owner had slipped the moorings and the boat turned around and slowly made it's way past dozens of colourful dhows moored alongside the jetty and out into the Straits of Hormoz. Once out into the open sea the outboard motor was opened up to full throttle and we hurtled across the surface of the sea towards Hormoz Island, the fibreglass hull crashing over the crests of the small waves. I hung onto my hat and scanned the horizon, looking for our destination. Gradually Hormoz Island began to appear out of the haze, a grey craggy lump of rock out in the straits. The crossing took half an hour and soon we were cruising towards the jetty by Hormoz village, mooring beside some more colourful dhows.
Hormoz Island is only 42-sq-km of mostly infertile, rocky hills baked by the intense Persian Gulf sunshine. Up until the 14th century the island was known as Jarun Island when the 15th Amir of Hormoz moved from the long established trading town of Hormoz on the mainland to escape repeated Mongol raids. The island flourished and became a major trading centre in the Gulf. It eventually attracted the interests of European traders and the Portuguese, led by admiral Afonso de Albuquerque who besieged and conquered the island in 1507 and built the fort, which was completed in 1515. This island became another Portuguese military base, along with Goa, Aden and Mozambique Island on the sea route to Malacca on the Malay peninsular. Early in the 17th century Shah Abbas I granted the British East India Company trading rights at the port of Jask. With the assistance of the English Shah Abbas I managed to seize the island from the Portuguese in 1622. He later decided that the small fishing port of Gamerun on the mainland should be the main port for Persian trade; he renamed Gamerun Bandar-e Abbas, which translated means Port of Abbas. The island quickly went into decline and within a few years reduced to ruins. Still left standing though today is the Portuguese fort at the northern tip of the island; this fort was the reason why I had travelled so far to visit this sleepy little island in the Gulf.
I walked down the jetty towards the only road, which ran along the coast to Hormoz village, a few hundred metres to the north. It had just gone 07.30 and already I could feel the heat of the day beginning to build in the still air. As I walked north towards the fort I passed young boys fishing and men repairing nets on the quay. Women stood veiled in doorways of small houses while barefoot children played in the street. Children ran across the road to greet me with, 'Hello mister, hello, hello.' The island had a relaxed pace of life, there was no traffic, the silence only broken by the occasional motorbike; not even out here could I get away from the motorbikes, the menace of Iranian streets. The smell of fish hung in the air, which felt heavy with the humidity; there was not a breath of wind and already it was feeling unbearably hot as sweat began to soak my t-shirt. I walked around the southern ramparts of the fort looking for the entrance. My search continued along the eastern walls and I finally found the gateway along the northern wall.
I entered the main gate and passed the armoury to my left and stepped into the large central courtyard. The western walls of the fort, which had also formed a barrier between the land and sea were no longer standing; all that remained was a modern concrete breakwater running through the shallows of the sea, tracing the missing outline of the fort. Today the breakwater is a popular fishing spot and young men sat patiently with their fishing lines while younger boys played, chasing each other up and down the breakwater. I admired the energy they had to be able to run in the heat and humidity; walking was my limit in conditions like this. I crossed the courtyard, following a path marked by stones through the dirt and dust and came to the underground church at the southern end. I sat for a while in the dark, cool surroundings of the church admiring the wonderfully, simple vaulted stone ceilings. It was a practical rather than an elaborate building and its simplicity had its own beauty. Some of the boys from the breakwater came across the courtyard out of curiosity to see who I was but soon lost interest and returned to sitting by the sea.
The fort was very much in ruins and looked structurally unsafe with huge cracks running up the walls. The stonework in the walls looked fairly rough, the stone was neither cut nor dressed; some of the stones were just lumps of coral. A few hundred years standing in this earthquake prone part of the world had taken its toll. Little renovation had taken place; a few walls had been repaired mostly to prevent them from totally collapsing. I climbed up onto the southern ramparts past the ground floor room of the watchtower, which was locked. Apparently there is a guardian of the fort who has keys to get into these rooms. Just past the watchtower another door lead down to the cistern, which from the accounts I have heard is quite impressive with an elevated walkway amongst the pillars; this door too was locked. From the top of the southern ramparts I stood next to a rusting canon and admired the view looking out over Hormoz village. Palm trees were dotted between the flat roofed houses and the jagged, rocky hills of the interior of the island formed a backdrop with the blue sea sparkling in the bright sunshine on either side of the peninsular. A police car drove past below me, the two police officers waved and smiled as they went past; I waved back. I hoped that if I stayed at the fort long enough the guardian might make an appearance with his set of keys.
I found a shady spot behind some battlements and sat down in the dust to rest. Lying in the dust all around me were hundreds of shards of pottery; at first glance it had looked like gravel. Upon closer inspection I found dozens of types of pottery, everything from chunky, crude looking pieces to delicately enamelled china. This for me suddenly brought the fort and the people who had lived here to life as I sat there day dreaming, wondering who had made and used this pottery and where it had come from to now lie here forgotten in the baking sun. The guardian never appeared and I never had a chance to take a look behind the locked doors. A few other visitors did arrive though, a family and a father and son. We stopped and talked; they were all from Bandar-e Abbas and were surprised to find that I had travelled here all the way from England.
By midday I succumbed to the heat and decided to return to the mainland. As I left the fort I passed the father and son, whom I had met earlier, bathing in the cooling sea, which gently lapped against the shore. They definitely had the right idea, although the water did look somewhat polluted. I walked slowly under the baking sun through the village and back to the jetty and waited for a speedboat to Bandar-e Abbas. About an hour later I was back on the mainland and walking along the bustling streets of Bandar-e Abbas and through the bazaar, where I stopped for a welcoming ice-cold bottle of Fanta. There was a huge contrast between the pace of life on the island and mainland; I was back again in the familiar, noisy surroundings of urban Iran.
I rested for the afternoon at the hotel and decided that I would make an early start the following day and take a bus to Shiraz, a journey of some 600km or ten hours on the bus. The heat and humidity of the Gulf coast was totally crushing, I had to leave. I secretly admired the people who could manage to live in this climate, and this was the cool time of the year.
I didn't sleep much that night as I lay sweating on top of my bed listening to the roar of the fan as it rotated and the noise of the traffic in the street below me until the early hours of the morning. I eventually opened my bleary eyes and peered at my alarm clock in the first grey light of the morning, it was 05.30. I packed my luggage and at 06.00 checked out of the hotel and walked along the now deserted streets looking for a taxi to take me to the bus terminal, some three kilometres east of the town centre. What happened next that morning was one of those fateful things that have you questioning yourself for days later saying to yourself, what if?
I walked along Emam Khomeini Street as far as 17 Shahrivar Square, where I waited for a passing taxi. The traffic was light, but it wasn't long until a share taxi pulled over on route to the bus terminal. The taxi was a very battered looking white Paykan; the driver wore a blue shirt and jeans and was probably in his late twenties with a bony, slim face and scraggly, black beard. I put my backpack in the boot and climbed into the front passenger street for the short journey across town; along the way the driver picked up another couple of passengers. On a quite road near the beach in the suburbs of town the driver pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. He pointed to the dashboard and the oil light and shrugged his shoulders as he grabbed a rag and stepped out of the taxi and went and opened the boot. He fiddled around in the boot for a while; I was immediately suspicious and watched as best I could in the rear view mirrors. My concern was that my backpack might 'disappear' but this street was totally deserted, not another car or person in sight. This put my mind at rest and soon the driver was around the front of the car and fiddling around under the bonnet with the engine.
I didn't think any more of this incident as we completed our short journey and I walked into the bus terminal and booked myself on an express bus to Shiraz, departing at 10.00. While I sat and waited in the rather ramshackle booking hall watching football on television I suddenly noticed that one of the side pockets of my backpack looked very empty. On closer inspection I found it was. That bloody taxi driver I thought! I couldn't quite believe it and as I still had a couple of hours to wait for my bus I decided to take a taxi back to the hotel. I just wanted to double check that I hadn't left things in my room in the rather bleary state I was in at 05.30 in the morning. Of course I hadn't but I felt better eliminating any other possibilities, it must have been that bloody taxi driver. I again found myself walking along Emam Khomeini Street, this time fighting to get a space in a taxi amongst the crowds, everyone trying to get somewhere. Suddenly I saw a man in a blue shirt driving a white Paykan drive past me. I began to chase the car but then stopped, looked around me and thought logically; 90% of cars were white Paykans and half the men seemed to be wearing blue shirts. Everyone could have been my thieving taxi suspect. I squeezed into the back of a share taxi and returned to the bus terminal to wait for my bus.
At 10.30, finally I was leaving this slightly decaying, sleazy and unbearable hot port town and was once more on the open road heading for the historic city, Shiraz. The most valuable thing the driver stole from me that morning was my water filter, which I had used on a lot of my trekking trips. I smiled to myself as I imagined this guy trying to work out what he had stolen; he is probably using it today as some sort of bizarre contraceptive device.
The journey by bus from Bandar-e Abbas to Shiraz took most of the day, travelling through endless dusty deserts, with jagged, rocky mountains forming a frequent backdrop. The journey became rather dull and tedious as the bus continued relentlessly along the road. We only stopped twice, once at a police checkpoint north of Bandar and again in the middle of the afternoon at a roadside teahouse. It was good to be back inland away from the coast and the intense heat and humidity. I stood outside the teahouse basking in the dry heat of the desert while drinking an ice-cold bottle of soda. Despite the boredom of the journey, I was happy to be leaving Bandar-e Abbas far behind me and looked forward to arriving in Shiraz, the centre of Persian culture later that evening.
By 20.00 we finally arrived in Shiraz. The contrast between the dark, empty desert we had been travelling through and the bright lights and crowded streets of the city could not have been greater. The bus disgorged all it's passengers, including me, at Valiasr Square before reaching the bus terminal. I quickly worked out that from where I stood it was a fairly short walk along Zand Boulevard into the city centre and to the cheap hotels. I made my way through the bustling crowds in the square, everyone trying to get somewhere, hawkers trying to make a profit and almost every other person saying, 'Hello mister' to me. I weaved through the traffic, a chorus of car horns and whistles and walked west along Zand Boulevard, leaving the chaos of the square behind me. The further I walked along the tree lined boulevard towards the city centre, the quieter the city became; most of the shops and workshops were closed for the day behind metal shutters. As I approached Shohada Square the traffic disappeared down a tunnel suddenly leaving the street eerily quiet; where there were once cars now were kids playing football. I checked out a few cheap hotels trying to find the best deal for the night before finally checking into the Darya Hotel on Piruzi Street, a few hundred metres south of Shohada Square. I had a twin room on the top floor at the back of the building, away from the noise of the street. The view from my window looked out east across the rooftops of the city towards the illuminated dome of the Mausoleum of Shah-e Cheragh.
Shiraz is a city of just over one million people; it felt like I had met a lot of them when I got off the bus at Valiasr Square on the evening I arrived. It was once one of the most important cities in the Islamic world and served as the Iranian capital between 1750-1789, during the Zand dynasty. The city is very much the centre of Persian culture, a city of learning, poetry, gardens and wine. The great Persian poets, Hafez and Sa'di are both buried in the city and there is also a large and important university. Unfortunately the wine from the grape, which the city lends its name to, is not currently cultivated; although I heard rumours of locals fermenting wine on a small scale, I never did get to try a glass of Shiraz in its home city. The city sits in a fertile valley, once covered in vineyards at an altitude of almost 1500m, giving the city a very pleasant climate, especially when compared to what I had left behind on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The Khoshk River flows, when it rains, through this valley and through the centre of the city dividing the city between the mainly residential areas on the north banks and the old city and commercial centre to the south. During my stay this river was as dry and dusty as the deserts I had travelled through to get here and seemed to serve mostly as a depository for the cities litter and rubbish.
I spent four nights at the Darya Hotel, which gave me enough time to explore the city and the nearby ruins of Persepolis. Zand Boulevard is the main commercial street, which runs roughly east to west, parallel to the Khoshk River, which flows (when it rains) to the north. Shohada Square is in the centre of the city, but unlike the centre of most Iranian cities, it isn't a traffic choked, chaotic place, thanks to the tunnel that takes the vast majority of the traffic underneath Zand Boulevard for a few hundred metres. This left the Boulevard a relatively peaceful pedestrian precinct, apart from the roar of the traffic coming from the ventilation shafts dotted along the pavement. All sorts of entrepreneurs set up business under the trees above the tunnel selling everything from books, shoes and shirts to tea and bananas. There were even fortune tellers with their caged budgies and finches, which once you paid their owners the birds would pick a card from a box with something written on it, generally a verse from one of the great Persian poets.
Next to Shohada Square is the impressive citadel of Arg-e Karim Khani looking rather odd surrounded by modern buildings such as the police headquarters and other governmental buildings around the square and the central branch of the Bank Melli. It really looks like a desert fortress, something you would see while watching Lawrence of Arabia, stuck out in the middle of a desert surrounded by sand dunes; to me it looked out of place, here in the centre of the city surrounded by some very un-contemporary buildings. It is a beautifully simple building, perfectly square and uniform with 14m high circular towers at each corner and an uncomplicated entrance midway along the eastern wall. The walls and towers are all built from brick, the towers decorated with ornate brickwork in geometrical designs. The tower at the southeast corner has a dramatic lean to it that almost puts the Tower of Pisa to shame; engineers from all over the world, including Pisa, have tried to correct this lean, but have so far failed.
Karim Khani was the first ruler of the Zand dynasty who created a royal district around the citadel that bears his name; he wanted to create a capital city equal to Esfahan under Shah Abbas I. Unfortunately the Zand dynasty was short lived and in 1789 Agha Muhammed Khan moved the capital to Tehran. Shiraz remained a prosperous city though, being on the trade route to the main port of Bushehr, until the trans-Iranian railway line opened in the 1930's and trade switched to ports along the coast of Khuzestan province. Much of the royal district was subsequently lost, victim of either neglect or the town planners. One part of this royal district has survived though, the bazaar, probably one of the most impressive bazaars in the country. Built to make Shiraz a great trading centre, the Bazar-e Vakil is magnificent with high vaulted brick ceilings, which keep the bazaar cool during the heat of the summer and warm during the winter months. I wandered around the bazaar soaking up the atmosphere and squeezing through the crowds; Koran readings echoed down alleyways while businessmen negotiated with customers. Sometimes business was conducted at a frantic pace, others times it was slow and relaxed, there was always time for a cup of tea and young boys would dart up and down the alleys delivering glasses of sweet black tea to traders and their customers. At the southern end of the main vaulted bazaar I came across a caravanserai the Serai Mushir. It was like an oasis amidst all the alleyways of the bazaar, the sudden, bright sunshine made my eyes squint as I emerged into the courtyard. It made a nice place to stop and relax under the green trees away from the bustling crowds of the surrounding bazaar.
On my second day in the city I met Wouter while I was photographing the citadel. I hadn't had a proper conversation with anyone since I had left Bam some four days ago and I found myself talking almost uncontrollably to Wouter. We were both in a similar situation, travelling by ourselves around the country and we decided to go and visit some of the sights of the city together that day. I was just happy to be talking to someone after all these days; I did later apologise, but isolation in a land where you don't speak the language can become unbearable after a while. Wouter was from Holland and had just finished work as a tour guide in Uzbekistan and had travelled through Turkmenistan, crossing the border into Iran and stopping first at the holy city of Mashhad before continuing his journey on to Shiraz.
We first visited the Regents Mosque built by Karim Khani in 1773 beside one of the entrances to the bazaar. This was the first mosque I had visited so far in Iran and the exquisite tiling, predominantly in a floral motif, suitably impressed me. I was very surprised at the access foreigners and infidels had to the religious sites in this country. On previous travels to many Middle Eastern countries it was very rare to be allowed to freely walk into a mosque and have a look around and take photos; Iran was a country that continuously surprised me. We continued our walk through the labyrinth of the bazaar to the Madraseh-ye Khan; a theological college built in 1615, which is still in use today. We knocked on the door and where allowed in to wander around the peaceful courtyard amongst the mullahs, who welcomed us warmly. Again the madraseh was like an oasis, palm trees surrounded a pool in the centre of the courtyard; the chaos and noise of the bazaar seemed a world away rather than just outside the door.
After stopping for lunch at one of the numerous hamburger joints along Dastqeib Street, we continued to the Mausoleum of Shah-e Cheragh at Ahmadi Square, whose illuminated dome I could see from my hotel window every night. The mausoleum was built in the mid fourteenth century over the grave of Sayyed Mir Ahmad who died in Shiraz in 835AD. He was the brother of Emam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam and a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed whose burial place and shrine is in Mashhad. This shrine is an important place of pilgrimage for Shiites. We were able to walk around the large courtyard but were not allowed into the shrine itself, which had a magnificent entrance covered in thousands of dazzling mirrored tiles.
From the mausoleum we walked east back along Dastqeib Street looking for the elegant Nasir-ol-Molk Mosque. We knocked on a door, which we thought was the mosque but found ourselves in another, small madraseh. An elderly mullah welcomed us and allowed us to look around the courtyard. The next door we knocked on was that of the mosque, built towards the end of the nineteenth century and decorated in the most exquisite blue tiling. In the courtyard we met a beautiful, young artist who was working on a restoration project at the mosque. She spoke very good English and showed us around a chamber, which was being restored; the chamber housed the tomb of the son of the Fourth Imam. She joked that the tomb, a giant glass box surrounded by a heavy metal frame, looked more like a refrigerator. She told us that it would be replaced with a more fitting tomb as part of the restoration. Meanwhile she and other artisans were slowly uncovering original wall paintings piece by piece, which had been hidden behind more modern plaster and tile work; her work involved restoring these delicate paintings. Today appeared to be her day off as she was busy working on a painting for an art competition to commemorate the poet Hafez. She had been at the tomb of Hafez all day yesterday, where the gardens were open free to the public for the day. We decided that these peaceful gardens would make a relaxing place to end a busy days sightseeing.
Hafez was one of the great Persian poets, together with Ferdosi, Sa'di and Omar Khayyam. He was born in Shiraz in 1324 and educated by the cities scholars after his father died while he was still young. He memorised the Koran at an early age and went on to study literature and write poetry. His verses are still read today and are very much part of the fabric of Persian culture. In 1389 Hafez died and was buried in his hometown of Shiraz. His tomb is on Golestan Boulevard on the north side of the river near Melli Park. The gardens surrounding the tomb were very beautiful with two long pools shaded by cypress and pine trees creating a tranquil and relaxing atmosphere. The tomb itself was very simple; Karim Khani laid a marble tombstone engraved with a verse of his work here in 1773. In the 1930's an elegant octagonal pavilion was erected over the tombstone supported by eight, slender stone columns, a beautiful piece of simplistic architecture.
At the rear of the gardens we found an outdoor teahouse in a small walled garden. Alcoves were built into the walls where people sat on soft cushions sipping tea and smoking qalyans (water pipes). Wouter and I found a large alcove and stretched out on the cushions with a large pot of tea to drink. There cannot be a better combination than soft cushions and tea after a busy day sightseeing. We sat back and relaxed and reflected on the events of the day while sipping tea and decided that tomorrow we would visit Persepolis together. We continued relaxing and ordered more tea until we eventually outstayed our welcome and were asked to move to make room for some other customers.
The ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis are about 60km northeast of Shiraz. Wouter and I made an early start and walked to the bus terminal to find a local bus to Marvdasht, 42km along the road. From there we managed to hire a taxi fairly reasonably for the final 18km of the journey and arrived shortly after 09.30. Once we purchased a ticket at the visitors centre, just down the road from the ancient city, we walked to the monumental Grand Stairway, the main entrance to the city. As we approached, the city remained mostly hidden sitting on a plateau above us, the Grand Stairway cutting up the retaining wall built of mammoth blocks of stone. Two flights of shallow steps, built so that the ancient Persians could walk gracefully up to the city in their long robes, took us up to Xerxes' Gateway, also known as Gate of All Nations. This would have been the main formal entrance to the city and is today still an impressive monument. A later addition to this monument is the graffiti scratched into the stonework during the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly by British soldiers posted out here; their graffiti has now too become history over the period of time.
Persepolis is a palace complex rather than a city and was built by Darius I in 512BC to serve as a summer and religious capital. The city stands on the slopes of Mt Rahmat and covered an area of 125,000 sq metres surrounded by an 18m high wall. It was used as a place for the people of the empire to pay homage to the King during the New Year festival of No Ruz and it is thought that during the rest of the year it may have been deserted. It's original name was Parsa and was only known by its Greek name of Persepolis, meaning City of Persia and Destroyer of Cities after it was sacked by Alexander the Great.
Persepolis became the religious hub of the Achaemenid Empire, founded in the 7th century BC by Achemenes, whose main religion was Zoroastrianism. The administrative capital of the Achaemenid Empire was centred at Shush. During the reign of Darius I (Darius the Great), the Achaemenid Empire became known as the First Persian Empire stretching from India in the east, to the Danube River in Europe and Egypt in North Africa. Today the vastness of this empire can still be seen at Persepolis amongst the fascinating relief carvings. These depict delegations from over twenty countries bringing tributes to the Achaemenid King; these include Arabs, Ethiopians, Indians and Parthians. The fortunes of the Empire finally turned during the reign of Darius' son, Xerxes when he was defeated in Greece in 480BC. Alexander the Great finally defeated the First Persian Empire after conquering most of Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq and invading Persia, capturing Persepolis in 330BC. After Alexander spent a few months at the palace city, it was burnt down and abandoned. Today there is still a debate as to whether this was a deliberate act or just an accident but whatever happened it marked the end of this beautiful city. Over the following centuries it became lost to time, covered by sand and dust. It wasn't until the 1930's that archaeologists finally began extensive excavations and once again uncovered the lost glories of this ancient and historically important city.
Today, no great buildings are left standing, so it is difficult to imagine how impressive this city once looked. There are though, tantalising glimpses of the sheer scale and grandness of the palace buildings from some of the huge columns, which have been re-erected, giving an idea as to their huge scale. These include the Palace of 100 Columns, the largest of the palaces where delegates came to pay tribute to the Achaemenid Empire. The slightly smaller Apanda Palace lies to the west of this, where the more important delegates would be received and between the two, the much smaller Central Palace, with reliefs in the eastern doorway of Darius on his throne. It must have been truly awe-inspiring to visit this city in its heyday, the grandeur and monumental scale of the buildings would have left you in no doubt as to the power behind the empire that built this place. The greatest legacy of this city left today are the thousands of bas-relief carvings, which adorn every wall on every building; they offer a wonderful insight into life during the First Persian Empire. These carvings are the most impressive historical sight in the whole country.
The most exquisite carvings are to be found on the Apanda Staircase, on the eastern wall of the Apanda Palace. The panels along the staircase depict dignitaries paying tribute. The northern panels show the reception between the Persians, in their long robes and the Medes in their shorter tunics. Three tiers depict the Imperial Guard and the royal procession including horses. The centre panel depicts the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda flanked on either side by two human headed eagles and four Persian and Median soldiers. A ring with wings represents God, a symbol repeated across the city. On either side of the centre panel is the staircase, guarded by Persian soldiers standing on each step. The southern panel, which I found the most interesting, shows twenty-three delegations from across the ancient world from as far apart as Ethiopia and India, bringing tributes to the Achaemenid king. During the New Year Festival the bull was an object of worship; an almost iconic carving, repeated across Persepolis, shows a lion attacking a bull.
Cut into the rocky hills, overlooking the city are the rock-hewn tombs of Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III. Both these tombs are decorated with Zoroastrian carvings including the winged ring symbolising God. At Artaxeres III tomb I found a shady spot to snooze for a couple of hours before returning to Shiraz later in the afternoon.
Wouter, who I had met a few days ago in Shiraz, decided that he would spend another day in the city before travelling to Yazd. We agreed to meet up again at the Hotel Amir Chakhmagh, a popular travellers hotel in Yazd. I had booked a bus ticket the previous day on the way back from Persepolis. At six in the morning I met up with a Swedish couple I had met at a restaurant the night before and we shared a taxi to the bus station. Also waiting for the same bus was Paul, a British ex-pat who now lived in Lisbon, Portugal. He had moved there from Hampshire in the UK about ten years ago and now taught English. The approximately 400km journey took longer than expected and it wasn't until the mid afternoon that we finally arrived in Yazd.
Yazd is a desert city sitting between the northern Dasht-e Kavir and southern Dasht-e Lut deserts and has the best preserved still inhabited old city in the country, which Unesco has recognised as one of the oldest inhabited towns in the world. The city dates from the Sassanian period, 224-637AD. After the Arab conquest in 642 the city became an important staging post along the caravan route to Central Asia and India. In more modern times the extension of the railway line by the last Shah has brought new life to the city. The noisy, traffic choked Beheshti Square marks the centre of the city. The old city lies to the north of the square and is bisected by the busy Emam Khomeini Street.
The bus station was in the southern suburbs of the city next to the railway station on the Tehran to Kerman railway line, which I passed along in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago. The Swedish couple went to book tickets at the bus station for the next leg of their journey east while Paul and myself hired a taxi to the Hotel Amir Chakhmagh in the centre of the historic old city. The only rooms free were those at the front of the hotel overlooking the noisy Amir Chakhmagh Square. The compensation though was the fantastic view of the three-storey façade of the Amir Chakhmagh complex. This has to be one of the most recognisable and unique buildings in the country with its three rows of alcoves and two towering minarets. I won't forget the view at night from the hotel window of the facade floodlit and the crescent moon hanging in the sky between the two towering minarets.
Later that afternoon I went for a short walk around the square to familiarise myself with my new surroundings and to find a barbers shop to get a hair cut and a shave. I briefly explored part of the bazaar, south of Qeyam Street just on the other side of Emam Khomeini Street. It was getting late in the afternoon though, so I decided to explore the rest of the bazaar tomorrow when I had more time. Once the sun had set Paul and I wandered out into the darkness to find a restaurant. We had heard rumours that there were some good restaurants in Yazd. I hoped these rumours were true, as so far on this trip I had been living off chelo kebab and Iranian fast food delights of pizzas and burgers. The two words, chelo kebab, must be the two most disappointing words in any culinary language. We walked to the Hamum-e Khan in the heart of the old city, just to the south of the main bazaar, where I had been wandering earlier that evening.
Like most buildings in Yazd, it didn't look very special from the street, but a short walk down some stairs in a passageway took us into the splendour of a beautifully restored underground hammam. The first domed room we entered served as a teahouse, locals and tourists sat around either on cushions or chairs quietly talking while sipping tea and smoking pipes; waiters glided past carrying tea pots and cups on silver trays. The restaurant was in the next room, complete with a shallow pool. This was by far the most atmospheric restaurant I had visited for quite some time; the food was pretty good as well and at last my Iranian food nightmare was over.
I spent a day exploring the city, wandering aimlessly for hours along the labyrinth of back streets and alleyways. Once away from the busy main streets it felt like I had stepped back in time, the alleyways were lined with traditional mud brick walls, which mostly hid the houses from public view. Children played in the streets, when they saw me approaching they would quickly run back to their houses and stand in their doorways staring as I walked past. The old doorways in Yazd where fairly unique as they had two doorknockers, one long and thin, the other round and fat; one would be used by women, the other men. They would give off different sounds so that the homeowner could decide who would answer the door. In this conservative society this was important so that women would not encounter men. The peace along the narrow streets would occasionally be broken by a speeding motorbike leaving a cloud of dust in it's wake; there is nowhere in Iran where you can escape from the motorbikes.
My walk took me through the busy bazaar, which is centred to the north and south of Qeyam Street, just east of Emam Khomeini Street. I eventually found my way out of the bazaar and reached the stunning Jameh Mosque; two towering minarets reaching up into the sky flanked the huge, elegantly tiled entrance portal. The mosque was constructed in the 14th century, reputably on the site of an earlier Zoroastrian fire temple. In the courtyard of the mosque is a stairwell, which leads deep underground to a qanat, an underground water channel. This has been the traditional method of irrigation in Iran for at least two thousand years. There are more than 50,000 of these underground irrigation channels in the country, the longest one more than 40km.
I returned to the hotel in the mid afternoon for my afternoon siesta and a cup of tea. It wasn't long until Wouter arrived from Shiraz and checked into the room I was sharing with Paul. The three of us returned to the Hamum-e Khan restaurant, where we had eaten the previous evening. After dinner, while we were enjoying a cup of tea and smoking a water pipe we met a couple of local students who were studying English. We talked for a while and were invited to visit the language college the next morning to meet the other students and to help them with their conversational English.
The following morning at 09.00 the two students arrived outside our hotel in a Paykan that, like most Paykans, had seen better days; Paul and I climbed into the back seat and we were driven across the city to the college. We soon stopped outside a non-descript concrete and brick building in a suburb of identical modern buildings. We walked down a staircase into a basement and into the small college. There were a number of classrooms; in one a class of about a dozen young children, no older than six or seven, where busy shouting out numbers in English. Every now and then one of the young kids would peer around the door and stare at us with big, dark eyes. The students we had come to see were all late teenagers and soon they arrived and gathered in the reception area where we were sitting; the majority of them were girls, dressed in the traditional, black chador. For Paul this was like a busman's holiday as in his adopted home in Lisbon, Portugal he taught English as a foreign language. We spent most of the morning talking with the students and learning from each other about our respective cultures. By lunchtime we finally managed to leave after saying some very extended goodbyes to all of the students and were driven back to our hotel.
That evening a group of us from the hotel walked into the heart of the old city past the Jameh Mosque and along narrow alleyways past mud-brick buildings to Husseinia, a small shrine lost in the heart of the city. Some young boys showed us the way; otherwise we would never have found this small building in this maze of a city. This shrine is a popular place for visitors to watch the sun set over the city; stairs lead up to the roof providing a fantastic vantage point with 360' views across the city. The views were quite breathtaking with the many tiled domes and minarets of the mosques glinting in the evening sunshine. The traditional badgirs, the wind towers used to cool the houses, dominated this roof top view and the ochre coloured mud buildings glowed in the last warm rays of sunshine, the shadows stretching away from us. We could see as far as the desert, which fringes the city and the jagged mountains beyond disappearing in the haze. Now, for the first time, looking down on the city we could see the many traditional houses below us, which are hidden from public view at ground level by high mud-brick walls. In a courtyard below us boys were playing football; when they saw they had an audience they began to show off. This perfect scene looking over this ancient city was completed when the call to prayer began to echo across the city from the many mosques. I sat on the dome of Husseinia mesmerised by the sights and sounds around me; it almost felt magical.
I didn't plan to buy a carpet in Yazd, I was going to wait until I reached Esfahan at the end of my trip, so I didn't have to carry it too far. Wouter also planned to purchase a carpet while in Iran and the next day, while wandering around the city, in the area behind the Jameh Mosque, we came across a small carpet shop in the corner of a dusty and deserted square next to a school. We decided to go in to the aptly named, Iran Carpet Showroom, to have a look and to do some research, checking prices and types of carpets available, so that we would be better prepared by the time we reached Esfahan. We were welcomed into the shop by Javad and taken upstairs to the carpet showroom. A young boy soon appeared with a silver tray and a couple of cups of tea for us.
I had visited many carpet shops in many cities across the Middle East and knew pretty well what style and colour carpet I wanted. I explained what I was after to Javad and he began to pull carpets off the shelf and roll them out in front of me. The fourth carpet he unrolled caught my eye. It only took a split second for me to realise that this was the carpet I had come looking for in Iran. Another few seconds looking at this beautiful carpet laid out in front of me and I decided that I wouldn't be leaving this shop today without it. I began to prepare myself for some very tough haggling. Meanwhile more and more carpets were unrolled at my feet until a pile almost knee high lay before me. Another cup of tea arrived and Javad turned his attention to Wouter and proceeded to unroll carpet after carpet for Wouter to look at. I sat back sipping the sweet, black tea trying to work out a strategy for buying this carpet.
After a while there were two piles of carpets in front of us; Javad stood there now looking rather exhausted from the exertion of pulling all these carpets off the shelves, which reached up to the ceiling. A small group of European tourists arrived in the shop; they all looked around retirement age. Javad suddenly had his work cut out now flitting between his two groups of potential customers. He helped us narrow down our choice of carpets to four, which we liked; I went through the motions as my mind was already made up as to which carpet I would purchase. Eventually I was left with the fourth carpet I had seen lying at my feet; now came the difficult part, negotiating the price. Javad looked in his stock book, made a quick calculation on his calculator and announced the price as US$680. My heart sank as I realised that there was no way I could afford this carpet at that price. Wouter and I decided to haggle for our two carpets together to try and obtain a bigger discount. First we had another cup of sweet, black tea delivered.
Meanwhile the group of European tourists were quickly closing a deal on some splendid looking city carpets, which would be well over my budget. I could see the excitement in Javad's eyes as large wads of crisp Euro banknotes changed hands; they must have paid a high premium for their short stay. Now he gave us his undivided attention as we began to negotiate. It was hard work, but soon the price began to drop. I worked on the assumption that a good price would be half of what was originally quoted, so battled to get down to US$340. In the course of our discussions, when I mentioned the finite amount of US dollars I possessed, he told us that he accepted most major credit cards. Things began to look up, maybe I could walk out of this shop today with this carpet. The haggling continued until we reached US$300, only managing to discount 10 dollars at a time, after much hard work. When Javad was on his hands and knees, thumping the floor with his fists, screaming, 'No, not another ten dollars off!' we realised that we could go no further. The final price was agreed at US$290, two and a half hours and many cups of tea after we had entered the shop for a quick look around.
Wouter and I left the shop and walked back out into the bright square, almost blinded by the brilliance of the afternoon sun after spending so long in the Iran Carpet Showroom, and made our way back to the hotel with our prized purchases. That evening we found another restaurant in a traditional merchants house a couple of streets over from the Hamum-e Khan. The tables and bed couches were set around the pool and fountain in the central courtyard and the food was even better than at the Hamum. After dinner we retired to a bed couch to relax, smoking a pipe and drinking a pot of tea. It was the perfect way to end the day in this beautiful desert city.
Yazd is the main centre of the ancient Zoroastrianism religion in Iran, with an estimated 30,000 Zoroastrians living in and around the city. I was surprised to learn about this now minority religion, I had not previously heard of before, surviving in the heart of the Islamic Republic. The religion dates back to around 550 BC and was the main religion across the Iranian plateau, becoming the state religion during the Sassanian period. The religion thrived until the Arab conquest defeated the Sassanians in 637 bringing with them Islam to the region. Zoroastrians are followers of Zoroaster, who is thought to have been born at Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan. They believed in an invisible omnipotent god, symbolised by fire, which they worshipped at their temples where eternally burning flames were kept; hence their temples are referred to as fire temples. Zoroaster preached about the battle between good and evil and believed in the two principles, Vohu Mano, good mind and Ahem Nano, bad mind, which were responsible for day and night, life and death. These principles were represented in the Supreme Being, Ahura Mazda, as well as all living things.
There are a number of Zoroastrian sites in and around Yazd. One of the most important fire temples is about 50km northwest of the city at Chak Chak. There is an annual festival here, which lasts ten days and attracts thousands of pilgrims. Unfortunately it is a difficult place to get to on the southern fringes of the Dasht-e Lut along a rough stretch of road. A trip out there takes the best part of a day and it is off any public transport routes. We tried to hire a taxi to take four of us out there, but unfortunately had left it too late in the morning. No taxi drivers were prepared to take us for the price we were offering. After much negotiation in the street outside the Hotel Amir Chakhmagh all we managed to achieve was to attract a large group of questionable Afghans and Pakistanis, plus a few locals around us. These characters seemed to spend all of their day hanging around the square, gathered in small groups. So instead we decided to visit the Towers of Silence later that afternoon to watch the sun set.
Arranging a taxi that evening to go to the Towers of Silence was easy, compared to the earlier debacle of trying to get to Chak Chak. We drove out to the southern outskirts of the city where the sprawl of modern, half completed concrete apartment blocks finally gave way to the desert. The desert appeared at times to creep up along the road into the city; small drifts of orange sand were blown up alongside the curb stones. The taxi dropped us off where the relatively smooth tarmac surface of the road gave way to sand and desert. The large circular Towers of Silence are set on two rocky, barren hills overlooking the city and are open to the elements.
Zoroastrians believed in the purity of the elements and did not bury there dead so as not to pollute the earth, nor did they use cremation so as not to pollute the atmosphere. Instead they brought there dead up here to the Towers of Silence, Dakhmeh-ye Zartoshtiyun, where the bodies would be placed in a sitting position, exposed so that the vultures could pick the bones clean. A priest would keep watch on the dead to see which eye the vultures would pluck out first. The right eye would mean the soul faced a good future; the left eye meant that the future for the soul looked grimmer. The towers have been disused now for over forty years and today Zoroastrians mostly bury there dead in concrete lined graves, so as to preserve the purity of the earth.
Unfortunately the Towers of Silence were far from silent as the hills and desert surrounding the towers had become an impromptu scrambling course for every male youth with a motorbike. The peace and tranquillity of the location was completely destroyed by the incessant roar of motorbike engines as bikes battled with tourists up the narrow paths leading to the towers. If they weren't tearing up and down the hills they raced in the small valley, which separates the two towers, pulling wheelies and leaving clouds of dust hanging in the still air. To say I felt disappointed would be an understatement, but in Iran you came to expect that wherever you went there would be a motorbike close behind you. We sat on the wall of the eastern tower watching the sun go down behind the mountains and the city becoming cloaked in darkness. Getting back to our hotel was easier than expected. We walked back along the road we had come, there was very little traffic, just a few motorbikes returning from the towers now it was dark. We began to expect that we were in for a long walk back into the centre of the city when an empty bus appeared out of a back street. The bus took us back to a busy intersection in the city from where we hired a taxi back to Amir Chakmaq Square.
Paul left Yazd a day before Wouter and myself, as he soon had to be back in Tehran to catch a flight back to Europe; we agreed to meet again the following day at the Amir Kabir Hostel in Esfahan. Meanwhile on my last day in Yazd I walked down to Ateshkadeh, a Zoroastrian fire temple at the southeastern edge of the old city on Kashani Street. This small temple is set in a relaxing garden walled off from the busy main street. A number of steps lead up to the main entrance of the temple above, which is the symbolic birdman representation of Zoroaster. In one hand he holds a ring symbolising loyalty, while the other hand is held up as a sign of respect; the three layers of feathers in the wings reflect the belief that you should speak, act and think decently. From the hallway inside you can see the sacred flame burning behind glass, which is reputed to have been burning since 470 AD. The flame has been burning at its present site since 1940 after first being moved to Yazd in 1474; previously from 1174 it had burnt at Ardakan, a small town 60km north west of Yazd.
I left Yazd early in the morning with Wouter and took a bus the 300km northwest to Esfahan, an uneventful trip that took about five hours. The bus dropped us at the Jey bus terminal, about 4km from the city centre, although at the time we were not quite sure where exactly we were in the city, leaving us feeling slightly lost. We soon negotiated for a taxi, which wasn't that easy as we had no idea how far it was to the city centre. The taxi took us to Chahar Bagh Abbasi Street, the main north, south street in the city where we checked into the Amir Kabir Hostel and soon met up with Paul again as planned.
Esfahan is the second largest city in Iran, after Tehran, with a population of just over 1.2 million. It has to be one of the finest and most elegant cities not just in Iran, but also in the whole Middle Eastern region. The city is an architectural treasure trove with many exquisite blue tiled mosques and madrasehs, grand palaces and some of the most splendid bridges across the Zayandeh River you could ever possibly dream of. Undoubtedly the architectural jewel in this city has to be the magnificent Emam Khomeini Square, previously known as Naghsh-e Jahan Square. History seems to surround you wherever you go in this city; the legacy of Esfahan today comes mostly from one man, Shah Abbas I, also known as Abbas the Great.
Shah Abbas I ruled under the Safavid dynasty, which was founded in 1334 by Sheikh Safi od-Din in the northwest of Iran. The Safavids reached their peak under the rule of Shah Abbas I, who reigned between 1587-1629, and who created the third great Persian Empire, after the previous Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires. It was during this time that the capital was moved to Esfahan, which Shah Abbas rebuilt with great splendour that can still be seen today. The glory days of this great empire did not last long and after Abbas' death the empire floundered with out a clear, strong leader, which lead to an Afghan invasion in 1722 and eventually the loss of control of this great city.
On my first afternoon I walked with Paul and Wouter down to Emam Khomeini Square, a place I would end up visiting at least a couple of times a day during my visit to this city. It wasn't far to walk to the square from the hotel; a short walk south along the tree lined Chahar Bagh Abbasi Street to Emam Hussein Square and then east, past parklands along the quieter Sepah Street, which lead into the northwestern corner of the square. The shear size of this square and the uniformity of the architecture is quite breathtaking when you first enter from Sepah Street. Built in 1612 by Shah Abbas I, it measures 500m by 160m. In the centre is a large, shallow rectangular pool and fountains surrounded by gardens; shops line all sides of the square with identical large white canvas awnings keeping out the bright sunlight. Today, traffic only traverses the northern part of the square between Sepah and Hafez Street, leaving the majority of the square a peaceful place to wander about. To the north of the square alleyways lead off into the Bazar-e Bozorg, one of the largest and most labyrinthine covered bazaars in the country, built mostly in the 16th century, although some parts are hundreds of years older. It is one of the highlights of the city, walking for hours at a time, meandering along the many alleyways getting hopelessly lost for a morning or afternoon.
Some of the most beautiful and majestic buildings in the country are found in this square. Providing a balance to the entrance to the bazaar at the northern end of the square is the giant portal, about 30m tall, of the Emam Mosque at the opposite, southern end. The beautiful tiled dome (cupola), minarets and entrance portal of the Emam Mosque dominate the view to the southern end of the square. Work to build this grand mosque began in 1611 and took eighteen years to complete. It remains one of the greatest examples of Safavid era architecture, being perfectly proportioned and covered in the most stunning blue-tiled mosaic designs. Since construction finished very few additions have been made over the years and what you can see today is the original vision of Shah Abbas I.
Although the entrance portal faces the square, the mosque is angled to face Mecca. Walking through the entrance and through the north iwan you hardly notice that you have turned west through approximately 40' as you enter the inner courtyard facing Mecca with the ritual ablutions pool in front of you. There are four iwans, rectangular halls opening out into the courtyard, each leading into a vaulted sanctuary. The main sanctuary is entered through the south iwan; here the domed ceiling rises 36.3m. This is where the mihrab, the niche marking the direction of Mecca and the minbar are situated, both beautifully crafted out of marble. On either side of the main sanctuaries are two more courtyards housing the madrasehs. To protect worshippers during the heat of the day, a scaffold covered with canvas sheets had been erected across the inner courtyard. This was my only disappointment during my visit as it was very difficult to see and photograph the sheer splendour of the interior.
There is another mosque on the eastern side of the square, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque; it too was built under the reign of Shah Abbas I between 1602 and 1619. Shah Abbas dedicated the mosque to his father-in-law, Shei