Andrew Susan

I was oddly anxious about visiting Persepolis. I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of whether it would be a disappointment - had Alexander made such a thorough demolition job in 330BC that there would be nothing worth seeing. In retrospect I needn't have worried, there is plenty to see and it is still an impressive place. Vahid walked us around the main elements of the site - I think we were lucky that it wasn't blazing sunshine at this exposed place. Whilst the buildings are fragmentary there are lots of marvellous reliefs to look at. We then had free time to explore further - Susan went for tea, I went to see the rock cut tombs in the hillside above the site. Going up the hill gave the opportunity to look down over the ... read more

Wednesday 1 November We arrived in time to relax for a while before going out to start exploring this amazing city. For a start we walked down to the Se-o-e Pol (33 arch bridge), a fabulous sight and popular with tourists and locals alike. We realised that we were going to start seeing other European tourist groups for the first time. Luckily the city is big enough and the numbers small enough so that this is not a problem. After this some of us went to the Shahrzad restaurant and had possibly the best ever plate of lamb chops followed by a shared dish of the local speciality, khoresht-e mast (google it). At the end of the dinner the waiters plied us with local nougat (gaz). Thursday 2 November Esfahan A day of sightseeing in this ... read more

Tuesday. To Qazvin via Alamut Looking back I can’t work out whether I enjoyed this day. We spent quite some time getting out of Tehran and driving to the outskirts of Qazvin where we changed to a smaller bus to tackle the mountain roads. One of the odd, but nerdily interesting, events was realising, when the driver filled up, that petrol/diesel costs about 6p a litre (compared to around £1.20 in London). Our objective for the day was the Assassin sect’s castle of Alamut. Three hours or so from leaving the motorway we arrived at the foot of an outcrop which seemed to be crowned with scaffolding and corrugated iron….the castle. The surrounding countryside was either bleached by the summer into a pale brown dustiness or covered in trees that were turning beautiful shades of gold ... read more

We had decided to go on an organised trip as our first trip to the Lebanon as we had only a week and wanted an easy time in terms of travelling around, booking places to stay etc . So there we were at T1 Heathrow people spotting to try and guess who we might be spending the next week with. We flew out from London to Beirut on BMI, not the BMI Baby offshoot that the number of ankle biters on the plane might have led you to believe. I normally sleep like a "baby" on flights but this was four and a half hours of screaming wakefulness. And we were late so dashing my hopes of seeing all the second half of the Champions League Final destruction of Man Utd by Messi and Co in ... read more

Preamble: some of you will know that one of us is a bit of a castle anorak and we have travelled the world seeing piles of stones from Spanish forts in Cuba through to marvellous Crusader castles in Syria and east to Japan and many (many) places in between. This trip was to see some of the castles and other sites/ sights in the area of Turkey around the top right/north east corner of the Mediterranean. This area has many ruins from the Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Armenians before the Mamelukes/Ottomans finally extinguished the Cilician Armenian kingdom in the 1370s. We were only here for a week so the challenge was to see lots but not get "not another bloody castle ruin" fatigue or spend too much time in the car. Lots of versions of ... read more