After a day or so of sightseeing and meeting the locals in Yazd I planned to head south again. The next city was Kerman and from there I would venture to the eerie desert sculptures in the desert of Kaluts. I wanted to travel there by train. I was a bit tired of all the buses and wanted to relax for the journey which is what train travel provides. However this is Iran and things aren't really the same here. I arrived at Yazd railway station by taxi at half an hour before the 5.30 departure. I waited in the foyer with everyone else in headscarves, chadors and men with the usual uniform of plain trousers, belt and long sleeved shirt. The train was late by an hour and I'm already yawning. Despite this line having ... read more

So I left Esfahan on a coach headed south and I knew it would get even hotter. I could already see the heat give the road and the distant mountains on either side of the motorway a purple haze. Yazd is a very historic city, stuck in the desert between two mountain ranges -it was once an important trade route - Marco Polo stopped here on his to and fro from China in the 12th Century. It gets so hot here in the summer that there are many old wind towers - called badgirs - that capture the hot wind, cool it with water and then distribute it around a house. The old city also had plenty of sights and lots of old mosques. Upon arrival in Yadz I got a taxi to the Old City ... read more

Sa-lam again from Iran and chet-ou-rey? - how are you? I’m having a wondrous time here in Iran, this place ticks all of the boxes; good weather, layers upon layers of history with accompanying ancient ruins, inquisitive people, friendly people, hospitable people, that happened to be rather oppressed because of a culture dictated by religious fundamentalisms and utterly foreign to a Western traveler like myself. I’m in my element. Travelling south from Tehran on a modern Volvo coach I headed for the town of Kashan, bypassing the city of Qom. Why? Its where the hard-line mullahs who run Iran all live and thus is a conservative place for anyone to stay. When I say conservative I mean unsmiling sombre mullahs in beards and robes walking around and women covered form head to toe in black chadors ... read more

So I’ve finally left Australia, I was there so long I was beginning to get complacent and forgot that there were countries and cultures out there. So my first travel was a low-budget flight with Air Asia X from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. It was an 8 hour flight in total and there was no on-board TVs, movies, nothing. The food I had to pay for in advance and it came in a heated up metal box and it wasn’t particularly exciting - roasted chicken lumped with runner beans. I managed to survive it all with a mixture of the second last episode of Deadwood watched on my notepad and reading as well as taking lots of pictures of the amazing clouds and landscapes flying over the top of Australia and the ... read more

Melbourne Diary: As I'm walking along a busy Elizabeth Street in the Central Business District two teenage girls are walking behind me. “Fack that! Fack that! No facking way” etc. It got me thinking about how many times I’ve been shocked by the proclivity for cursing here. Keep with me. For example on I've witnessed a couple of altercations between passengers trading some seriously aggressive swearing such as: "go fuck yourself!" and “Up ya, ya facking cant” - and that was from a woman. I’ve turned into Disgusted of Brunswick all of a sudden. Even my work colleagues regularly surprise me by using ”fack” and “shit” in mid-sentence as if it's any old word. Coarse language features prominently in Australia it seems (I could of course make reference to sixty years of British criminals being sent ... read more