We manage to get ourselves a driver to take us to the desert town of Abarqu. We strategically load all our gear into the car, and get the hell out of Yazd. The drive to Aberqu is much longer than anticipated, and quite boring apart from the imaginatively named Eagle mountain. We arrive at Aberqu around lunchtime, and what can I say about this town? Well if Mansour thought Yazd was a shithole, its just as well we didn't bring him to Aberqu. I immediately feel out of place for not wearing a black shirt and tight black slacks, which despite [View Full Entry]

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Esfahan fully deserve it's title The Diamond of Iran. Our hotel was right across the (very congested and dangerous looking) road from the Allah Verdi Khan Bridge, which is absolutely gorgeous, especially when it's lit up at night. There are also a lot of beautiful historic landmarks we failed to find on the first night (look, I wasn't navigating okay) and a lot more that we passed, including lovely parks, a really ornate old university building and somewhere that may or maybe not have been Iman Hossein Square. [View Full Entry]

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Getting into Tehran was unreal: sudddenly the women's headscarves were slipping back to reveal bands of hair and their clothes were getting tighter, brighter and less tent like. Everything was more modern and less uncomfortable than the stiffling atmosphere in Tabriz. Since we arrived too early to check into the hotel we went to visit the Royal Jewel Museum, which was amazing: the jewels were so huge and flawless I almost refused to believe that they were real. There were extraordinarily decadent things too: I thought that these sort of napkin ring like things made from gold and enamel, whi [View Full Entry]

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We arrive in Yazd early on Friday morning. Pat and Christina decide to join me in meeting up with Mansour. While waiting for him to arrive we meet a couple from Geelong who are cycling through Iran. We all find it odd that five Australians are standing at a roundabout in a town in the middle of the desert in Iran at eight o'clock in morning. Mansour and Maria arrive and the first question he asks is "why would you want to come to Yazd? Its shit". This is a reassuring comment from our supposed guide. We dump our bags in [View Full Entry]

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Wonder of wonders, we started the day with a lie in, OzBus standards, on behalf of the sick people who were growing fat in number. We were joking about draping the back of the bus in yellow and sealing it off for quarantine. Fortunately we didn't as the bacvk of the bus is the most fun place to sit: out of all the things I learnt at school I didn't think it was that one that would come in useful on an around the world trip but the world is a funny place. Tabriz is a very funny place. We went [View Full Entry]

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Today was a driving day, starting with us getting into our ridiculous tent dresses, crossing the border (better than we expected; we didn't even need our bags checked), and ending with us getting into Tabriz and pretty much crashing in the hotel room. Iranian hotel rooms are nice; for some reason (something to do with saving face) we're staying in ridiculously nice hotels for the whole country, so yay for random social customs. We also stopped at a nice restaurant where we all ate ridiculous amounts of food, mine more ridiculous than other people's because I was in the rapidly shrinking [View Full Entry]

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Well we are now in Tehran. We camped one night after crossing the border from Turkmenistan and then had an 18 hr drive to get into Tehran the following day. Tehran has been great - a very modern city where we visited the Palace, the "Den of Espionage' (the old US Embassy), the National Museum and the Jewels Museum - really enjoyed it all. We boutght black cotton in Ashgabat and borrowed long shirts from the boys to make our way over the border. Since then we have bought black headscarves and mantous (thigh length coats) to get around in. Some [View Full Entry]

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Reza is working, so he leaves me with his friend Mehrdad. Mehrdad and his taxi driver brother Mehdi come to collect me and after a sneaky lunchtime tea (behind closed doors so as not to offend the masses) we head to the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza. Apparently he was a pretty popular bloke because the sheer size of the Haram is unbelievable. After much confusion (since alot of the site is off-limits to non-muslims) we are allowed in and are ushered to the Islamic Relations Office and Foreign Pilgrims Affairs, where I am bombarded with Islamic propaganda by friendly staff. [View Full Entry]

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On from Tehran to Esfahan [View Full Entry]

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Pictures rather than words... From Istanbul to Tehran by train. And then to Esfahan [View Full Entry]

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