February 2007
You really meet some incredible people. A friend and I met Hossein Abdollahi in one of those happy chance encounters you experience when you go to small villages. Mr Abdollahi drove past us when we were looking at some old houses in the village of Khazaq (below), a few miles before Kashan on the main road.
June 2007
It’s always nice to add a bit of adventure to a walk. The tang-e vahshi (wild gorge) above Jeliz Jand village near Firuzkoh requires long wades through a river with cliffs rising straight up on each side, a Qajar stone relief, pools, waterfalls, swamps and a final green paradise about two hours up from the gorge entrance. This might just be the most beautiful place I have seen in Iran - perhaps anywhere in the world.
A restaurant named after one of the world’s best known hunger strikers comes across sounding pretty sick. But Bobby Sands Burger on Darband was named for the republican hero well before he died, when he was a figure of great inspiration for revolutionary Iranians suddenly aware they had comrades in the West.
February 2005
I tend to find Qom a pretty dour place. The scenery is monotone, the climate is bad and the architecture is dull. People tend to dress with less snap than their compatriots in other cities. Or perhaps this is just the jaded eye cast by somebody who only ever visits the city after getting up indecently early to avoid the Tehran rush hour.
April 2007
For someone with a morbid horror of snakes, I thought I’d done pretty well to go though my whole life to date without seeing one in the wild. Then I saw three (yes, three) in two days. What is it with this part of the country? The first was dozing on Alexander’s Wall near Gharreh Tappeh Sheikh, a couple of feet long and green. The next two were both in the eerie village of Ashuradeh at the top of a long peninsula that almost encloses the gulf of Gorgan and faces Bandar Turkoman across a narrow strait of water.
April 2007
Now I’m the first to admit I’m a terrible rider. To be honest, except for a few half-hearted lessons during holidays in Scotland when I was very small, I don’t think I’ve been on a horse in my life. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself bolting across the steppe, pleading my horse to stop and fearfully sobbing into its mane. I could barely walk for a week, but God, it was fun. And this is a place to give you the shivers - a place where thousands of years roll across the grass like an invading Scythian horde (Ok, that’s pushing metaphor a tad too far, but you know what I mean).
April 2007
The Seljuks were quite a people. After sweeping into Iran from the Central Asian steppe at the time of the Norman conquest of England, they abandoned the saddle, quit their yurts and settled great cities, where they perfected the delicate caramel brickwork that still characterises much of the northeast. They weren’t the first invaders from the steppe and wouldn’t be the last, but their two centuries of rule gave Iran some of its most colourful history and most interesting buildings.
April 2007
There are some places that not only grab your imagination, but wrestle it to the ground and tie it in knots. Radkan tower, hidden behind the first high ridge of the Alborz, is such a place. Despite sitting at the bottom of the valley, it overwhelms it. It broods. From a distance – you’re likely to approach across the hills to the north – it looks small. But from near at hand its size (35 metres high) takes you by surprise.
April 2007
Rajab took us with his little daughter, Saha, who had never been to Khaled Nabi, a drive of about 90 minutes from Gharreh Tappeh Sheikh across weird soft hills that could have been carved from butter. On every hilltop and the bottom of each small valley was a sprinkling of bright green, vivid at a distance but utterly unsubstantial at close quarters. The way it collected on flatter surfaces looked almost as if it had been scattered like stardust by some giant hand.
November 2004
We had already climbed as far as the autumn snowline up the steep mountainside opposite Masouleh. Now, on empty stomachs, we set off up another winding forest path to the Mongol ruins of Rudkhan castle a few miles from Fuman.
