The men we met after dinner on our first night. Very friendly.

I was con­cerned before enter­ing Iran that it may be rather similar to Turkey in many ways. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with Turkey, but after spend­ing what amounts to over two months there, on two sep­ar­ate trips, Laura and I are both looking for a change.

Luckily for us, Iran feels like a whole other world, and we’ve only been here 24 hours. The land­scapes have been unique, like cross­ing the giant, salty Lake Orumiyeh. According to the Lonely Planet it has salin­ity levels like the Dead Sea, with the same you-can’t-sink-effects. Unfortunately, we were flying across it’s long cause­way in a taxi and couldn’t test it.

The house archi­tec­ture is dif­fer­ent. In Turkey almost all build­ings are concrete-framed with cinder-block walls. Here, houses we’ve seen are strangely tot­ter­ing affairs, made of brick (mud-brick?) and orna­men­ted with pillars often on the second and third storeys. Infrastructure seems better too, with smooth asphal­ted roads that best the bumpy mon­stros­it­ies that pass for high­ways in remote eastern Turkey.

We’re in a city called Tabriz as I write this. Both of us finally putting our bouts of Traveller’s D behind us. We haven’t a clean outfit between us, and will be doing some laundry this morning so it can dry in our warm, breezy hotel room overnight before we push on tomor­row, likely to a place called Zanjan. From there we can make a trip out to Takht-e-Soleiman, the site of a beau­ti­ful crater lake that was the centre of the Zoroastrian reli­gion in the third century. Today we’ll be explor­ing Tabriz a bit, maybe hitting up the large bazaar, as well as finding some new, slightly more appro­pri­ate clothes for each of us. Laura, of course needs to obey the country’s rel­at­ively strict female dress code, which at its least, involves wearing a head­scarf, long sleeves, and long skirt or pants. We also want to get some photos printed of our fam­il­ies back home, in order to show people a bit of our life back there. The people we’ve met so far seem quite inter­ested in learn­ing from us, just as we are learn­ing from them.

Already we’ve exper­i­enced some of the country’s world-famous hos­pit­al­ity. We were given snacks on our bus from Van, by a friendly Iranian hotelier and his family. We got Farsi lessons (Farsi is the lan­guage here, some­times called Persian by out­siders), travel advice (“Tehran: Good; Shiraz: Good; Kermanshaw: Veeeery good!”), and a heap of hotel help from our friendly Taxi driver Amir, who spent almost as long here in Tabriz helping us hunt down a decent hotel value as he did actu­ally driving us here. And we enjoyed very wel­com­ing small talk with some stu­dents who beckoned us over on a street corner last night.

In Iranian tra­di­tion, vis­it­ors are con­sidered gifts from God. I think we’ll need to work on our humility.

p.s. — Facebook seems to be blocked here, so don’t expect a lot from us on that front.

We visited the bazaar in Tabriz on a Friday. The weekend here is Thursday/Friday, with Friday being the holiest day, so only a few of the many, many, shops were open. It was still very pleas­ant walking in the cool, lonely corridors.

Another shot from the bazaar. Nothing special, I just liked the light.