Persia

People usually do what I am doing in reverse, there are of course obvious reasons for going west to east, the fact that you are departing your home ( for europeans) and the added bonus of everything getting cheaper. Iran has taught me another important reason for going the opposite way, when you go east to west as I am doing countries get considerably more dull, boring and sanitized. Maybe a little harsh but I have been having to continuosly remind myself that I am not infact in Argentina bi-daily, I actually greeted the man in the hotel lobby by "Buenos dias" yesterday morning. There are two abvious reasons for this besides my obvious lack of intellect, ther first is like Argentina is you close one eye and squint the other you could well be in Paris or Madrid, of course here rather then Argentina the lack of womens hair, alchohol and the abundance of Soviet cars is a constant reminder. The other reason as I calculated as I suffered from a bit of a bout of insomnia is that in the last 16months I have stayed in a grand total of different 128 rooms, not including the 30 nights or so that I have camped, surely enough to adle any brain.

I am not so far as you might tell terribly impressed by this country, it seems to be lacking charachter that the past countries have had such an abundance of, the culture shock is minimal and despite the stunning architecture at nearly every corner there is very little that new. I will now move on to the two most dissapointing parts of the country so far, the Iranian diet seems to consist of kebabs, burgers and pizza, oh yes, and roast chicken. The bread which I have been loking forward to, seems to have been baked with a flour substitute cojnsisting mostly of rubber, great for a yeast flavoured chewing gum but not so good when rapped around your kebab. Secondly and this almost brought me and Kieran to tears on discovery is that the no good do gooders of this world have arrived here and banned smoking in public places, surely not too big a deal for non-smokers, but when my idealogical picture of me in Iran is sitting in a musty tea shop, sipping on strong sweet black tea, pondering my next move in chess and being reassured by the theraputic bubbling sound as I take another draw on my apple flavoured hooka can be no more then a dream I feel like packing my bags and going to a more civilised hooka smoking nation. Basra is only a few hours bus ride from here, well on second thoughts maybe not.

I will have to recap the last few days as I am sure you havenoidea where we are. Aftre spending a day exploring Kerman which had to be fair a rather nice Bazarre, we packed our bags the next morning and left with the first rays of sun, after doing a 9km detour because of completely wrong directions from a "nice teacher" we finally found the way out of Kerman and felt sure we were going in the direction of Yazd.

A quick sidenote just to explain the problems of cycling in Iran, there are huge expanses of nothing especially in the south east where hundreds of kms seperate village from village where any sort of accomodation is doubtful, camping is of course possible but to get out of sight of the road you have topush your bike for miles and even then it is freezing and with no chance of anything resembling water, so one must pack ones bike to overflowing point.

So where was I, oh yes, we were joining the only linking road between Kerman and Yazd and to our horror it was an 8 lane highway populated by extremely smelly trucks. After struggling in to a gale for 20km along this ro0ad and contemplating another 400 of the same we stopped took out the map and made a slight change of plan, a wussy plan if you will but I am a very grateful wuss for doing it. We put our tails between our legs and cycled back to Kerman, where we got a bus to Shiraz in the western mountains bordering with Iraq, here there seems to be a large amount of secondary roads leading to Turkey to please us and also will offer us a change of scenery from the monotinous dessert.

While I am on this anti-Iran rant I have never met a more money hungry rip off artist bunch of people who seem to do anything in their power to take your money and use the advantage of you not knowing the language and being defenceless entirely to their advantage. I am sure I will end up eating my words as what usually happens, but having heard so many great things about these people I am absolutely appalled especially after the reception I recieved in the last Islamic country. I will give you an example, the only time we were ever ripped off in Pakistan by a few cents at a street stall, a crowd of people who were there started complaining and shouting at the vendor and calling him cheat untill he gave our correct change, here after already paying through our teeth for the privalage of putting our bikes in the luggage hold of the bus to Shiraz midway through the journey they started to demand more, we of course refused but to get us back they demanded us to leave the bus 23km from the centre of Shiraz at 11 o'clock at night, the whole bus was watching this but no-one did anything, I could not believe it.

The photos I am publishing are of Persepolis about 40km from Shiraz where about 2500 years ago Darius and Xerxes used to welcome visiting dignities to their land until Alexander the Great raised it to the ground. It was quite incredible to see and really very inspiring but as i am sure you can tell I will need alot more then this to remove this bitter taste from my mouth.

Hopefully the cure for this bitterness is get the hell out the cities and get on your bike, which is what we will be doing as of tomorow morning, we are going to go camping in the mountains for a few days on an abstract route to Esfahan which will hopefully introduce us to a higher class of Iranians. This all depends if I can fix Rocanante who is not in the best of shape, our explosive diarrhoea which has been attacking us for the past few days subsides and the rain and snow lets off for a while.

That is all from a very disgruntled Will in Shiraz who may offer this piece to the Iranian tourist board or more likely the Department of Defence in Washington!!