A Magic Carpet Tour of Persia

[Skyring]

Azerbaijan Museum, the sign reads. Inside it was crammed full of fascinating stuff, but I won't bore my readers. While Parri was buying the tickets, I regarded the hanging lamp in the foyer with some interest.



Our porch at home has just a bare bulb, and one day, when we find exactly the right lamp fixture, we'll install something nicer.

Well, that day had arrived, and I spoke with Kerri about plundering antiquities, smuggling them out of the country. If she could distract the guard, maybe by dropping her headscarf, I could conceal the thing under my shirt…



Kerri looked at the lamp, hanging about four metres up, and considered its size - about as big as my torso. She started tugging on her scarf.

"No," I stopped her in the nick of time. "I don't want to give the poor guy a heart attack."

That would be wrong.

I'll have to return. With a bigger shirt.

And a ladder concealed beneath it.



Okay. Cases and cases full of ancient things. Gold coins, pottery, weapons, fabulous stuff. This one I liked enough to share. A roller to impress a design upon clay. Early home decoration. Make one design, roll it onto wet bricks, do it as many times as you want. Whoever thought this one up must have been able to outcompete the market, at least until the other builders figured out the secret.

Civilisation is made of one bright idea after another, each building on the previous.

This place is pretty much the cradle of civilisation. A trade crossroads along the Silk Road and the Spice Road. Not just goods being traded. Ideas, designs, technology.

It all makes my head spin. Heaven knows my ancestors weren't building great cities and conquering the known world at this time.



I'll throw this guy in for good measure. Now, it takes a certain amount of knowledge, skill, and experience to make a clay pot. Constructing one in the shape of an ox takes it one level higher, but to go outside representational art to this elegant and whimsical form, well, I just take my hat off to the artist.

Had to work my way around the glass case. Reflections and the glass getting in the way makes photography very difficult.

Not to mention slipping this into my camera bag. Go very nicely on the sideboard at home, that would…

 

[pagingjoan]

Beautiful objects. I'm so looking forward to following in (some of) your footsteps.

 

[Skyring]

There was more to the museum, including a basement floor almost entirely given over to recent bronze statuary depicting various themes of war, hunger, slavery etc. Powerful stuff with contorted faces, but somewhat out of place in a museum, I thought.



I liked the piece for "Overpopulation". The man's expression is apt.



We looked outside, where there was a display of gravestones and ancient statuary. I was reminded of Pictish objects - there is a definite similarity of style in the complex linked forms and the stylised but recognisable animal shapes. I guessed that the phallic ram carvings marked the graves of powerful community leaders.

Then we climbed back in the bus, and off to our lunchtime restaurant. Along the way we passed examples of public artwork. There was a statue of a horse, contorted but recognisable, which I'll get to when I find a better image, but there were a great many Easter eggs.



An overwhelmingly Islamic nation, and they have these things on the streets?

Seems that the local New Year is just around the corner, and of course eggs are powerful symbols of new beginnings. There are traditions associated with the festival - something about guests to one's house being welcomed by seven objects beginning with "S" - but I couldn't follow the details. Big, colourful, decorated eggs - now that's something I recognise!

As an aside, the following week in Athens, eggs featured again, this time as red decorated half-dozens sold in the supermarkets to celebrate their local Easter. As Kerri discovered when she made up some breakfast, these are hard-boiled.

The restaurant meal followed a pattern which became very familiar. We sat down at some reserved tables, salads and starters such as flatbread were distributed, we were given a limited choice of mains, and one drink per diner was rationed out. Soft drinks - of course! - but there was always a brewed drink or two.



Peach beer! A "carbonated malt beverage", as it says on the tin. Not bad, and I'll bet if they left some of the alcohol in, this could really take off at home.

On that note, the two missing members of the party joined us to applause. Seems that the airport security check is covered by cameras, and when one of the security checkers pulled out two bottles of alcohol from luggage, he decided that everything was being recorded and he'd best do things by the book. So our unlucky tourist was handcuffed and taken away to court, where he was released, fined, and fed sweets by a judge.

"What was the fine?" we asked.

"A bottle of wine and a bottle of whisky," came the reply. "Straight into the judge's personal supply, I'll bet."

Most likely. Alcohol is officially forbidden for all but a few - some religious minorities are allowed their traditional vodkas - but isn't too hard to come by on the black market. So I'm told. Not sure of the wine type - a bottle of shiraz to be consumed in the city of Shiraz, I'll bet - but the whisky was Jamesons, and I'm such a snob that I wondered why you'd smuggle in anything but a good single malt.

I'll skip over the food. Salad, flatbread, rice, and lamb, beef or fish as a main. But all fresh. We saw very little processed food in Iran. This is the home of organic - and tasty - tomatoes, rather than the insipid vegetables we have become accustomed to.



Items such as mayonnaise and chive yogurt were packaged. Probably just as well. Leave these things out at room temperature for a bunch of tourists, and just asking for trouble.

I also avoided tap water as best I could. Bottles of spring water were freely available in minibar fridges and on the coach. I got a day of gastro later on, but luckily it was fairly mild. Just stopped me eating for a day and produced some entertaining side effects I won't go into.

 

[Skyring]

Next stop, the bazaar. Apparently the largest undercover market in the world, this one. I dunno, I've seen some fairly huge bazaars in my time.

We were dropped off at the old caravanserai. An important stop on the Silk Road, this one in Tabriz, and Parri told us a bit about the history and culture of caravanserais before letting us loose in the bazaar.

"If anyone gets lost, our hotel is the ElGoli Pars. Tell that to a taxidriver and he'll get you back," she advised.

Tour guides must hate bazaars. They are complex and confusing and full of passageways all alike. Make one wrong turn and you can easily become irretrievably lost. Parri led us through the maze, with Robyn and Carmel old hands at the read, making sure everyone kept up.

Including your humble photographer, who loves the sound and the sights and the smells of bazaars.











Everything is for sale in these places. Including SD cards and hard drives, most likely. I also wanted a shoelace for my camera, but I couldn't spot one amongst the jumble.

Forgive me, but the next few posts are all bazaar. I just went nuts.

 

[Skyring]

As promised, nuts. There were big bags and tubs of every variety under the sun. And everything else. Just an amazing sight. Cheap as chips, too, despite the alarming number of zeroes on the price labels.



I think these are saffron-flavoured sugar sticks for stirring tea. I could be wildly wrong on this. But geez, they look spectacular!



I'm a sucker for sweets. Brightly coloured in diverse profusion, my camera just dives into the bins by itself.



The bazaari use abacuses. And calculators for Western tourists. No computers - they might produce records which would be useful to tax collectors. Apparently these folk barely scrape by.

They are also one of the most influential communities in the nation. Strongly conservative, endlessly discussing current affairs, the people of the bazaar are deeply rooted in tradition. They drink tea and they know things.



Tripe! Just sitting out there in the open for anyone to buy.

"I'd eat that," said Bruce, all but licking his lips.

And welcome to it.

 

[Skyring]

I'm not exactly sure what these things are. Surely not pigs' feet?



Colourful and interesting as the displays of all manner of foods and spices and fabrics and wares were, the people made it. Sellers and buyers alike, the place was great people watching.




Maybe a little hard to tell in the shot, but these guys are putting edges on knives. I think.



Even those souls just taking a moment out of their day to savour some quiet time, perhaps they were best of all against the clutter and bustle of the bazaar.

 

[Skyring]

Not entirely pedestrian traffic. People wheeling trolleys through the aisles, even motorcycles making their way through the crowd.



This chap must have thought I wanted to be run down. I jumped aside at the last second - I just wanted a good shot.





Pick the locals! Kerri was an obvious tourist, but Diana had put some study into her dress, making a garment that would fit in. She had made it herself, and Kerri, a seamstress of some ability, took keen interest in the details. On our return next year, I expect her to look more the part.

Still, I suspect the Persians would know the difference immediately. It's like visiting Paris or Rome: no matter how much you try to copy the locals, you never have the style they are born with.

 

[Skyring]

Charcoal in the smokes section. Kind of appropriate. I'm guessing it's used for cooking or heating of some sort, rather than art, which is more my experience.

Bazaars are divided into sections. Meat, spices, clothes, carpets, jewellery, tobacco. They must all be selling the same goods at the same prices - I wonder how they manage competition in a perfect market.

Pari reckoned that the better goods were found in more substantial shops outside the bazaar. Maybe the prices wouldn't be so good, but the quality would be better.



I couldn't resist these tubs of rice. The grains, the texture, the variety. Love to find out the differences. a lot of rice in Persian cooking. We later travelled through a region of rice fields: little paddies under irrigation, divided by small dykes. Not on a vast agrindustrial scale, but still obviously producing significant crops.



And finally, this glory. Wherever I looked, there were details that stood out. The brickwork, the lighting, the signs. These places have their own culture, their own personalities. They are suffused with the lives of the people within, who make these laneways their home.

So, even though tour guides must cringe at the thought of taking a dozen ignorant tourists into a maze, they still lead us in, for the variety, the smells, the sounds, the sights. And for the people. A nation is more than monuments and mountains.

 

[RooFlyer]

Did you see many other tourists / tourist groups in your travels there? Was there any reaction when your (tourist) group appeared in a market etc? That is, did you get the impression that tourists are still a novelty?

 

[love_the_life]

Were people happy to have their photos taken? Especially the women who show up in some pics (not the ones in your group).

 

[Skyring]

Did you see many other tourists / tourist groups in your travels there? Was there any reaction when your (tourist) group appeared in a market etc? That is, did you get the impression that tourists are still a novelty?

We saw a good many other groups. Mostly Europeans, although there were a few Chinese. After all, we stayed at the same hotels and ate at the same places, and went to the same sights.

The tourist industry in Iran is ramping up. New hotels, none of them full, but all aimed squarely at tourists, especially English-speaking ones. Signs are always in Persian (as far as I can tell, anyway) but often duplicated in English, rather than any other language. Tour guides speak English, students learn English, and we had any number of young people come up to us to try out their English.

We attracted few glances of surprise or dismay in our travels. We stood out as tourists, but were accepted as a familiar sight, rather than a novelty.

Having said that, if ever one Iranian was brave enough to ask for a photograph, then soon there would be dozens crowding in for selfies. Blondes, in particular, attracted most attention, and if you have fair (or red) hair and are willing to talk about yourself and your homeland, then you become an instant superstar. However, local women sought out tourist women and ignored the men. Vice versa for the men - they chose the male tourists to talk with.

It is impossible not to warm to these people.

 

[Skyring]

Were people happy to have their photos taken? Especially the women who show up in some pics (not the ones in your group).

They seemed as happy as anybody else around the world. There was one point where our group were busy buying local crafts in a shop and it took time for them all to be served. I had no interest in the wares, but I stood outside in the street and took photographs of people. Nobody reacted poorly, and I got a few smiles.





I tried not to take photos of soldiers or policemen, but sometimes a few would be included in the shot by accident. They never spoke up or tried to prevent me from taking photographs. There are a couple in one of the shots above. Here's a crop:

 

[Skyring]

After returning to the hotel, the evening light presented a striking image. I love the way the horizontal light brings out the slopes of the mountain above the dusky rectangles of Tabriz's apartment buildings.

A treat was promised for tonight: dinner in the revolving restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. We gathered in the foyer, to read the Tehran Times beneath the stern gaze of Ayatollah Khomeini.





Ah, there may have been a certain amount of posing for the camera. Bruce commented that he'd love to read what the English-language paper had to say about Donald Trump. Sadly, a quick skim through the journal revealed a more intense focus on football.



This was the goods. Dinner included a soft drink, and this time we had a full half-litre of "0.0" beer. Apparently imported, though whether from Bavaria in Germany or Holland in the Netherlands, it isn't clear. But this was fair dinkum beer, with the proper mouth feel, taste, head, the whole deal.

Just no alcohol, apparently.

The view was excellent, but after sunset, it was just the lights of apartments against the black of the night and the surrounding mountains. The brightly lit restaurant interior made the view all but invisible. Perhaps a more thoughtful treatment of the exterior windows and candles on the outer tables would have helped. Or the longer daylight hours of summer; watching the sun go down over the mountains would have been a treat.

The photographs I attempted were ratty in the extreme, so I won't present them here.

The meal included salad and dessert bars, and the mains were the usual meats with rice and vegetables. I think I had a trout and it was excellent.

 

[Skyring]

Day 3: Today we drive north, through Maku to the very ancient monastery church of St.Steppanus. which is almost on the border between Iran and Armenia. Also known as the Kara Kilise (Black church) and the church of Saints Thaddeus and Bartholomew, this church was established in 69 A.D. (about 36 years after the death of Christ) by St. Thaddeus, who was one of the twelve apostles. Only the black stone foundations of the original church remain, which retain some petroglyphs of the early Christian "fish" symbol. The extant buildings date from the 10th, 13th, 14th and 19th Centuries. From the high ground in front of the church, Mount Ararat (in Turkey) can be seen, but, as yet no sign of a big boat. On the way back to Tabriz we will stop at Kandovan, with its troglodyte inhabitants. A pleasantly sited and interesting place to visit for an hour or so.

We're in the northwestern corner of Iran, where Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan come together, with Iraq not too far away. A place familiar to many frequent flyers, albeit from twelve kilometres up.

Looking forward to seeing it from ground level.





More Easter eggs. The first is set against a fortuitously coloured blue truck of the ubiquitous variety. I'll have to find a photo of one of these things hauling a huge load. About the size of a ute, they had heavy duty wheels and tyres and were frequenty seen piled staggeringly high with stuff.

The second was snapped at a police checkpoint. Apparently heavy vehicles have to stop on a regular basis to ensure that they are sticking to the speed limit. They were also inspection points to ensure that bus passengers were properly belted in. About a kilometre beforehand, there would be a sign advising motorists to buckle up, our guide would make an annpouncement to this effect, and once or twice a policeman would make a cursory inspection inside.

There were various service outlets sprouting up alongside. Toilets, petrol/diesel, restaurants, mosques, snacks, trinkets…



We drew closer to the mountains. For a boy from Brisbane, this is a pretty heady view. Real mountains with real snow! The highway traffic is normal - a mix of trucks and cars. Iran is well served by four or six lane highways, well-maintained, plenty of services alongside.



We stopped in a regional town to change money, stretch legs, visit the facilities, duck in to the local convenience stores for a snack…

Our bus, though very well equipped in the matter of comfy seats, had no toilet aboard. Plenty of room, but none included. There was a small space on the luggage deck for the co-driver to bunk down, and occasionally we'd have two drivers aboard with only one visible at any given time.

A rural landscape with villages, mountains, farms, the occasional town. And increasingly dramatic scenery.

 

[Skyring]

I must say that this site's image handling sucks. The photos I'm uploading come out looking much worse than they really are. I've commenced uploading them to Flickr as well. They may be found in appropriately named albums here at full resolution.

 

[Skyring]

We headed steadily north, and gradually approached the border. I got a welcome message for an Azerbaijan mobile network - the first that my phone was able to pick up in Iran - though after perusing the data rates I declined to join.

We passed through one small town, which seemed just a few buildings along a single street in an otherwise rural landscape.

However, we noted that the shops were modern, sporting signs for Western luxury brands, and there were rather a lot of them. We had entered the Aras Free Trade Zone, where the Iranian government had relaxed import duties and made other concessions to attract commerce. Only a few years old, some Western fast food franchises, it was kind of like an airport duty free area spread out like a strip mall.

Cars could be purchased duty free, but could only be driven as far as Tabriz. They were identified by their number plates, and I guess if you headed along the highways south or east, the police would grab you and shake you down for the extra taxes.



I think I've found the birds laying those giant eggs!



Morning tea. We pulled over by the roadside at a little Christian chapel. I thought this might have been the monastery, but no, just a shepherds chapel. Urns and tea and coffee things were set up on a bench, we all grabbed a welcome cup, visited the chapel, some went a little further in search of a better view and ahem a secluded place to drain out the coffee.



That's Azerbaijan just across the river. There's a road and railway on the other side, and here and there watch towers. Probably not to guard against smugglers.

The chapel was tiny and absolutely bare inside. Any services would have been limited to a flock of a dozen, maybe twenty if nobody sat down.



Certainly an inspiring setting out here on the edge of Iran, crags all around, nothing for miles and miles but tourists.

 

[Skyring]

We packed up the morning tea gear - or rather, the driver and the guides did. We were too busy chatting with local tourists. One family - little girl, parents, grandmothers - were looking around and we got to talking. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo apparently made it to Iranian television. Posing for pictures, hugs all round, lollipops and gifts distributed. One young lady had brought a supply of those little toy koalas that cling onto clothing or pencils, and she couldn't stop with just the child. Everyone got a gift!

We rolled on along the border river. I had my camera out in time to catch a train disappearing along the riverside track, high valley walls behind. I'll bet that every spring as the ice thaws boulders break free and roll down that steep slope, making rural Azerbaijan train travel a bit of a hazard.



We pulled off the main road, such as it was, and headed inland to St Stephanos monastery. Higher into the hills until we got to a car park on one of the few flat spots. There's a flash of blue and yellow off to the right there, one of the ubiquitous charity boxes for the veterans of the war. The money changer back in Jolfa had had a small version on his counter, and I'd pushed a small note through the slot.

Not a lot of coins in circulation - the rampant inflation had rendered them not worth the cost of minting. I only saw a few, and the lowest value was 5 000 rial.



A steep walk up to the monastery. A flight of stairs led to a café and associated facilities, which proved popular with those who hadn't managed to find a convenient rock earlier on. But the climb must surely sort out the sheep from the mountain goats - not a site for those with dodgy knees and faint heart.



At the top, spring water was in plentiful supply. I'll bet that's popular on summer days!

Navid, our guide, bent to take a healthy draught, but we looked on dubiously. "It's delicious!" he enthused.

"Yeah, but you've probably got the local enzymes that we don't."

I'm sure it was the best drink in Iran, but count me amongst the faint of stomach. I refrained.



And before we entered the monastery itself, we had a plaque for tourists, complete with floorplans and historical notes in three scripts.

 

[Skyring]

There's some tall tales and true going on here, to be sure. Never mind all that intricate carving around the entry to the church. Bruce is standing at the doorway, holding his hands out to indicate the extent of some information being passed on to we tourists. The age of the church, the size of the trout in the local streams, the length of the bishop's tenure, I forget what. Navid's hands indicate more credible values. We cannot see head guide Pari, but her demeanour is probably very similar to that of the docent on the left. There may be some headshaking and eye-rolling going on.

Mount Ararat turned out not to be visible from the monastery grounds, and I suspect not at all from any of the nearby hilltops. It isn't that far away on the map, but there's another mountain range intervening.

The monastery is claimed to have been founded in AD 69, only thirty-odd years after the death of Christ. By one of Christ's original disciples. What he was doing here, a very long afternoon's walk from Jerusalem, well, who knows after all these years?

Navid is trapped. He would dearly love to tell stories as fascinating as Bruce's, but nor does he want to go too far down the track of myth and fable, let alone to such outrageous lengths. Perhaps he will find some way to embrace both: "The strange rock formation visible on the hillside is an outcropping of granite, formed by the processes of erosion. Some say it is the fossilised remains of the cough lovechild of Saint Bartholomew and a she-bear - note the truly impressive proportions of the lower limbs - but scientists have not yet confirmed this."



No comments on these remaining photographs. I took a whole bunch, and a few worked out. The site was so confined by the terrain on all sides that it was hard to get a good view of the whole complex, and I've resorted to panoramas for two images. Which I've got to say that stitching software has progressed a very long way since I first met it!







We all took loads of photographs. I'll try not to be too snobbish about iphone photography, and the optics and software have improved immeasurably since the first days when a camera in a phone was a wonderful innovation, but it's basic physics, really. A plastic lens a few millimetres across and a sensor likewise is not going to produce the same image quality as something more like the dimensions of the human eye or bigger.

What's in front of the iphone camera will be recorded, and if it's something remarkable or striking, it will be fine. For most people, that's all they need. I used to roam the world with a point and shoot camera I could slip into my trouser pocket, and I got some great shots.

But eventually I got tired of having images that were always a bit fuzzy, the colour was never quite the thing, the photo was too dark or too light. I won't say that my photography is world-class, and certainly the JPEGs presented here after considerable modification along the way don't properly reflect even my modest abilities, but it's nice to have the ability to take a shot of something and have it come out a keeper, regardless of the conditions on the day.

A mirrorless camera with a reasonable lens isn't too big for travel. Handy tripods that fit in a daypack - or even a pocket - can make a huge difference. An understanding of the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO can work wonders. Some HDR (high dynamic range) capabilities can save a shot such as a person standing in front of a window with a fabulous view, or a brightly-lit exterior with a dim interior. Especially if shooting RAW files as opposed to JPG, and you have some reasonable software for post processing.

I recommend the Olympus Pen EPL-7. Fabulous little camera, even with the kit lens. Not quite pocketable, but close. Only three axes of image stabilisation, but that's enough to take handheld shots in low light. Has a rear screen that folds up 180° for taking selfies, to make sure you are centred in the frame. Has a bunch of preset modes - portraits, landscapes, night, sunny etc. - that does most of the work. And full manual capabilities for those who want to play.

Um, here endeth the rant.

 

[Skyring]

Seems that Bavaria beer from Holland is a real thing. A product with some history behind it. Even available in Australia.

 

[cgichard]

Despite the mihrab-like main doorway, it is evident from the various crosses that this is a Christian edifice. I don't suppose any monks were in residence, though. Did you get any impression of the extent to which Christianity is tolerated in Iran, or is it just that a few historic structures are retained for their tourist-attracting potential?