A Magic Carpet Tour of Persia

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Well, of course you're in their files. That's bureaucracy for you.

One of the things I'm learning is that the Islamic Republic government model of Ayatollah Khomeini is badly flawed. It was basically something he came up with off the cuff when the revolution occurred and he returned from exile. Supervision of government processes by clerics can only go so far, especially when clerics are not united in thought; indeed, they thrive on argument, accepting that only through discussion and debate and the examination of ideas can Islam progress.

Maybe some clerk took it upon himself (or herself) to make some sort of statement. Women, especially young women, constantly test the boundaries. Maybe it was a matter of convenience; use up the old stock first. Maybe whoever issued the edict didn't bother to speak with the actual workers processing visas.

And maybe it's like my own time in the public service. Stuff-ups happen all the time.
 
Wednesday 13 April 2016
QR 909 SYD - DOH
B773 A7-BEI
Scheduled: 2105
Boarding: 2045 G10 14A/14C
Pushback: 2136
Takeoff: 2157
Landing: 0504 from North

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I can look out my window to see the First lounge I'd left not long before. Oh well. I'd better get used to fourteen plus hours of discomfort.

I take the priority line, aiming to get overhead space for my bag. An LL Bean rolling duffle, it's slightly oversize. It fits into overhead lockers, but only just, and I like to get it in first. Sometimes it has to slot in sideways.

We're ten abreast on this Boeing 777-300ER. The seats are narrow and the aisles likewise. Just enough room for a meal trolley, and anyone with their feet slightly out of line gets their toenails clipped. I detest the various ways airlines use to cram more seats in, usually at the same time making the premium seats ever more comfortable. I'd rather see a flatter structure, with more room at the back and less at the front. Dividing flying society so sharply is good for nobody.

Those who arrange such things rarely fly in the rear. They don't care about comfort here, just maximising profits. I've read some fairly solid criticism of Qatar's staff practices, and I don't doubt the accuracy.

Anyway, I'm stuck here for a while, better make the most of it.

The flight is full, and our middle seat taken. Kerri moves over to sit beside me, giving the aisle seat to the latecomer. We're only a couple of rows back in the first Y cabin, so I wasn't really expecting the seat to remain empty unless the flight was only about half full. Worth a try, but.

After dinner in the lounge, we both wave away the onboard dinner. It's just going to be extra calories, nothing special. I rarely drink Economy wine because it's not going to be good, and the only reasonable drink is Heineken. Not that beer in a low-pressure cabin is much chop. Frothy and thin, and drinking it out of a plastic cup one step up from Gladwrap is no fun.

However, I've got some melatonin I want to swallow, and I ask for spiced tomato juice to knock the pills down. Special order, this, and I wait a very long time before a can appears. Tonic water. Oh well, it'll do.

The stewardess notices immediately she sets it down and snatches it away. Another long wait for some liquid to swallow my pills. Finally a can arrives: tomato juice. Not what I really wanted, but hey. I slug down my pills and then it's another hour or so before the meals are cleared away and I can raise my tray table.

I just want to sleep.

The audio selection is limited. Qantas has a superb selection of albums and curated radio streams, Emirates not far behind, but Qatar picks a few artists and goes for a solid coverage. Simon and Garfunkel suit me nicely; AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen and the other options aren't my cup of tea at the moment.

Sleep is difficult in such cramped conditions. I struggle to get some scratchy rest and eventually give up, turning to the movie options. Here there is an excellent selection. I love that airlines are including classics, giving me a chance to revisit movies I've seen before. Juno is my first choice, a Jason Reitman film. He also did the marvellous Up in the Air, which I've seen any number of times and love to pieces, like any good frequent flyer does.

Juno is quirky and a little edgy. The opening scene, with high school student Ellen Page drinking a gallon of orange juice as she heads for her third pregnancy test of the day is a standout. In the end, young love triumphs and the various threads are wrapped up. I'm writing a novel with high school love as one of the themes, and I pay close attention here.

I notice that Qatar have made a few snips to the movie, deleting some of the racier moments. I am too tired to figure out how to remove the Arabic subtitles, so I endure them like all the other discomforts.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a new one for me. A little too clever for my taste, but still an entertainment.

Along the way, we slide over the tip of the Indian subcontinent. In the sliver of window between fuselage and the enormous jet engine, I see a little midnight India, and my camera imperfectly records the moment.

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Breakfast eventually arrives.

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Fairly typical economy fare. Welcome to fill a hole in the tummy, and the caffeine jolt will be needed to cope with arrival and transit, but, well, you know.

Again, it takes an immense age for the debris to be cleared away.

We hit Doha just on dawn. A new airport for me, one of five this trip.
 
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Doha is another of these huge airports springing up around the world. All glass and steel and clever design. In this case, not so much clever design as Dubai, but certainly more cutesy artworks. Expensive shops and lots of signs directing passengers here and there. Our next gate was C21, and arrows pointed off in a fresh direction, but we had a couple of hours, and I wanted some decent coffee and tucker, maybe a shower.

Qatar has three lounges here. One for First class passengers, one for Business, and one for status passengers travelling with the herd. Like me. I'd heard it wasn't much chop, but still, we sought it out, they looked at our passes printed on Business class stock and said, "Oh, there is a much nicer lounge you can go to!" and directed us off to Businessland.

Thanking Maryam in Sydney for her continuing bounty, but kind of holding my breath, I led my drowsy wife to another lounge. The guy at the bottom of the escalators took one look at our boarding passes and waved us on up. Likewise the folk on the counter.

Big lounge, not half or as quarter as big as Emirates, but still sprawling, still new, still very plush. The restaurant section was a little disappointing, or maybe I hadn't worked out the system, but it was pretty much a cafe in Manuka. Order your coffee and toasted sanger, get a numbered sign, sit down to wait. A few bowls of olives and nuts and snacks, a self-serve coffee machine which wasn't working, a lot of frustration on our part until we had our coffee and the world seemed a brighter place.

I turned on my phone, but when I got the welcome message from Vodafone saying that data would be a dollar a megabyte, I turned off the data roaming in a hurry. So much for Ingress here. I'm on the Vodafone red sim plan, which allows me to use my Australian allowance overseas for an extra flat charge of $5 each day I use it. I can keep my phone unused in my bag and it costs nothing, or I can wander around streaming movies, playing Ingress and navigating by Google maps as I read my mail, and it costs me $5. A sweet deal for a traveller.

Just not in Qatar, obviously. There's a few other places where the system doesn't apply, but most of the time I can use my phone like at home. In Lisbon I'd been a heavy user of the Citymapper app, which had given me precise directions for public transport down to route numbers, bus stops, exact times. Not to mention Ingress.

We found a few chairs to sit down at after second breakfast. They came with an ipad attached to the armrest, and there were computers available nearby.

More coffee, or (in my case) champagne. A few biscuity things and we settled down to wait.

No showers, but I got in a shave. There was a sensor near the tap, but not part of it, which had me waving my hand every few seconds as I removed the stubble.

Our flight to Tehran was announced, and we set off, following those blessed signs. C21 turned out to be a long way down one arm of the terminal, the distance between gates equal to a heavy airliner's wingspan plus a bit for comfort. There was a train running back and forth overhead, but my dear wife insisted we needed the exercise to walk off the airline food.
 
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Loving the TR and good to see you posting again Skyring.

<snip>

But this didn't stop me enjoying dessert and a coffee. Sadly, the pavlova in a glass has vanished from the menu, but my double icecream was of a very high standard.

I asked for the pavlova at Melbourne on Tuesday (26/4) and after the waiter checked was informed that chef would make it for me. Very nice it was.
 
not sure which lounge you went to, but the business lounge has an a la carte restaurant upstairs and a well staffed shower block.
 
not sure which lounge you went to, but the business lounge has an a la carte restaurant upstairs and a well staffed shower block.
Now that I do some more research, I see you're right. We went to the deli and missed the showers entirely. Oh well, I wasn't even expecting to get into this one, so I didn't look it up beforehand.
 
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Thursday 14 April 2016
QR 482 DOH-IKA
A320 A7-ADA
Scheduled 0800
Boarding: 0715 G21 (remote stand) 18E/18F
Pushback: 0800
Takeoff: 0823 to South
Landing: 1055 from East
Gate: 1103

After walking all the way down the terminal arm, we found a bus gate, where we boarded a bus and headed off toward a cluster of smaller jets. Ours was an A320, and we had some pretty ordinary seats towards the back.

Odd thing. Just before the door closed, a lady in a hi-viz vest came up the aisle, stopped at our seats, and asked for our boarding passes, which she swapped for economy class passes. Rather pointless, by that stage, but I guess she was collecting them for evidence.

We had a third breakfast once we took off. Pretty much the same as the one we'd had coming into Doha, but the toasted sandwich in the lounge hadn't really filled in all the gaps.

I'm informed we missed the actual lounge restaurant upstairs with a-la-carte service and actual champagne. Oh well.

Clouds all the way to Tehran. Pretty boring flight, really.

The arrivals process was what I was dreading. I'd brought along a couple of dozen books with me for the BookCrossing convention in Athens, and a few hand-picked kind-of-spicy books for my mate in Tehran. Time Traveller's Wife, a couple of Kerry Greenwood books (you know, the Phryne Fisher author), some Australian titles.

On scanning the travel advisories for Iran I'd come across a warning that importing books and literate was forbidden. While I'd be upset at losing these books, I planned to give them all away anyway, just not to customs agents. I had some foreign currency in Euro and US dollars with me, which I'd have to declare, and I had the scripts for my various pills.

No entry forms were handed out on the plane, so I guessed we'd have to fill them in on the ground.

Iman Khomeini Airport (IKA) looked much the same as any other. Modern but not striking. An oddity was the appearance of a "Follow Me" vehicle as we taxied up to the terminal. Our plane dutifully followed all the way to the gate. As we approached, all the women donned headscarves. Including my wife, who had practiced in order to appear at her most fetching. We'd been advised that anyone not in hejab would be refused entry.

No entry forms, just a row of passport booths. We fronted up, showed our passports with their gaudy visas and gained another stamp.

Luggage was collected, we walked through the Green lane - not that anyone was manning the Red lane - and we were in. A young lady in a headscarf was holding up a Pasargad Tours sign with our names on.

"Welcome to Iran," she said.

"Salaam," said I.
 
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Tehran is a big city. About twice the size of Sydney, with several more millions in the surrounding areas. The airport is quite a long way out of town, and I was all eyes as we drove in.

We had our guide, a driver, and a Renault of some kind. Kerri and I sat in the back seat and made small talk with the guide. I gradually lost track of the conversation; I was trying to assemble the novel sights outside into a coherent form.

The highway was wide and smooth. Top marks there. Plenty of traffic, of a remarkably limited variety. The taxis seemed to be almost entirely Peugeot 405 GLXs (though some were marked "Pars", which I guessed was a specific Persian model) and they were all painted the same taxi yellow you see all over the world. A very limited number of other French cars. Some of the taxis and many of the private cars resembled old Hillman Hunters. Labelled "Paykan", they looked a very tidy design. A small model, kind of Toyota-ish in appearance was also plentiful. These three models made up over half the traffic, maybe more.

The ubiquitous Mercedes "round-nose" truck dominated heavy transport. Sturdy and colourful, these things can be seen around the globe. And a ute with truck wheels, invariably painted blue, often carrying a staggering amount of cargo.

Lots of traffic, just not very diverse.

And a myriad motorcycles, increasing as we approached Teheran itself.

Hills speckling a flattish landscape, snow-capped mountains in the distance. Agriculture and greenery. Not at all the dusty and desert landscape I'd imagined. Some small farms, larger orchards, a few small herds of sheep looking picturesque.

There were several military establishments on the road, some marked by old Soviet T-62 tanks as gate guardians. Hard to pick the military camps from (say) a logistics depot - anything of any significance was fenced off with guard towers around the perimeter.

I'd had warnings not to photograph military establishments, vehicles, or personnel, but it's hard for me to resist a tank. I resisted.

Getting closer to the city, a truly impressive mosque appeared. Big silver dome, twin minarets, hectares of supporting buildings. Ayatollah Khomeini's mausoleum, our guide told us, warning, "No photographs!"

Later on, our guide and carpet expert recounted the story of one group of tourists stranded in traffic here, who got out to look at the edifice. Some winsome young ladies in the group began taking pictures of a guard - a young man who wasn't averse to this - and pretty soon progressed to photos standing beside him.

The colonel's jeep appeared about the time the guard was snapping pictures of the girls in the sentry box holding his rifle, and it took half an hour of spirited discussion before the group could proceed.

We stopped once or twice to pay tolls, and the traffic became thicker, along with the haze. Every vehicle sported a grey coat of diesel particles, and when we dived into a tunnel that seemed to go on for kilometres, full of traffic, the fumes became unbearable.

Massive expressways everywhere, and I lost my taxi-driver sense of where we were. A huge city, mostly apartment buildings. It reminded me of Tokyo more than any other place. Occasionally a mosque or a tower or a park would break the urban ugliness, and there seemed to be more parks and monuments than you'd find in a Japanese city, but the two models of urban design are fairly similar to my eye. Japanese buildings are a tad more colourful; Iranian exteriors tend to grey.

End walls of buildings often sported paintings of sad looking young gentlemen. "Martyrs from the Iraq war," we were told. Their memory is kept fresh, and their families supported by public donations. Every block has a blue collection box showing a pair of yellow enfolding hands, for contributions to the support of the disabled survivors and the families of the dead.

At last, my eyes pricked up. We left the freeways and drove down a boulevard. Ahead appeared the distinctive shape of our hotel, the Laleh, formerly the Intercontinental. On the other side of the road.

No worries. Our driver simply stopped in traffic, turned his steering wheel to the left, and cars in both directions stopped as we drove across the zebra crossing outside the entrance. I'll have to talk about Tehran's traffic culture later on, but let it be said that now that this particular ex-cabbie, who has driven around the Arc de Triomph at a time of crisis, would not be game to take the wheel in Tehran. You've got to be born to it, I think.
 
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What tales our hotel could tell! Before the 1979 revolution, the Intercontinental was full of Americans. The French restaurant had a cellar of glorious vintages and top champagnes, the pianist played all the show tunes, the foyer hummed with journalists and assignations. This was one of, if not the, top hotel in Iran.

Newsweek's journalist Elaine Sciolino, in her book Persian Mirrors, described the establishment before and after the change, poignantly recalling meeting with one of the waiters years later, who glossed over the hard times, showed her the bullet holes from leftist militias, and poured her a Coke in one of the old Intercontinental wine glasses. Brandy snifters were kept in an alcove, twenty years of dust, and little chance of seeing use again.

She recalls the day when armed Islamic zealots politely but efficiently destroyed all the alcohol in the establishment. Some say it was quietly poured into the swimming pool, others say the bottles were hurled down from the second story restaurant.

"Soon afterward," she goes on, "the Air France stewardesses were banned from sun-bathing in the chaises longues near the five-sided pool. The pool was emptied of its water and closed. Later, masons came and installed a mosaic of tiles on the lobby wall. It welcomed all visitors with the words, “Down with U.S.A.” The doormat was imprinted with a large American flag that visitors stepped on going in and out of the hotel."

The mosaic and the doormat have been removed nowadays. The fizzy drinks are still served in the Intercontinental's wineglasses, and a display in the lobby shows off the old silver and glassware. Glittering chandeliers decorate the foyer, and the pianist has returned, making me smile when he strikes up a tune I recognise.

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The circular staircase leading down to the spa features Persian motifs, and Ayatollahs Khomeini and his successor Khamenei look down benignly but firmly from twin portraits. Outside a display of international flags fails to feature the Stars and Stripes or Union Jack. Or any version of the Southern Cross, come to think of it.

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The new name, Laleh, means "tulip", the symbol of martyrdom, and also the name of the large park adjoining the hotel. Tourists are made to feel at home now, a 24 hour police guard is stationed outside the entrance chain-smoking their way through their shift, and tour groups in very loose hejab cluster in the lobby.

We are delivered to reception, where Bruce Granger, our carpet expert guide is waiting for us, along with his wife Robyn, and neighbour Carmel. They have arrived earlier, and have a free afternoon ahead before the rest of our tour turns up the next day.

We are pretty well done in, and spending the afternoon unconscious in our room appeals more than any stroll in the park. We make a half-hearted promise to come down for dinner, but I know from experience that it may be breakfast a day or two hence before we emerge.


 
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I'd had warnings not to photograph military establishments, vehicles, or personnel, but it's hard for me to resist a tank. I resisted.

Getting closer to the city, a truly impressive mosque appeared. Big silver dome, twin minarets, hectares of supporting buildings. Ayatollah Khomeini's mausoleum, our guide told us, warning, "No photographs!"

I visited Iran 2 years ago and did a 1,500 km road trip over 2 weeks. Whilst traveling in the middle of nowhere my driver told me not to take photos in the area. When I enquired why, he pointed to the right and said "That is the Anarak Nuclear Facility" At the time I had a gopro with a magnetic base on the roof of the car. I removed it very quickly and noticed guard towers and anti aircraft guns.

And yes If there is a 2 inch gap, Iranian drivers will find it.
 
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We're placed on the eleventh floor, and the view is amazing. The photo doesn't begin to do justice to it, honestly. This one on Wikipedia gives a better idea. The city seems to go on forever, a sea of angular grey apartments running up to the base of the Alborz Mountains. We're well over a thousand metres up, just sitting here, and the highest peak in the range is about 5 600 metres tall.

These are serious mountains!

Frankly, I could hang out the window for a long time, just watching the view, watching the traffic, watching the people in the traffic. There's a guy sweeping the road surface with what looks like a twig broom. There are pedestrians blithely crossing the road in the face of unstoppable traffic.

The room itself is bog-standard. I suspect the "American Standard" bathroom fittings are original, but the room itself has been redecorated in recent years. Nice large room, plenty of power points. There's even a universal socket provided, albeit hidden under the writing desk. I set up my powerstrip there, plug everything in, draw the shades and zonk out.

Welcome sleep, recharging my human batteries. We wake in the late afternoon to contemplate dinner. Three breakfasts aside, we haven't had lunch, and it would be nice to sample the local tucker.

We've made tentative plans to meet the rest of the party at seven, and it's approaching that now. We head down to the lobby - four lifts to serve three hundred rooms, very rarely do we have to wait more than a few seconds, and the view in the other direction is pretty bloody good, looking over a large park to yet more snow-capped mountains - and there's only one thought in our minds as we hit the lobby: coffeeeeeee!

The pianist is tinkling his ivories, various exotic folk are taking tea, uniformed staff hovering nearby. We flag one down as we sit at an elegant table, and not only does he speak English, he knows what cappuccino means, though not "flat white".

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The coffees hit the spot, though on inspecting the foam art, I think we may have been given a breeding pair. They are charged to the room and it takes me a while before I figure out what these things have cost us, what with the exchange rate and the difficulty over where to put the decimal point. So many zeroes!

Later on we change some money. The cashier is probably giving out a good rate of 33 000 riyal to the US dollar, as he won't change more than fifty at a time. This is better than the official rate of 30 000, though there may be better rates available in some of the shops over the road. For now, we're reluctant to venture outside, let alone brave the evening traffic, and we need our coffee.

One of those 100 000 notes is worth about four Aussie dollars. Food and drink is relatively cheap here, but still it's easy enough to go through a million or so. When I hand over a note with so many zeroes, I'm expecting in return something more like a house than a bag of chips.

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We hooked up with the tour group earlybirds, but they were all headed off to some private function for Bruce's Persian partner. "There'll be food and dancing and happy people," Bruce said glumly, "and it will go on until midnight or later."

I felt his pain. I could use a solid night's sleep myself.

But we could sleep after dinner. We arranged to meet after breakfast the next day, when Bruce would show us the carpet museum. Off they went to their long evening of festivities, and we looked into the hotel's Persian restaurant.

Only a small room, really, seating maybe twenty people, but it was gorgeously decorated. "Like the inside of a Persian jewelbox," my wife said, and I couldn't disagree. I should have taken a photo of the menu, or even the food, but it was fare that was to become very familiar over the next few days. Barley soup, saffron rice, kebab. The Iranians are masters of barley soup, I've got to say. Not stodgy or salty, or thick. Mixed with other ingredients, spices to make it interesting, light and tasty. From this point on, I always ensured that I got a bowl of soup and it was always excellent.

The drinks menu was what I was looking at. Big on soft drinks - Coke Zero seems to be Number One on the Iranian beverage list - and "mocktails". Bloody Mary without the vodka, that sort of thing.

Kerri looked at the "doogh", some sort of yoghurt drink. We'd been told it was whey, but no, it was thicker than that.

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Some people like it a lot, but not me. I took a taste and that was it. There was also beer - Beer Zero, as I called it. This I could get used to. It certainly looked the part (and note the "Intercontinental Hotel" glassware), bubbled and frothed appropriately and the taste wasn't too bad.

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Very hoppy, but a reasonable facsimile of the real thing. Over the days to come I tasted several variations and brands. Some of it was fruit beer. And some of it was very good indeed. We never got more than one drink apiece at any of the tour-arranged meals, but I guess you could consume a sixpack and get the usual beer effects of bloat, full bladder, bad breath, poor manners and so on.

Just no buzz. And you'd be good to drive home.

We finished our meal - costing about half a million each - and went back up to the room. I finished unpacking, as we'd be here for another night. This time around, I'd rolled my clothes instead of folding them. On arrival in Lisbon a few weeks earlier, my cotton clothes had looked wrinkled and unhappy, but this time around, they were quite passable.

And then more sleep. I knew I'd wake up several times during the night, but that's pretty normal for me. I had my iPad beside me with a few ebooks loaded up.

Wifi in the room wasn't too bad. Sometimes it would slow right down, or kick me off altogether, but it was certainly usable.

What wasn't good was the phone service. I had zero service. No carriers of any sort, let alone a preferred one. I could join the wifi, but when I tried to log on to Ingress with my Google account, I was unable to log in at all, and Google sent me emails telling me that an insecure app was attempting to use my account.

I could still log onto the Ingress web pages. Just not on my phone or iPad. Oh well, so much for my dreams of being able to hack all sorts of exotic keys.

I was also trying to hook up with my Tehran mate, and she suggested various messaging apps. They were a struggle to download and install, and they all insisted on sending me an SMS verification code, which of course never got to my phone number. Not until I'd left the country, anyway. It also didn't help that I'd misunderstood the itinerary and thought we had a free day later on which we didn't. I don't get jet-lagged, but I do get tired, and I'm hardly the most organised person at the best of times.

For the next few days it was a worry whether I'd be able to see her. I had no idea where she lived, and Tehran is a very big city. Calling a cab could be expensive, maybe several million, and could I reasonably expect her to brave the insane traffic across town?
 
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"But they're nothing like cornflakes!" one puzzled tourist complained, a big bowl of these brown squares in front of her.

I shouldn't laugh. What sort of linguistic atrocities would I commit if I were translating from English into Persian? People would be standing in front of my breakfast buffet howling, upside down on the floor with laughter.

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For the six days of our tour, we stayed in three hotels. Four to five stars in general, each one full of character, amenities, and excellent service. Some rough edges here and there, but none of them uncomfortable. One of the benefits of having an experienced tour company running the show, as opposed to being a solo traveller: there will be no unpleasant surprises in accommodation.

Admittedly, some of the food labels kind of missed their mark. I guess when you go looking for breakfast beans, lentils are not exactly what you expect. And sometimes the breakfast coffee wasn't up to scratch; there was one hotel that offered sachets of "three-in-one" coffee along with an urn full of hot water. But hey, I can find worse coffee disasters in any Midwestern hotel. Or Starbucks for that matter. I asked for a "skinny latte" in Texas once, and got something in a tall glass with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

All part of the travel experience.

By and large, breakfast buffets in Iran were excellent. Some offered omelettes, they all had sausages, there was always a local delicacy to try. Rosewater jam, for example. Each table had three shakers, and it was fun to watch new arrivals puzzle over the sumac.

Each day, we'd be given a wakeup call, our bags had to be packed and outside the door half an hour later, we then had an hour for breakfast before the bus arrived. Some days we wouldn't have to pack, because we'd be exploring locally or on a day trip.

Breakfast was a chance to socialise, ease into the day over a coffee and some pieces of "Kind of Bread" spread with mystery jam. Thoroughly civilised, and I never forgot that here in Persia was the birthplace of Western civilisation.
 
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Just across the road was the most delightful corner store. Patisserie, confectioner, health food shop rolled into one, with smiling young men to serve out the goodies. There were racks and racks of interesting local candies, shelves full of scrumptious looking pastries, big colourful cakes, tubs of nuts and all manner of good things. I bought some dried apricots there that were the size of peaches, perfectly moist and tasty. We have been sadly shortchanged in the matter of dried fruit in Australia. I very much prefer the Persian version.

Getting across the road was a challenge, even with a marked zebra crossing and the Sabbath reduction in traffic. Sabbath is Friday hereabouts, and many businesses were closed for the day. As we found out later, that just meant they opened at sundown and by midnight the place was rocking. The local shopping centre was pretty much a disco.

We'd been advised, when crossing the road, to follow a local and do what they did. Despite first impressions, the drivers aren't hell-bent on running people down, they aim to miss, and the trick is not to do anything silly or sudden. Locals are quite happy to wander across busy intersections, but we novices would look for places where the traffic only came at us from two directions instead of eight.

Our tour guides were excellent in holding up traffic for us. Parri, senior guide, comes up to my shoulder, but when she wades into traffic and holds up her hand, six lanes of bustling peak hour come to a stop while we dumb tourists saunter across.

By the end of the week, we were becoming attuned to the harmony of the traffic flow, and when I got to Athens I had to hold myself back from just walking across the road. "Wait for the green man, you galoot!" my wife said, holding my elbow.

Speaking of green men, one excellent feature at busy intersections controlled by traffic lights is a countdown timer for both red and green lights. Each traffic direction gets sixty seconds, and though that's for the convenience of drivers, it's an immense help in crossing the street.

We saw several radar speed traps coming in from the airport, but the traffic police didn't seem to mind driving behaviour that in Australia would see your licence torn up for life.

One added degree of difficulty in Tehran came with the gutters. Not ankle-high kerbs, so much as stormwater drains, some of them requiring a fair bit of agility to leap over, but easy enough when a semi-trailer is bearing down on you from behind. Apparently when the snow melts in the mountains - and as I could plainly see, the local peaks reached all the way to the heavens - the city is awash.

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Robyn dived into the nut tubs, the assistant digging in with a scoop to offer samples. Some of the mixes were exotic - dried white mulberries, anyone? - but all yummy and crisp. Here she is being assisted with a taster of glorified trail mix, which she dispensed on the bus in coming days.

Kerri and I browsed the pastry shelves, selecting a modest assortment. The food was ridiculously cheap. I think a few hundred Euro would have bought the whole shop, though getting the contents through customs on the way home could have been tricky.

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(My, but isn't that bare-armed young man dishy? Look how he's sneaking a peek at Robyn's hair. Blondes are rare here and objects of intense interest. My (blonde) wife went through passport control on the way home, and she was taking a rather long time about it. "My God," she said, amused, when I joined her airside, "he was flirting with me!"

"You still got it, gorgeous!" I replied. He had been all business with me. Grab, stamp, hand it back, next.)
 
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Just as an aside, today was much clearer than the previous, and I grabbed a series of pictures aimed at showing the extent of the city up to the edge of the rising mountains. This was one of the few times on the trip I was able to use my tripod. The final shot is a crop of the last. If I'd been thinking I could have used the hi-res 50MP mode of the Pen F here to get a bit of extra resolution. I'm afraid my long zoom lens isn't much chop when cranked all the way open.

Incidentally, I was able to open the hotel window quite a way here. Makes a big difference when not having to shoot through two panes of less-than-sparling glass.

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The city covers a lot of ground and it's all much the same. Apartment blocks all the way. Very few stand-alone houses. If it were Australian suburbia, ten million people would flow the metropolis over the horizon in every direction. There's a LOT of people live here!
 
When I tried similar photography from my hotel window in Esfahan the manager was knocking on my door 5 minutes later stating neighbours were complaining I was trying to film inside their houses. I was actually videoing an aircraft contrail with the mountains in the back ground. I explained I was not filming houses just aircraft. "You are filming aircraft?" Damn! Wrong answer. I was sure the police would be the next knock at the door but all worked out well.
 
Attending Bruce's carpet auctions has given me a thin grounding in the basics of Persian carpets. Nothing like Bruce's lifetime of immersion in the subject, but enough to know something about how to pick a good one, as opposed to some of the junk being mass-produced by computers nowadays.

Today he's leading us on a tour of the Carpet Museum, which just happens to be a stone's throw from our hotel. For me, this is a highlight of the tour. Bruce likes to talk about carpets, I like to listen, and here are some of the best Persian carpets in the world.

The Carpet Museum is the brainchild of the wife of the late Shah. She was concerned that some of the oldest and best carpets were being discarded or destroyed. A good carpet will last for many decades, but eventually, if enough people walk on it, it gets beaten clean enough, and enough sweet tea gets spilt on it, it wears out.

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The museum has the external appearance of being supported by abstracted carpet frames, leaning up against the walls of notional mud brick village houses. Inside, tall walls allow carpets to be hung vertically, and some are laid on the floor, offering inspection from one or two floors above. The displays are constantly changing, and Bruce is keen to have a look at this year's crop.

As an aside, the image above shows the distinctive silhouette of the Laleh Hotel in the background. Although most Persian civic architecture is drab and boxy, some buildings are innovative in design, and some are of supreme excellence, intricate and elegant, impressing with their design. The museum is pretty good, an example of function dictating form, along with clever ornamentation.

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The main hall has several huge carpets on display. There are decades of man-hours in some of them. Women-hours, to be accurate, for it is the women who weave here. Once upon a time, village women would spend their afternoons together, weaving, gossiping, drinking tea. Nowadays, "they all have televisions, and they watch the Iranian equivalent of 'Days of Our Lives'," Bruce lamented.

Whole cities, once fertile factories of exquisite carpets, are now barren, and Chinese junk is filling the gap. Made of inferior materials and woven with less attention to detail than the carpets of old, they curl and fade and fall apart long before the normal lifetime.

All Persian carpets have two main parts. A field, enclosed by a border. "There are really only five designs," Bruce tells us, "and every Persian carpet is based on one of these designs."

Detail and pattern differ, but it's readily apparent after a while. Some, especially prayer mats, resemble a mihrab, the niche in a mosque wall indicating the direction of Mecca. There is a pointed arch, through which is seen the Tree of Life (in the garden of Eden) usually with birds and animals visible. A vase or fountain offers water for cleansing. Others echo a Koran's decorated cover. The dome of a mosque is imagined from below, with hanging lanterns or chandeliers abstracted along the long grain of the carpet.

Some are just fragments of an intricate, infinite pattern of which a portion has been enclosed by the border. Bruce points out examples, noting that they are not entirely regular or symmetrical. Design elements will be divided arbitrarily by the frame, leading the mind to imagine the pattern continuing on past the border, endlessly repeating.

I contemplate the philosophy of this. The universe is underpinned by the patterns - the design, if you will - of natural laws operating infinitely and endlessly. Two plus two equals four, no matter where. No part of the universe is exempt from gravity. Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom will form water. Here in a fountain, as ice on Mars, on an unseen planet in a distant galaxy. The same laws underpin our universe, and everything we see, from a rainbow to a mountain to a star, are created by those laws.

Put a border around a part of the universe and we have our individual perception. We only see a part of the whole. We cannot see all. What we see is not reality, which is immaterial, and known only to the Almighty.

Look at a Persian carpet, look closely at its intricate, complex, and beautiful design, and there is Creation in microcosm. A piece of the whole.

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Some carpets mimic life in a more visible way. A rectangular design might represent a formal Persian garden, wavy patterns indicating water channels; paths and hedges and flower beds sketched in. Look at the carpet, look at tranquility and beauty. Or there might be figures shown. People, trees, birds. Look at the carpet above. Can you see the coughatoo?

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Upstairs, usually the domain of the more angular tribal carpets, woven on portable looms in tents, is today given over to the work of the modern weaver Razam Arabzadeh. Three looms are set up, with works in progress, but on today's Sabbath no work progresses. Arabzadeh knows his craft, and he knows how to break the rules. Some of the carpets on display have their borders interrupted; the design flows to the very edge of the carpet, unbounded, flowing eternally outwards in the mind's eye.

The image above depicts a carpet with another woven into it. Two different weaving methods in one, perfect and complete. Bruce itches to flip the carpet over to see the underside, but here it is forbidden to touch the displays, and we can only peer at the edges, gaining an imperfect and oblique view of the carpet's base.

All of the carpets on this level are beautifully designed and woven. They are objects of art in their own right. And each one "breaks the rules", moves the art forwards, excites the imagination. They certainly excite me. I like my art semi-abstracted, the abstraction giving an insight into the mind of the artist.

One, in particular, leaves me gasping in delight:

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The label beside this carpet reads, in Persian and English,

"Up to the edge of the sea

A bold design, mystical and modern at the same time, inspired by a
couplet from Rumi:
There are footprints up to the edge of the sea.
Under
the sea there are no prints but N. O. T.
This rug is thoroughly innovative and uncoventional, typical of master Arabzadeh's lifelong endeavour to achieve a breakthrough in carpet design."

"I wonder what
'N O T' means," muses Bruce.

I have no idea either, but I photograph the text and later attempt to google it. I can find various translations of Rumi's couplet, but no explanation is apparent.

On the face of it, the carpet shows footprints leading up to the edge of a sea with a stylised ship sailing, its mast amongst the stars. Apparently the footprints represent the finite journey to God, the infinite sea and sky the journey with God. Looking at the sky, there are any number of threads leading up and away. Some are drawn towards a cosmic whirlpool in a corner, from which emerges Rumi's name in Persian. Segments of more traditional carpet represent more obvious pathways.

The combination of the two geniuses - Rumi and Arabzadeh - enthralls me. This is truth, beauty, wisdom made visible.
 
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