Ricardo, Author at Ricardo Pinto

in Yazd

Ricardo on 12th November 2011

I wrote this on the 9th, but it’s taken me a few days to insert the photographs…

he 33m high wind tower at Bagh-e Dolat Abad

Amir Chakhmaq complex and wooden palm nakhl

the road to Yazd, from my seat beside the bus driver

the central courtyard of the Malek-o Tojar hotel

central courtyard of the Mehr Traditional Hotel

even more glamorous tent over a smaller courtyard

a male door knocker on left, a female one on right

me standing before the Zoroastrian fire temple

Mr Lorian & the fire that’s been burning for 1500 years

one of the 400 year old Tower of Silence

roadside rubbish photo from speeding car

interior of pigeon tower showing levels and niches

in near darkness across the ice pit towards Mr Lorian

water reservoir cooled by four wind towers

bottom of a wind tower from which cool air pours out

Before I talk about Yazd, I want to tell you what happened today. I had, with pleasing efficiency, got up early, had a quick breakfast and had managed to see one last garden, as well as breezing through a museum on qanats (more about that later). A last minute rush to change some money, quick packing, ordering a taxi to take me to my bus for Esfahan, and then checking out. Then the hotel receptionists informed me that they didn’t have my passport. (You have to hand it in at any hotel you stay at here.) They explained that they had accidentally given it to some Iranian woman in error – because our names were so similar, apparently… *crazed stare to camera* Quite.

I naturally displayed some anger – I chose not rein this in so as to make sure, across the language barrier, that they understood that I was REALLY not pleased. Apart from anything else, tourists have been arrested for not having a valid visa, never mind no passport at all! Their proposal was that I should go on to Esfahan as planned, and that they would make sure that my passport would be sent on to my hotel there, from Tehran – where, apparently, it is currently holidaying without me.

Needless to say, I was having none of this. I asked them: and what if the passport doesn’t turn up in Esfahan? What would I do 150km away when the authorities asked me for my papers and I said, in my fanciest foreign: oh, alas, my last hotel in Yazd gave it away mistaking some Iranian woman for a bald farangi (oh, yes, that is what all non-Iranians are referred to as – have I said this before?). Tolerant as I am, and understanding, I’m not sure that were I in their position, I would find this entirely convincing.

At this my time of need, the estimable Mr Lorian (of whom much more later) appeared as the taxi driver who the hotel had phoned to take me to the bus terminal. Thinking about it now, this appearance at convenient moments of familiar characters might make me suspect that I may be in some kind of Persian farce – however elegant with its adobe walls, wind towers and formal gardens. I told them I wasn’t budging and they, bending over backwards in what I felt was true embarrassment and contrition, told me that I could stay at their expense. Indeed, I am typing this to you from behind the reception desk where they’re letting me use the only computer in this hotel with an internet connection. All food etc would be gratis. Somewhat appeased, I retired to lick my wounds.

Later, taking advantage of my snowy carte blanche, I joined the impossibly crazy seminar of local businessmen (perhaps not so local, my various frantic taxi rides this morning have all fallen foul of the large and posh white cars ferrying these luminaries to this hotel – located as it is within the warren of mudbrick alleys of this exquisite city.) Now I was about to tuck into the feast they had laid on for these gentlemen, sitting cross-legged amongst them on one of these takhts rather natty raised platforms, or ‘day beds’, when one of them, tripping, deposited an entire plate of food on my leg and jacket. More hotel staff appeared, fussing, and the hotel has now agreed to wash those clothes, and all the other dirty ones I have been lugging around with me in search of a laundry. I’m beginning to feel that I have somehow wandered on to the set of a Charlie Chaplin film – in which I am most definitely the tramp… What can I do but play my part and hope that my passport returns and that I can move on…

To more interesting matters: Yazd, oh Yazd! How lovely she is lying here between two vast deserts. I have really fallen in love with her. Bizarrely, this is the one place where I’ve developed yearnings to have a house – not seriously – but still… It is cold here – very cold, especially once the sun goes down. I came to Iran without a jumper and now that my coat is in the wash, I have asked to borrow one – we shall see how this further enhances my comic role. Checking out the temperature in Tehran and Shiraz before I left – if not scorching, at least warm – I assumed that this would be true for the whole country.

Another climactic digression, if I may. On reflection, I don’t think that, in my last post, I properly managed to explain the climate here. Iran is a very complex landform – one far more complex than most of us are used to. I say this with some confidence because this is a landform I have spent some time meditating on while peering at maps and climate charts. In spite of this I simply didn’t get it. To try and put it as plainly as I can: each city here – certainly the ones I’ve visited (though my endless interrogations of the natives seems to suggest that these are not anomalies) – each city here lies at a unique confluence of terrain, aspect, height and position relative to bodies of water, mountain ranges, seas. As a consequence, each city (and it’s environs) has a wholly unique climactic character. When this is combined with the overlaying of different migrational genetic groups, cultures, languages etc etc – it means that each city is unlike another.

Yazd is at the moment, as I have said, cold. But everywhere I go there are groves of pomegrantes with overripe fruit fallen and split into red grimaces on the dusty earth. The city, the old city – for what interest is there in the hideous urban sprawl that spreads here beyond the ancient centre, as it does around every city I have been to in Iran; with it’s lookalike concrete monstrosities, the hideous air conditioners clinging above windows like ticks, and all subject to the merciless tyranny of the petrol engine? The old city is a soft flowing brown surface, pierced by all manner of tunnels and openings, of arches and towers, of wind towers… oh the wind towers. Much of it forms a roofed over network – elegantly arched and vaulted where lined with shops and the workshops of artisans, beating out metal trays or selling fruit and vegetables, or hills of shelled nuts and dried fruits on great steel platters. To put it bluntly, the topography of Yazd suggests that its inhabitants – the, as always, delightful Persians; that much at least seems to be invariant across this land – seem to have a need here to live like termites. Suggestive this of the scorching – well above 50 degrees celsius – that characterizes the long summer (thankfully with zero humidity). I have experienced nothing of this directly, but I have seen so many, many signs – for this is the great joy of the ancient Persian city: that it is exquisitely moulded to its particular climate – in ways that all the planet, it seems to me, needs to learn from.

I came here from Shiraz after Karim put me on the bus. I was sitting just behind the driver, and he insisted on me coming down to sit on a seat that folded down across the bus doorway – and gave me tea and more of those damned addictive roasted and salted pumpkin seeds. I may be beginning to get the hang of these: you nibble along its length like a mouse, then insinuate the, hopefully, uncrushed kernel onto your tongue, while discarding the rest. The first time I was given these (no doubt you have eaten them often and are considering me tres gauche) I munched the whole lot – crunch, crunch, crunch, scratchy swallow – much to the amusement of the driver who gave them to me.

When I arrived for some strange reason no taxi was prepared to take me into the centre. A kind man, drew me into a taxi with him. We both got out somewhere or other, and he welcomed me warmly to Iran, got my email address, and then hailed me a taxi and insisted on giving the driver the money for it. Quite, quite typical behaviour, of course.

I was whisked away to the hotel I had chosen from my guidebook, and found that it lay down one of these covered bazaar streets, at the end of a narrow alley. This hotel, a typical old house, is built around a great court roofed with canvas. So far, so good. I was less enamoured of the ‘bathroom in a cupboard’ – when I took a shower, the water was just pouring down the inside of the old wooden door. In truth – and I’ve commented on this before – Iranian plumbing is a bit eccentric. I’ve only twice come across a shower curtain. Mostly, the shower is merely set up on the wall of the bathroom and when you shower, the entire bathroom gets soaked. Nor did I like sleeping in a room without any window anywhere… nor, for that matter, the rather fabulously expensive buffet I had that night. So, the next morning, I defected to another hotel – even grander with a larger courtyard (I discovered two more today), and roofed by something like a rather glamorous circus top and, though a bit more expensive, I was given a nice large room with windows overlooking the court.

On a whim, one morning, I phoned a tour guide whose name was in my guidebook as being a Zoroastrian who had the ‘in’ on the rather sizable Zoroastrian community – largest, I think in Iran – and rather a sad remnant considering that, before the Islamic conquest, the whole country followed that faith. I shall not lecture you on Zoroaster, I’m sure you will piece it together from what follows. The man appeared, Keykhosro Lorian – he told me that some time in the past, people were asked to choose family names, and so they did so, with some degree of randomness. He appeared, and it was immediately obvious that he was the guide for me. When I opened with my well used: chand toman? (how many tomans), he countered with: you say. I made an offer, he laughed… and after some negotiations, we settled on a price.

Off we drove, first along streets where he asked me to tell him which houses were Zoroastrian and which Muslim. I did my best – and I did get one thing right: that some doors had two knockers – one for women callers, the other for men, that by producing a different sound, alert the inhabitants of the house to send an appropriate person to answer the door. Clearly Muslim then. The Zoroastrian houses – some having but a single knocker – though not always so, rendering that Holmesian tool in my kitbag somewhat dodgy – had wet marks outside the door because, each morning, water is supposed to be thrown out – I never did get to the bottom of why. Then there was the possibility of a cypress tree somewhere in the vicinity. Thin pickings, I think you will agree.

After that, as Mr Lorian and I continued on our way to the fire temple, the inquisition continued. Whenever I would get something right he would bark: Bravo! Within the building, through a pane of glass, I observed an enormous ‘goblet’ in which burned a cheery fire. The same fire that has been burning continuously for some 1500 years (something of that order). Not at this place exactly, but lit from another somewhere else, and generally emanating, by direct ‘descent’ from an ancient fire. This is all a lot deeper than it might seem – they do not worship the fire, it is merely a symbol of their one and invisible god. And, as I think I have already mentioned in another post, we owe to the Zoroastrians all manner of spiritual inheritances: the Last Judgement, angels, the Devil, the Holy Spirit, the notion of Heaven etc. Such a profound legacy, indeed, that it only makes it sadder that the number of Zoroastrians in the world number perhaps 150,000, these mostly in Mumbai (I think), with only a community of 12,000 in Iran, according to Mr Lorian, who is very sad about it. His community is dissolving, through intermarriage, through migration – many Iranian Zoroastrians having moved to the US and Canada – and his single daughter, Nirdal (I may have misremembered this – though it means “evening star” – ie. Venus – Zoroastrians names all being derived somehow from nature), 11 years old, is already being seduced by the American visions of consumer bliss she watches on her friends’ satellite TVs. He worries for her future and that of his culture, whose core tenets are threefold: good thoughts, good speech and good acts. You can’t argue with that, now can you?

Next we drove out of town to two massive rings high on hills – the famous ‘Towers of Silence’. Here, until perhaps 50 years ago, Mr Lorian’s community would carry up their dead. Carefully washed, they were left there for the vultures. In a few days they would return to find the bones picked clean. These would then be desposited in a central well. I climbed to the tallest of the two. It is mostly ruined now – a ragged hole with the remains of a stone pavement around it upon which the bodies were laid. These towers are 400 years old, but there are others far older. They used to be way out of town but, gradually, the Muslim housing crept closer and closer to the towers, until the elders of the Zoroastrian community decided it was better to desist from a practice their neighbours neither liked nor understood. Now, still fearing to pollute the earth with their decaying dead, they bury them in concrete lined holes.

Zoroastrians venerate water, earth, wind and fire and they strive to keep these undefiled. They could neither burn, nor simply bury their dead – for a corpse is impure. A Zoroastrian would not even wash or urinate in a stream. It is interesting to wonder if, were the country still Zoroastrian, there would be so much litter lining every road through the glorious uninhabited spaces, or clogging streams and rivers whose purity of taste is delicious – I’ve certainly never tasted water comparable (though I was thirsty). Incidentally, Cyrus would only drink water from the river that flowed past Susa, water from which was carried around after him, wherever he went, in silver containers, a practice carried on by all the Achaemenid kings – most of whom – Cyrus possibly too – were Zoroastrians.

One of the hotel receptionists keeps answering the phone beside me and deploys, as some women here do, an unnaturally high voice. This is something I’ve also noticed among Japanese ladies and in Japan, if the samurai film is to be believed, the men used to growl their words like grumpy bears. I do wonder if there is some kind of cultural trope operating here in Asia where people exagerrate their gender through their voices…

Meanwhile, back in reality, Mr Lorian next drove me to Mebod, another ancient town hereabouts, where I explored a vast ‘pigeon tower’ that had nesting niches for 4000 of our feathery brethren. What was this used for? asked Mr Lorian. For food, I said, and he shook his head smiling: Persians don’t eat pigeon. Their eggs, I offered, smugly. Nay, his head said with another shake. Fertilizer! I said. Bravo! he beamed. There had once been 1600 of these towers around Yazd, all of them producing guano (that was once the chief export of Peru). Next was an ‘ice house’ – though to call it that is to reduce something sublime to banality. Yakh Dan – the first being pronounced in the Scottish as ‘yach’. (Incidentally, the Persian terms for many things here lose a lot in the translation. ‘Tower of silence’ is actually ‘dod gaa’ – Judgement Time – and the modern cemetries are called, by the Zoroastrians, Areh Gaa – ‘Silent Time’. Wind towers are ‘bad gir’ – literally ‘wind grabbers’). Back to the ice house. Under a great adobe dome, lay a deep, smooth pit into which, down its wall, curved steps. The whole thing, once my eyes adjusted to the gloom, looked like an Anish Kapoor sculpture. The way it worked was thus: outside in the open, they poured water into shallow troughs and built walls around these to keep them in the shade. At night, in winter, when it got cold enough, the water froze. It was cut into blocks, put in the ice house bowl, each layer covered with straw. Thus a large supply of ice was available during torrid summer days. Genius!

Incidentally, when I asked Mr Lorian whether his community would ever return to ‘sky-burials’ – he waved his arm at the sky and I understood: there are no vultures. Specfically, if the functioning towers of silence in India are anything to go by, griphon vultures. Recently, in India, some antiobiotic they have been giving the cattle has decimated the griphon vulture population – poisoned by feeding on the carcasses. Consequently, communities near the towers of silence there have been dismayed to find bits of granny being dropped on the streets by the far less fussy eaters that are the vultures who have taken up the job.

After lunch, Mr Lorian and I drove off across the desert towards another gorgeous range of violet mountains. Deep in among these we climbed to a narrow valley and parked beneath some rather 60s looking platforms stacked like bracket fungus up the cliff. Climbing to the very topmost of these we reached a curious shrine, holy to Zoroastrians, called Chak Chak – literally: Drip Drip. And, indeed, inside the shrine, the air reverberated to great drops of water falling from the overhanging rock into bowls – as has been happening for hundreds of years. Indeed it is strange in this arid landscape to find this inexhaustible supply of water so far above the water table. There is a story of a Sassanian (who were all Zoroastrians) princess fleeing into the desert from the Arab invaders and miraculously calling into being this water; another story claims these are her tears.

The complex has been built by Zoroastrian pilgrims for celebrating a four day festival every June. The ambience of the place, and the way Mr Lorian described the making and sharing of food, and the sleeping on the platforms gazing up at the milky way, made me imagine something funky like Woodstock. The view was certainly stunning, the air fresh (and free of petrol fumes) and there were wizened old fig trees, eucalyptus and wild pepper.

Dusk thickened as we reached the abandoned village of Kharanaq – abandoned, yes, the villagers have moved to a modern town, but daily pass through their old village, all of adobe like melting chocolate, to their fields in the valley below. Two of these villagers were sorting and washing yellow carrots (a small bunch of which I have in my rucksack for later munching). A spooky place, and beautiful.

This business of adobe – or mud bricks covered with a plaster of mud strengthened with straw (rather the same principle, it seems to me, as steel reinforced concrete). Close up it is like smooth and curving chipboard – with more emphasis on the smooth and less on the chipboard *grin* An amazingly versatile material that I have had a tendency to disdain – being somewhat obsessed (as I imagine most Europeans are) with stone. Indeed, in our rainy climates, adobe would quickly sag. My understanding is that the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lamas in Llhasa is made of adobe – and has to be repaired after heavy rain. Mud brick construction has been the basis of many civilzations – not least Mesopotamia – and now that I’ve seen it up close, I have come to realize that it is really rather wonderful. Not only can you build massive structures, and delicate ones – no doubt rather quickly – but it is also an excellent insulator – keeping buildings warm in winter and cool in summer – and, of course, it is ecologically very, VERY sustainable. In comparison to the hideous carbon dioxide excesses of producing concrete, it only takes some earth, water and sun to bake it.

Let’s talk sustainable architecture. Ok, I’ve already burbled on about ice houses and adobe. I would like to add two extra elements: wind towers and qanats.

Qanats – long a passion of mine – originated probably in eastern Iran – perhaps western Afghanistan. (I have a feeling that I may have gone on about this before – if so, please bear with me – and, after all, it would hardly be an obsession if I didn’t go on and on about it whenever the opportunity presented itself!) To build a qanat you must first locate a source of water in some high ground – the ubiquitous mountains of Iran hove into view – and then to construct a channel to lower ground where you have your settlement already, or where you wish to build one. This channel of water turns your lowland site effectively into an oasis. Now with the kind of heat we have around here (and, let’s face it, there’s not much point in going to all this effort if you have abundant supplies of water falling from the sky – and so we’re naturally talking about dry and hot places), with this heat, a channel running along the surface would lose most, if not all, of its water through evaporation. The solution is to put your channel underground – no mean feat, you’re thinking. No. And, though the qanat builders cunningly effect their underground channel to be almost horizontal along its course, the gentle flow still erodes the earth tunnel you’ve built and so you need to sink ‘wells’ all along its length, to get down to it to dig it in the first instance, and to repair it as an ongoing concern. Thus you end up with something that looks like the holes in a flute running down the slope of the mountain to your settlement. What you also end up with is a spring wherever you want it, daily pumping out delicious and cool mountain water into your houses and gardens and fields. More genius!

Wind towers, or ‘wind grabbers’, are tall structures – I think mostly of adobe – that rise up from buildings and present openings to the prevailing breezes. This cooler air is further cooled by being encouraged to pass over water. The conduits sometime have kinks in them holding shelves that collect dust and sand. What you end up with is a constant flow of cool air. I stood beneath one today, in the Bagh-e Dolat Abad, the tallest wind tower in Iran at 33m. A delicious, fragrant stream of air simply wafting down from the sky. Perfection!

So we have our cheap, sustainable building material, adobe, an unpumped water supply and a natural air conditioner without all that nasty drying and rattling – and these are, above all else, passive technologies!! These systems, all tuned to local conditions, with the addition of building shapes that reduce the amount of a building that at any time receives direct sun – are all passive. Silent, using no energy – could anything be more important, to a world in which we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and a general excessive use of energy, than this way of thinking?

While driving through a ruined Zoroastrian village, Mr Lorian pointed out a couple of dogs wandering around where there was no longer any water, not anything to eat. He pointed out that Zoroastrians greatly value dogs – often giving them some of any cooked food before people eat. This stands in direct contrast to Muslims who apparently despise dogs, considering them filthy. I’ve been wandering around Muslim Iran showing photos of my family – because that’s what they want to see – and of my poor, ancient little pooch. Little did I know that I may as well have be en showing them photos of my pet cockroach.

Yazd is however awash with cats. In one of the hotels, when I sat on a divan eating my dinner, there was one particular tabby with one eye who stared me out until I gave him something.

Last night, after 11:00pm, there was a knock on my door and, most apologetically, one of the hotel staff handed me my passport that one of them had gone to the airport to fetch for me. So I have lost a day in Esfahan, but it could have been worse.

perspectives…

Ricardo on 8th November 2011

The bulk of this was written the day before yesterday, but I was unable to post it then. I have also added an extra paragraph just now, from my hotel in Yazd that happens to have wi-fi…

I have just returned from five hours at Persepolis. This ruined palace is probably the single most important reason I came to Iran. But now I have that feeling of exhaustion that I comes upon me (I’m pretty certain this is a common experience) whenever I spend a long time in a museum or gallery. No doubt it is my brain’s natural reaction against being stuffed like a haggis.

It’s probably too soon for me to be able to express anything very sensible about the experience – I have been dreaming about Persepolis since I was a child and what I have just done is to attempt to replace the complex mental ‘fantasy’ I have of the place with the visceral reality of having actually been there. To some extent this was a brutal process.

My core reason for coming to Iran was to recalibrate my conceptions of the place by access to direct experience. This is not without its perils – or perhaps, less dramatically, it is difficult. (Can I just state that, in the following, when I use “I” I really mean “we” – because I am confident that what I am describing here is a common experience – indeed, if it were not, I wouldn’t wish to be inflicting on you what would then seem to be merely ‘a tour of the mental processes of a madman’ *grin*) An effect of all this travelling is, for example, to ‘stretch space’. By this I mean that any book-derived knowledge of a place will reside within my mind in a peculiarly ‘compressed’ form. This form is not devoid of measurements nor awarenesses of scale, but this is true only in a peculiar mental sense, as if the thing is being seen through a prism. The book I am intending to write set in ancient Iran, has an almost complete ‘life’ of this kind already in my mind. I could have written the book entirely without coming to Iran, but then it could never hope to escape the prison of the prism and it would be a less ‘real’ thing than I would like it to be.

Seeking this link to ‘reality’ is necessarily a delicate business. First there is that ‘stretching of space’ malarkey that I have already mentioned. As I travel about, places, that were merely points on a map, pull apart and the true vastness of this land becomes apparent. As the landscapes stretch, there is a tendency for the characters I intend to people them with to shrink. I am reminded of how a Chinese painter, when first shown by an European the supposed aesthetic advance represented by perspective, is claimed to have said: that’s a nice trick, but is it art? Apocryphal or not, this seems to me to demonstrate the truth that we want our stories to have people firmly in the foreground and as large if not larger than life.

A second potential problem is that the Iran that ‘is’ exists raucously in the bustling modern life of its people and is constantly in my face (and very often up my nose in the guise of exhaust fumes). Though of course this constitutes the truest joy of being here, the Iran that I seek for literary purposes is the faintest impression on a page that has been constantly overwritten for more than 2000 years. A ruin, when you walk among its tumbled stones, actually works more against a reimagining of the building it was than if there were nothing there at all (assuming you have some description of it from some other source from which to imagine it into existence). I certainly find that the reality of what my senses are perceiving tends to overwhelm any imaginings I may have had – at least temporarily. Additionally, the land here has either suffered the general ecological degradation that all lands seem to suffer from long human occupation, as well, perhaps, some climate change on top (my impressions from what I’ve seen suggest that the dramatic drying of the landscape has been caused by deforestation). There is also the polution that I’ve already talked about that daily hazes out that famous ancient clear light.

So you can imagine my delight when I chartered a taxi to set off to see Darius’ inscription high on a cliff at Bisotun and found not the clutter of modern urbanity I expected to find, but a cliff rising craggily to the bluest sky and, at its foot, where anciently there had been a ‘paradise’ (a walled hunting park and garden), stood a shady gathering of trees through which streams ran glinting from a waterfall that tumbled from a pool. In truth this is all artificial, but no more so than had been Darius’ paradise, and no less delightful for that. I lingered there for hours and climbed the slope of the mountain so that I could gaze down upon the plain. Here at least it was easy to imagine Darius and his court on the migration from Babylon (not far from Bagdad), fleeing the coming of the brutal Iraqi summer, and marching along the road that led to the cool, breezy palace at Hamadan.

Later, to my great frustration, I could find no bus to take me, from Kermanshah down to Khouzistan, that didn’t travel at night. I thus made the descent from the Zagros mountains in darkness. It was after midnight when I decided to take the risk of bailing out at Andimeshk – rather than continuing on for another two hours to Ahvaz. I was the only person getting off there and, finding a taxi, I got in. There were two other guys in the car, and as they chatted to each other and the driver, and he made some strange changes of direction, I grew a tad concerned that this was some kind of setup – and so was much relieved when we stopped outside the hotel I had asked for. Paranoia, of course, and probably due to extreme tiredness. A cause for concern here is that, because of the sanctions imposed on Iran, their banks have no contact with ours. Consequently, all the money any traveller here has access to, he has to carry with him. But, as I have said – it was just paranoia – I have never actually had cause to feel in any way in danger.

The change in temperature from Kermanshah to Khouzistan was dramatic. When I woke the next morning, in my cheap and not so cheerful hotel room, I looked out and saw date palms rising from among the dusty, flat roofed houses. The fears of the previous night forgotten, I went out seeking breakfast – this was the first hotel I had come across that didn’t serve any. I found a tiny little place where the owner gave me tea and a hunk of baguette stuffed with falafels and salad. He was very welcoming and refused to take any payment. I found a minibus to take me to Shush – ancient Susa, and the second of the three Achaemenid capitals (the other being at Hamadan, where, alas, there was very little to see) I came to look at.

My experience of ancient Susa – where the remains are scanty, though enough for us to have a clear idea of the layout of the palace there, and its relationship to the ancient city – was somewhat ‘enlivened’ by a number of factors. The first was that, like a mad dog, I had decided to carry out my investigation of the ruins under the noonday sun – admittedly, I was on a schedule – but I hadn’t even had the sense to wear a long-sleeved shirt, nor to put on any sun cream – nor even to bring the umbrella that I had bought in Kermanshah (after having been royally soaked for two days on the trot, only for the clouds to part, so that I’ve not used it in anger, except to wander around another ruined city looking, no doubt, like some retired vicar out of some Merchant Ivory film). The next factor was the ever-so-keen young soldier who seemed intent on bounding around me wishing conversation. Eventually I had to send him away – as nicely as I could with the language difficulties (you try telling someone to buzz off, politely, when you barely have two words in common). Finally, there were some other tourists who decided to involve me in their moral crusade against the felonious attempts (over millenia, it should be understood) by the Persians to wrest Khouzistan from their rightful owners the Arabs – they claimed to be Arabs though they lived in Ahvaz and so were presumably Iranian citizens. They explained to me that ancient Susa had not, of course, been built by Darius, but by some Arab – who they were unable to name. I tried to disavow them of this nonsense to no avail. In truth, I often find myself being regarded with indulgent contempt as I try to explain, for example, that such and such an ancient monument has nothing whatever to do with Solomon’s mum.

The most important results for me in visiting Khouzistan (not withstanding later hiring a driver to take me to see the bizarrely modern looking remains of a ziggurat at Choqa Zambil, built from mudbricks – unfired, I think – still rising to a good height, and being more than 3000 years old) were the stretching of what used to be the land of ancient Elam, from something like a county in my mind, to a vast flat expanse. Also salient for me is Susa’s position beside one of its rivers and gazing down on this immense plain. Though temperatures here in summer can reach a deadly 60 degrees celsius, it was green – but not as green as when it was Elam and, apparently, marshy and with a plethora of exotic wildlife – including, and this may be a mental aberration on my part, elephants?! It looks considerably more like borderline desert today – as does neighbouring Iraq, of which Khouzistan would seem to form a natural extension, though the two regions have always been culturally distinct.

Anyway, my driver, another Majid, a cheerful soul given to singing traditional songs loudly, drove me away from the ziggurat and towards Ahvaz, an industrial city on whose approach many gas flares can be seen burning smokily – for this is one of the main sources of Iranian petroleum – and perhaps one of the reasons that my Arab friends earlier wanted to claim this province for themselves.

Ahvaz was surprisingly delightful. For one thing it was very warm, for another it had, from my arrival and well into the night, a carnival atmosphere. I suspect this vibrant nightlife is a consequence of, in the vicious heat of summer – where, famously, an ancient Greek, claimed that a lizard running across a road would be cooked in the process – having to hide indoors during much of the day. My understanding is that traditional Khouzistani livingrooms were built underground. Of course, today, every window has an air conditioning carbuncle clinging to it.

Issuing forth from my hotel, I went to change some money and buy some fruit and nuts for a light evening mea, as well as taking in the bustling sights, when, alas, I lost my flat cap :O( – and, consequently, I have now had to resort to an even sillierhat *sigh*

Determined not to miss out on the crucial experience of making the ascent from ancient Elam back to the Iranian plateau in daylight – and having to organize the trip in a hurry the evening I arrived in Ahvaz – I decided to make the journey – of something like 600 kilometres – by taxi… As we motored along I began to get anxious about the princely sum of 90 pounds sterling it was costing me – by far the most I’ve spent on anything here. Perhaps this was a foolish extravagance, but it was somewhat rewarded by the glorious beauty of the wide golden valleys of Persia that are walled in by gorgeous amethystine mountain ranges. Slopes bristle with oaks. The road winds up precipices in hairpin bends. At one place it squeezes through a narrow cleft between two mountain walls; a place anciently called the Persian Gates and that was stoutly defended by a body of Persian soldiers against the ultimately successful attempts to break through by Alexander the Great.

Guiding us into Shiraz was Karim, the same who I met on the Trans-Asia Express and who had told me that, when I came to his city, that I should phone him. I have stayed with him now for a number of days. He has taken it upon himself to be my guide and, being native to Shiraz, he knows where the best of everything is. He lives in a lovely house with his mother in the north of the city, somewhat up into the foothills of the surrounding mountains and away from the car fumes and din. The first morning there I woke and came out onto a terrace and could see, over the loquat (nespera) and orange trees in his small garden, to the mountain walls rising nearby and the flawless blue sky.

We went down to the old heart of Shiraz to wander in the bazaars where Karim has many friends, and to walk in gardens and visit the tomb of Hafiz. In the evenings Karim has told me of his amazing life: travelling to and working in dozens of countries; arriving in Istanbul at the age of 17 without a penny. He has made his way since then, in spite of all the disadvantages of coming from a poor country. Thus is explained his facility with languages and his German citizenship. Karim turned out to be possessed of considerable wisdom and had many penetrating things to say about the world in general. What he told me about the poverty he had seen and experienced both in Iran and Europe I found challenging – casting me as it does as one of the ‘rich’ – an uncomfortable position, implying not only responsibility, but complicity in the world order that allows this poverty to be a decay at the heart of our societies.

He taught me much besides about his country. For example, he is a keen walker and camper and, pointing to a map of Iran, he poured out a mass of information about the country, its landscapes and its climate. It is quite remarkable that if you go east from here Shiraz some 100km you end up in a torid salt desert in which it sometimes snows. If you go south even less distance the plateau drops to the Persian Gulf along whose coast the temperatures, even now, are in the high 50s. West, you climb into the Zagros, with an alpine climate, and a dizzying profusion of flowers in spring, and soon it will be below metres of snow. This is a land of wide, flat bottomed valleys nestling among a complex system of mountain ridges. Each valley is a separate world, with its own climate. Some are dry some wet, and in some there lie the ruins of ancient cities.

We mounted an expedition to one of these, Bishapur, the capital of Shapur I, a king of the Sassanian dynasty that was one of the successors to the Achaemenids. A king, incidentally, who several times humbled Rome, even going as far as capturing the Roman emperor Valerian whom he is reputed to have used as a living stool for mounting his horse. Such the vainglory of kings – for only rather unstable looking ruins remains of his once great city.

Weary of the ruins, Karim, Peyman (our driver) and I decided we would go and find the colossal statue of Shapur (you may be getting an ever clearer impression of the man) in some cave up in the wall of a gorge that was once the entrance to the valley in which lies Bishapur. We rattled the car up through a village that sprawled up the hem of the mountain wall and soon were forced to get out and walk. We none of us realized it was going to be such an arduous climb: 800m up a steep boulder and scree strewn slope and eventually over humps of the mountain itself. But when we arrived, the old king did not disappoint us, nor the view from his eyrie. Though it must be said: who would be crazy enough to put a 7m high statue of himself concealed in a cave half a mile up a cliff…?

On the way down we ran into some guys feasting on pomegranates and drinking some rather potent homemade hooch. When they invited us to join them, it seemed to me impolite not to do so. I told them that the brew reminded me of sake, which it did. They wanted to know where I came from and I ended up playing them some Breabach, bagpipes and all.

Yesterday, the same adventurers, with the addition of Saraf, Peyman’s girlfriend, set off on another expedition, this time north to Pasagard – where, as far as we understand, Cyrus is buried in his mausoleum, beside the palaces he built within its garden. This was a key experience for me because Pasagard seems to me to be what needs to be understood if you’re going to hope to grasp the ancient Persians and what it that allowed them to bring so much of the ancient world under their rule. Pasagard is filled with mysteries. We’re not really certain about what any of the buildings there are for. I meditated for a while before the enigmatic ‘genius’ (spirit, angel, what you will) that may or may not depict Cyrus and that feels to me a puzzle that I need to solve for my book – at least psychologically.

We rounded off the day by going to visit the massive tombs of Darius and some of his successors that were gouged into a cliff near Persepolis. We stood gazing up in a violet dusk as swallows swooped in an out of Xerxes’ tomb, now as empty as the others. As the sun was setting, we drove to Persepolis where I was left off at a hotel there while the others returned to Shiraz. Tomorrow I am heading for the great salt desert and Yazd…

Karim came to meet me at the cybercafe carrying my umbrella. As I had been driven back from Persepolis I had noticed leaden clouds gathering. We rushed to catch a bus as it began to bucket down. I imagined that everyone else shared my feelings of irritation and getting wet, and at how slippery everything was. Karim told me that I was getting it all wrong, everyone was joyous at the rain. He claimed that there have only been three days of rain in Shiraz in the past ten years. This was confirmed by a student who, in typical fashion, had struck up a conversation with me in English. I realised that this had been said to me many times, but I hadn’t really taken it on board. When I had shown them photos of Scotland the oohs and ahs at how beautiful it was – how green everything is. They see our plentiful rain as a blessing. As lightning lit up the room and thunder shook the house, I wondered at how cussed we humans are, always wanting what the other has and so rarely appreciating what we already have…

the kindness of strangers…

Ricardo on 30th October 2011

I’m in Kermanshah at the moment where it is raining gorbehah and sagah. To be able to inflict this (feeble) joke on you, I wanted to confirm what “cat” was in Persian and, since my bad pronunciation wasn’t doing it, and because my taxi driver’s English was rudimentary, I had to resort to making animal noises and feline impersonation (worse than rudimentary, I’m afraid). After an embarrassingly long period attempting this he suggested, cooly, in English: Cat? At which point we both dissolved into raucous laughter.

Chosroe II goes boar hunting on elephant back

Reza and Masood making ferni in Kermanshah

Ahmad, Raheleh and Darius’ and Xerxes’ inscriptions

Now I’m telling you this to give you an indication of what my day to day experience is like encountering Iranians. Whether in groups or alone, young or old, male or female; I almost always get the same reaction: faces brighten with delight and, beaming, they try what English they have on me – and if they have none, they try Persian, or mime. They ask me where I come from and how I am liking Iran. At some point they always welcome me to their country. On several occasions I have been invited to be a guest in their homes.

This morning I went to see some exquisite Sassanian reliefs, in a taxi with an old fellow who quizzed me incessantly in Persian – so that I had to try and respond with what Persian I could in turn manage to produce – I then returned by means of the ‘cat’ taxi and was left off at a roundabout and, after much tramping around in the rain, I found that yet another of the restaurants described in my Lonely Planet guide no longer existed (the Lonely Planet guide has not been updated since 2008 and, among other failings, the prices it quotes are generally at least half what they actually are now). I eventually found somewhere to eat and was condemned to yet another chicken and rice; I had been after something with vegetables in it. Afterwards, I went in search of an internet cafe… again finding nothing of the kind where the book said their ought to be one. Drenched and forlorn I asked various locals if they knew of one and, after I had told them where I came from etc, they pointed me in various directions, alas to no avail. At last I asked a young soldier who, sheltering me under his umbrella, insisted on making it his life’s mission to find me an internet cafe. Eventually, having tried half a dozen, we found they were all closed. He left me to wait until one reopened in the care of a man running a little shop that seems to sell nothing but a rather delicious concoction called ferni with little almond cakes. He gave me a bowl of the potion and a couple of the cakes. I can give you the recipe for ferni because this man, Reza, and his partner, Masood, suddenly dragged an immense gas burner into the middle of the floor of the tiny shop, placed an enormous steel bowl above the roaring flames and began stirring up a batch – much to my delight, I can tell you! While this was going on, customers were squeezing past the flames and bubbling cauldron in a way I don’t imagine our Health and Safety would have been very pleased with. So the recipe is water, milk powder and sugar brought to a boil, rice flour is then stirred in a separate bucket to stir out the lumps, and the whole lot is combined and stirred with a wooden paddle until it thickens. Throughout we plied each other with questions and became friends. They refused to let me pay for what I’d eaten, insisting it was given to me with love…

Now I am British enough to find all of this affection – and it’s hard to feel it as being anything else when you’re receiving it – sometimes a little unsettling. Something kicks in that seeks to undermine the authenticity of what’s going on, but I am constantly striving to disarm this suspiciousness for I know it is entirely uncalled for and says a lot more about me and – dare I say it, folks: us – than it does about these kind and warm people.

Yesterday afternoon I set off from Hamadan in a savari, a shared taxi – with a woman sitting in the front and myself and two soldiers, in camouflage uniforms, in the back. We were stuffed in that taxi for nearly three hours without a break. During this time one of the soldiers, the older of the two, started up a conversation with me. Now, I would like to point out that I have to trigger these chats – because, in spite of the slightly silly hat I have elected to wear (a tweed flat cap) as an attempt to signal my ‘faranginess’ – yup, that’s what they call anyone who doesn’t speak Persian – everyone seems to think I’m Persian until I open my mouth (actually, sometimes even then – as long as I don’t say too much. So the older soldier started talking to me – and everyone save the woman joined in, the soldier acting as interpreter. We muddled along and managed to communicate quite a lot about each others’ lives – the young soldier, only a teenager, was shy, but got involved too. Then I was informed that the woman, all shrouded in black, had phoned her husband to pick her up and wanted to drive me to a hotel. I touched her shoulder to thank her and everyone recoiled with shock and I was told, that in Iran, men never touch women. When we arrived, true to her word, the woman and her husband drove me to a nice hotel, and when they were sure i was satisfied, they drove off. As it turned out, the hotel ended up being too pricey for me – and too posh in that ostentatious way that makes me feel uncomfortable. So I left and the the guy manning the front gate asked me if he could help, and we managed to communicate, and he put me in a taxi and sent me on my way, to the hotel I’m currently staying. This, though exceedingly seedy and tatty, is very clean, though the bath for some reason is piped to empty out all over the floor and the water to run away into the squat toilet, besides which is a toiler of our kind. Most bizarre, but then I’m not here for the plumbing.

Incidentally, on my first night there, I witnessed a spectacular thunderstorm while reading my iPad in the dark and eating grapes. Little pleasures…

Now, from Tehran I went to Qazvin, though now I can’t really work out why. Someone recommended it to me, but it wasn’t who I thought it was. I had a rather depressing time there that involved another of these: Ricardo goes wandering off in vaguely the right direction, misjudges the distance, gets wet and tired, and doesn’t find what he is looking for. Once, in Tehran, I strode off manfully northwards only to find, half an hour later, that I had actually been going south. I wish I could entirely blame it on how confusing these cities are, but clearly I must shoulder some of the blame. Be that as it may, Qazvin was good for me because it allowed me time to reconnect to the real reason I am here – which is research for my book AND that, beyond this, what really matters is the experience of actually being here. This latter point explains why this post is entirely about people and not ruins. (Though for those of you brave enough to read these travelogues to their bitter end, the ruins are yet to come – oh yes!)

Thus we come at last to the dusht, ahem, or meat of this post. I hope my new friends won’t mind me displaying photographs of them here, I did try to explain that I might but that conversation spiralled out of comprehension.

On the bus from Qazvin to Hamadan, I chose a seat near a window – though it was all a bit rainy and gloomy to see much – and a man sat down beside me who offered me a biscuit and then we fell into conversation. Ahmad is an architect who lives in Hamadan where he was born, but some of his work is in Tehran. Not long after, he said he would like me to come and stay with him. At first I said no, thinking that this would be a great imposition on him and his wife, but he insisted and, eventually, I said yes.

When we arrived in Hamadan, his friend Hosein was there to pick us up. He was the first man with a shaved head I’d seen and I told him so. When we arrived at Ahmad’s he laughed, drew my head towards him and planted a kiss on it. Ahmad invited me into his beautiful home where I met his wife, Raheleh. They immediately planted me in front of a table loaded with all kinds of little cakes and sweets; specialities from all over Iran. Ahmad’s brother appeared with some friends. He lives upstairs and their parents above him – each in separate flats – quite a common occurrence in Iran. After much chat, I was whisked off to friends, Zahra and Majid, recently married and just moved into another beautiful home – this one with some retro 60s touches to it. Zahra had prepared a delicious meal of Persian rice (grown in various localities in Iran and very like basmati), khoresht (a stew of various herbs – that make a dense green sauce, kidney beans and bits of lamb), another lamb dish with celery, yoghurt with shallots and some other herb, fresh herbs and spring onions, pickles of various kinds, and warm flat breads. Wonderful. Then we men smoked some orange-flavoured tobacco from a ghalyan (hookah or water pipe). Zahra’s sister arrived with her husband and child. It was a delightful party.

The next day, Ahmad and Raheleh took me to see the inscriptions cut by Darius and Xerxes into a cliff above Hamadan. Then to see the archaeological dig of the remains of the Median capital of Ecbatana – the reason I came to Hamadan. A meal out with some other friends and their children, and back to their house for tea, home to pack and Ahmad drove me to the savari (long distance taxis) station and negotiated my trip (with the woman and the two soldiers). We parted warmly.

I can’t imagine that if Ahmad were wandering around Britain, as I am doing in Iran, that he would be so warmly welcomed. It seems to me strange that such overwhelmingly kind, gentle and hospitable people should have somehow acquired a reputation such that, everyone I told that I was going to Iran thought me brave for doing so, and that my friends and family feared for me…

apologies if some of the photos are a bit dark, this is because I am unable to adjust the contrast in this internet cafe, but also this reflects how bad the weather’s been here…

In Tehran

Ricardo on 25th October 2011

The first thing to say is that I missed the terrible earthquake at Van. Lucky for me, and for the others on the train, not so lucky for those poor Turks. From previously knowing none, I have recently met quite a few, and have spent hours talking with some – so that now they seem to me less remote; I have had direct experience that they are, essentially, indistinguishable from anyone else I know. Seems to me that we all know this with one part of our brain, but there is another part that is not so sure. Anyway, I wish them well.

traffic – alas, this shows nothing of the frenzy

changing currency – reading Persian came in useful

Ali’s sketches of gardens, pavilions & wind towers

more gardens, qanats & a house I will visit in Kashan

the bejewelled globe (from wanderingsscot.com)

from left: the ‘Arab’, Mustaba, his very good friend

Incidentally, and to swerve the mood dramatically, if I were superstitious, not to mention insanely narcissistic, I might begin to feel that I was some variety of Typhoid Mary: whenever I leave my hermitage in the woods, things happen: 9/11 when I was in a Mayan jungle, the tsunami in Sri Lanka a year to the day when I was travelling along in a bus on the same stretch of road that it washed away, the Icelandic eruption when I flew to Portugal and, now, this horrible thing at Van. There are people who would connect these sorts of things into a ‘pattern’.

Anyway, back to reality – of sorts. Tehran is one of the biggest cities on the planet and one of the things that proves it is the incessant floods of wheeled machinery that course down it’s thoroughfares. It really is the craziest thing if you look at it with British eyes. Not that you can have the leisure of looking at it very long without having to scamper for your life. It’s akin to the way that in Cambodia I observed flows of traffic – bicycles, tuk-tuk, oxen pulled carts, cars, buses, trucks – all hurtling towards a crossroads from all four directions at the same time and, somehow, everyone whisking (or plodding) through without mishap. In Tehran, something like this miracle is produced on every street and junction all the time, except that here they do have traffic lights, though really they seem to be some kind of starting gun. And the poor pedestrians – I’m one of those, folks; in places where there are no pedestrian crossings (even where there are, these seem negotiable…) pedestrians, merely using the power of faith, set off across the road and the torrent of cars and motorbikes pretends that you’re some kind of moving traffic cone at a rather jolly driving test. I tried to film this for you today, so that you could experience the anxiety of having all these vehicles rushing at you, but I have, as yet, not managed to work out how to get the film off my camera, onto my iPad, and from there onto YouTube so that I can embed it in this blog. The moment I crack this nut, you will be the first to know.

Yesterday, I woke intent on defurring my head when I discovered that my clippers were, apparently, kaput. I had to resort to shaving my head so that, when I issued forth, I looked even more of an alien among the, generally, universal thick mops of black hair on the people crowding the streets. Today, by the way, I somewhat botched my arrangements – only managing to make one of the several museum stops I had intended – and instead ended up, in what an unreasonable person might constitute as ‘being lost’, wandering the streets scrutinising faces, glancing into shops and generally ‘drinking in the ambience’. Alas some of this consists of toxic fumes, so that, while I’ve been here, I have had that feeling one gets when a nasty throat cold is coming on. Now what I noticed, or think I noticed, was that there is more variety here in the faces and body types than I am aware of noticing anywhere before. Now, of course, this is also true in, say, London – but there we are talking about people from many different parts of the world – races, if you will. Here in Tehran, just about everyone looks ‘Iranian’ (and quite often, beautiful with it) – it’s just that they come in every conceivable size and proportion and, for all the faces that reminded me of ‘types’ I’ve seen before, there are always new ones coming into view of which I’ve never seen the like. I can only conclude that this must have something to do with Iran being a sort of ‘corridor’ connecting East and West, even North and South – so that everyone has, at one time or another, passed through – and as they do, romantic dalliances occur – and some not so romantic…

So, back to my bald head. I took it out for lunch with a rather nice guy who made friends with me on the train, and since he had pressed on me that he wanted to show me around the city, I agreed. We had a perfectly nice time, if not a little fraught – what with trying to keep up a conversation with my few Persian words and his many but not entirely fully connected English, while being pushed in and out of taxis – with other people getting and out as we swerved towards the curb, herded on and off the metro, or being drawn into the path of oncoming traffic that was behaving as if, somewhere behind us, a limited amount of land was being sold at a dollar an acre. I wanted him to take me to some place selling some ‘typical’ Persian food, and we did get some, but from a sort of Persian Macdonald’s on the top floor of a shopping mall. We talked about life in Iran – with little asides as I continued my ‘learning Persian’ offensive.

Later I met up with Ali Tavakoli Dinani – an architect that I had met on Facebook through (the ubiquitous – at least in the context of this expedition) Lloyd. He took me for a very nice meal and told me that he had an aspiration to come and do a phd at Edinburgh University on the architecture of the Qajars. Somehow I got him doodling on my notebook – I have come to learn that, once coaxed to put pen to paper, architects find it easier to pour their thoughts out while drawing buildings, and I began to ask him about Persian gardens and one thing led to another and I received the most wonderful interactive lecture on not just gardens, but all kinds of modes of architecture, at different periods and how each is exquisitely adapted to the any given one of the many varied landscapes and climate zones of Iran. What began as a technical discussion blossomed into a spiritual one. For Ali is in love with this flower of Persian heritage, and I, having witnessed it as he sees it, am now half in love with it myself. For he is pursuing a tradition that is glorious but now lost to modern Iran and that, like Japanese architectural tradition, is one that the whole world could learn from. More than this, it’s entire spiritual heart lies in producing buildings that are married to the environment. If you were to sit and have him explain how, in the great salt desert that lies at the heart of Iran, people had, for centuries, manufactured ice, which they stored so that they could have blocks of it for refrigeration in summer; of wind towers that produce natural cooling in buildings; of the use of spaces differently aligned to the compass points, to provide living spaces comfortable and elegant for use at different seasons – then you too would realise that his vision is not to academically dissect a long dead corpse, but rather to nurture a seed back to life, one result of which could be to reunite his people with something they have lost, to renew their confidence in themselves, to free them from the ugliness of the soulless modern urban ‘development’ that is disfiguring their land.

Before I left good ol’ Blighty, one of the speakers at the Persepolis conference I attended said that, when he first went to Iran in the 60s, it had still had that peculiar quality of light that the poets had celebrated – but that now, alas, because of air pollution, that light has dimmed. When I heard this, I was disappointed, for it was one of my chief aims in coming to Iran that I should experience this light. This is not merely an aesthetic whim, for there was something in the quality of this light that has profoundly influenced the thinking of the Persians. To take just one example, it is light that is at the heart of the revelation of Zoroastrianism – and it is from that ancient religion that springs so much that is familiar to us: heaven and hell, the last judgement, angels, the holy spirit – all these things were gifted us by the ancient Persians – for these inspirations found their way into Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and who among us is not still affected by that?

Oh, and one last thing – the one ‘attraction’ I did manage to reach before the doors closed was the National Jewels Museum. Now, as anyone will tell you, I am more given to getting starry-eyed over precious stones than the next man, and let me tell you that jewel collection has more of them than I could imagine were in the world – and I’m not saying that for effect. What they have down there is a vault where glass cases are stuffed full of cups, and tiaras, and swords, and boxes, and clothing, and pendants and all manner of strange objects literally encrusted with rubies and emeralds and diamonds. In places there were bowls filled with rubies and emeralds, and chests overflowing with pearls, and a long fringe of tassels, each as big as your hand, made entirely of seed pearls, not to mention a throne the size of a bed, or a globe (you know the kind, that in the 60s people thought it tasteful to hinge open and turn into a drinks cabinet. Well, this globe had emeralds densely crusted for seas, and rubies for the continents (with, revealingly, Britain, France and Iran laid out with diamonds.) You get the picture: a gaudy Hollywoodesque notion of ‘splendour’ – though this was real of course. Well, I found much of it ugly. There were some nice pieces, where the gems had been allowed to form dense, somewhat amorphous, crusts. But wherever attempts had been made to form them into birds, or flowers, or who knows what, it just looked hideous to me. If you had turned most of it into identically coloured papier mâché, I dare say it would not have looked out of place in the art show by primary threes. Perhaps I’m being unkind…

Anyway, there I was wandering up the road feeling jaded (sorry) when who should come walking towards me large as life but my good friend Muchaba, We could hardly believe it that, in a city of 16 million, we had simply bumped into each other. Nearly crying with laughter, we hugged and then Muchaba introduced me to his friends, one of whom, started squeezing his thighs (for some reason that wasn’t clear to me) and Muchaba told me: “oh, he a joker” – and in an aside: “he an Arab” – that with a conspiratorial nod… You couldn’t make it up!

on the Trans-Asia Express…

Ricardo on 22nd October 2011

Blue Mosque & Hagia Sophia interiors with exquisite Islamic calligraphy...

Hagia Sophia interior, angel & stone inlays

It was colder in Istanbul than in Scotland when I arrived, blustery and lashing rain. I spent the next day, my only day in the city, incredibly cold, but unable to return for an extra layer – I had not thought to bring warm clothes at all – because my rucksack was locked away in a cupboard in the hotel I had had to check out of. The Blue Mosque was closed for prayers – the beautiful chant of the muezzin drifting into the hotel had alerted me – against the message of the decor – that I was on the edge of Europe. Hagia Sophia, even ravaged, stood a gorgeous testament to the glory of Byzantium. Of course it’s dome and vast lofty space struck awe even into one jaded by the scale of modern cities. The Islamic calligraphy spoke eloquently of other glories. But for me, beyond the theatrical effect produced by the constellation of chandeliers just above our heads, it was the slabs of patterned marble forming panels in the wall, and especially paving the floor in a stone analog of marquetry symmetry, that most entranced me. This greatest of basilicas only served to convince me further how vulgar is the interior of St. Peter’s in Rome. Of course, today, with the place buzzing with tourists, it is nigh impossible to conjure up the place with its inner skin of golden mosaic intact, candle lit and filled with the exquisite harmonies of Orthodox singing – which miraculous vision caused the envoy of the Prince of Kiev to feel he was in heaven.

That evening I crossed from Europe into Asia, over the Bosphorus by ferry. Entering the looming excess of the Hydapasha station, that I was later told had been built by the kaiser, I boarded the Trans-Asian Express. Without thinking much about it, I had imagined that this might be something like the Orient Express – in romance if not actually luxury – but of course it turned out to be nothing of the kind.

I was quickly bundled out of the compartment that was the one printed on my ticket and into another one occupied by a retired German professor and two Iranians. They had already decided who was sleeping where and so I was told which of the two top fold down bunks was mine. These companions were quickly to become a sort of temporary family. In the little closed travelling world of the train, each cabin became a home, the corridor the street that linked them, and the dining car our public square. Rules that needed no explaining structured our social polity. Compartments became inviolate to anyone other than it’s occupants; who each had within it his place. Each carriage had a sitting toilet, a squatting one and a tiny cubicle with a small sink. Rituals of communal eating developed, courtesies of sharing, meetings in the dinning car that had the character of diplomatic and cultural exchanges where people made enquiries about geographic origins, negotiating which languages to use, with people who spoke more than one language automatically becoming willing interpreters. Sometimes, when trying to resolve for someone what food they wanted, chains of interpreters would translate, for example, from English in German, from German into Persian, from Persian into Turkish – and back the other way. Conversations and exchanges of information that were of interest to others were disseminated by the participants out along the language lines. On the second night this culminated in a party, in which, lubricated by beer, we had a sort of international ‘love in’. I had a particularly delightful conversation with Tolul, a young Turkish student from Izmir, about his country, politics, and the cultural and linguistic ties between Turkey and Iran.

Meanwhile I was getting Persian language lessons from Karim and Muchaba. They patiently answered my ‘how do you say…’ in Persian questions, and when I wrote down their answers in Persian characters they were kind enough to correct my spelling. One morning Mustaba burst in while I was still dozing, spouting a constant flood of Persian, and ignoring my cries of: ‘I don’t know what you’re saying!’ Later Joachim suggested that Muchaba had probably been praying *grin*

Joachim, at 70, is on another of the solo adventures that he only began once he retired from teaching. These have included a journey from Europe to China and Tibet by train. He told me that he is saving South America for when he will be too old to put up with the discomfort of travelling in Asia… (I have long held a similar opinion, but my notion of what might constitute too old may need to be updated…) I have also learned from his efficient solutions to solo travel. Among other things, he has two sets of clothes: one on, the other being washed – an easy way to avoid the fretting I had deciding what clothes to take. He carries a printout of Eurasia on which he has drawn the routes of his adventures to show to curious locals, especially those with which he has no language in common. He has a notebook computer and on it a database with masses of statistics on the countries he is visiting – thus somewhat cutting his umbilical to the Internet.

He and Karim, who has spent more than 20 years living in Germany, carried out ceaseless banter in German. When asked, Joachim would relay this to me in English. Karim would also act as an interpreter between me and Muchaba when necessary. In truth, Karim was constantly in conversation with someone – in fact, as far as I could see, just about everyone – facilitating with irrepressible spirit: a prime nexus in our social network.

One of the things that I have learned about travelling is the need for patience and acceptance. When travelling, even within the ‘developed’ world, transport arrangements often go wrong. For those who know me well, the notion of me patiently waiting to put the next tick on my to do list may seem a tad atypical, however it seems to me that the explanation is that, in one case I have the illusion of control, whereas in the other I clearly have none. This yielding to the inevitable is a lesson that it seems to me one we will all have to learn in the end.

Of course patience is harder for the young. On the train we had two examples of people making themselves unhappy by trying to force the world to their will.

The first was a young French Canadian who became angry with the waiter when he discovered that the dish that he had ordered was not available. He did not take into account either that the waiter and he were on opposite sides of a language (and probably culture) wall, nor that the poor man was labouring on his own to serve a large number of people whose requests he often did not understood. The young dude tried to draw me into sharing his outrage that the man should come and explain his failing to him personally.

The second was a young Swiss woman who was sunk in gloom and responded to our attempts to help her out with surly silence. Employing our ‘translation web’, we helped her order some food, only for her to push it about on a plate, decide that she wasn’t actually hungry, and then proceed to make a grumpy scene trying to get the same poor put upon waiter to somehow box the food so that she might take it to her compartment. When this wasn’t quite working out as she wanted, she petulantly stubbed out the cigarette (that she had insisted on lighting up in defiance of the no smoking sign – and just as we, sitting at the same table, were about to eat) and left…

Beneath cloudless blue skies, we sped (well, mostly ambled) through a landscape of immense plains ringed with hills, or sometimes snowy mountains. Looking upon these flat vastnesses, it became clear to me why it is that they have, for millennia, been dominated by horsemen of one kind or another. Rare stands of trees were mostly poplars. Scrubby undergrowth was all yellow straw – though our Iranian buddies assured us that, in spring, these same dusty plains are seas of green. Rivers sometimes cut gullies in dramatic windings. Sometimes a village forms a crust of roofs, and yet, though these vistas seem essentially unoccupied, much of the land seems under cultivation.

On the 20th of October, the train stopped near a hamlet and we were there for hours. Eventually we got off because someone told us there was a shop. I was waiting to buy some tangerines (that, with oranges, are called ‘portugals’ *grin* presumably for the same reason they are called ‘portuguese apples’ in Greece, and that turkeys are so named by the British – though they are more accurately called ‘perus’ by the Portuguese themselves) – anyway, I was trying to pay for these when the train horn went and people started running back. I got my ‘portugals’ and clambered back on board.

We were told that this delay was due to some track ahead needing repaired. So we arrived at Tatvan, on the shore of Lake Van, already two and a half hours late. As we waited for the ferry we walked about outside in the cold. There I talked to Tom, a young guy who had cycled from London to Istanbul, mostly camping wild, and who was anxious about the bike that he had not seen since he had handed it over to the train guard and that was presumably locked away in the baggage car.

We waited until it got dark. A rumour circulated that the delay was being caused by Kurdist separatists having put some obstruction across the track between us and the ferry. (Later I read a report that suggested this might be true). Finally, we made it onto the ferry; like most a gloomy warren of shapeless and ugly rooms. We attempted to hold together our ‘social order’ so that we might transplant it into the Iranian train that was hopefully waiting for us on the other side of the lake.

We made the crossing in pitch blackness at 9pm, when we should have been crossing at 3pm. Six hours later, bleary eyed, we stumbled off into some big shack that, thankfully, had power sockets with which Phones could be recharged and calls made home – the socket on our abandoned compartment hadn’t worked.

When the Iranian train arrived we boarded it to find it was some ancient German relic, incredibly cold and with no lights working in the dining car. In near darkness we ate some chicken and rice that indeed was, as Muchaba and Karim had claimed, much better than Turkish rice – indeed very much like basmati. When the lights came on the dining car was revealed in all its garish and tatty grandeur; heavy red curtains, bolted down swivelling chairs, plastic tables each with a little vase of plastic flowers: how I would imagine a cheap Blackpool boarding house to have looked in the 1960s.

By the way, I’m writing this in the darkness, on what we think is 7:30pm Iranian time, and as we are fairly speeding along between Miyaneh and Zanjan, with a supposed arrival time in Tehran at 4am on the 22nd; it should have been 8pm on the 21st. My body clock is all over the place, I’ve been sleeping when I can and eating erratically and so, if this is somewhat rambling, that’s likely to be at least partially the reason.

We had lurched off in our Iranian ghost train until we had to stop again, not that long after, at around 6am – my buddies and I had decided it was pointless to try to sleep – and we had to jump down off the train, and it was locked up behind us. In another large white hall we had to queue to have our passports checked. I felt lucky that we were near the head of the queue. When it was my turn the ‘stealth technology’ of my Portuguese passport seemed to be working too well: the Turkish official seemed disconcerted at having no idea where Portugal was… With my passport given back, I discovered that no one was allowed to return to the train until everyone was processed. I was desperate to get some sleep. At last, long after dawn, at least two hours later, we flooded back to the train and I clambered up to my bunk and was instantly asleep. Twice, while I was at the crux of compelling dreams, we were woken by Iranian offocials coming on board to check our passports. When we were left alone, I fell back into slumber as we were carried over the border into Iran.

When we rose, the landscape had become drier, though the same wide plains edged with hills dominated. Now and then we would run along the shore of some salt lake, a soft-edged blade gleaming silver.

At Tabriz Karim tried to persuade me to get off with him and go directly to Hamadan, but I held to my plan to visit there later and to carry on to Tehran. Disembarking to say goodbye to him and to watch Tom, joyously reunited with his bike (he is cycling down to the coast via Shiraz and Yazd – and undertaking that a local onlooker, recently returned from living in the USA, declared was going to be far more challenging than the 5000 kms he had traversed across Europe). Gazing around me, I wondered if I was catching my first intimations of the stark light for which Iran is famous, and that is supposed to lend a luminous intensity and depth to every colour. Certainly, framed by the modernist sweeping concrete canopy of the station, under the bluest sky, everything had a pure clarity.

As we trundled on I wrote everything you’ve read so far. feeling worn out. As Joachim and I ate our dinner, we mused at how, under the pressure of constant travel, time changes, erratic sleep and eating, what was left of our ‘society’ had broken apart. We retired early to our bunks and were woken at 3am to find that we were moving through the outskirts of Tehran. It was nearly an hour later before we arrived at the station. Joachim and I helped Mustaba off with his many bags – all of them incredibly heavy, filled with the catalogues and books that he brought back with him from his business trip to Turkey. We said goodbye to him and then, with some help from a Persian, Ako, I had become friendly with on the train, I eventually got to the hotel room that I had booked before leaving Scotland, and a very welcome bed.

arrival in Istanbul

Ricardo on 18th October 2011

I hate flying. I hate flying for several reasons. For one being transported like sheep in a truck. For another the being processed like a parcel – moved around on conveyor belts, weighed and stamped, shunted from one tedious wait to another. The apparently glamorous ultra-modernism of grand airport terminals is hardly a compensation, saturated as they are by advertising and all the vulgar excesses of rampant consumerism. Worse of all is that, like the tube system in London, the indistinguishability of one airport from another makes them part of a globe spanning system that annihilates the very point of travelling: the sense of movement and the meeting with the other. You pop into one end of the system, are processed, and extruded at the other end like sausage meat.

I talked to a teacher on the plane and she told me that she had a map of the world that she showed her pupils who had flown off to Gran Canaria and had no idea whatsoever where they were when they were there. As I have written elsewhere, it seems to me that this virtual relationship with the planet is going to bite a large chunk out of us.

Don’t worry, my posts from my travels are – I believe – unlikely to be as grumpy as this one is turning out to be. Of course I am likely to have ‘moods’ – being as I see it is my job to absorb everything I can – and that is going to have to include the bad as well as the good… And let’s face it, our planet isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden at the mo. So, if you don’t mind, a little more ‘down’ before I swing into the ‘up’.

I was conscious when planning this expedition that I would most likely be flying – and I know that flying is bad for the planet. I did look into doing the whole thing by train – but the cost and time are prohibitive; the former should perhaps not be so, but there it is. It seems likely that, in our lifetime, this business of flying off to a place as far as Istanbul for a couple of days – the teacher was doing just that – is going to collapse. Not that anyone would guess that was even possible with newer and bigger airports being built everywhere. But one of the things that amazes me is how, over the years, the amount of baggage people take with them has increased to absurd proportions. No doubt, defining ourselves, as so many of us do now, by the things that we own, we must, like good Queen Bess, pack everything – down to bedding, silver plate and the tapestries from our walls – every time we go anywhere; perhaps we are trying to mask an anxiety that, without our objects around us, we might loose our identity.

(As I’m typing I can hear muezzin singing the call for prayer – presumably from Hagia Sophia, I at first wrote, forgetting that it is now a museum – it’s beauty is sending shivers of delight down my spine :O)

Surely, one of the core arts of nomadism is packing. There is a liberation in only carrying what you – or your quadruped – can carry. It seems to me that there is a pressure here towards minimalism – where elegance is achieved through form following function – and where relocating substantial objects and comforts is seen as the extravagance of kings. Fossil fuels, here and elsewhere, by removing this need to operate within one’s means, leads to all manner of excess – here a gluttony of packing. One of the beauties (perhaps virtues?) of backpacking is that it represents a return to the principle that you can only take what you can carry yourself. In the attached photo you can see what I have taken with me. Aside from my backpack, you can see the little orange sack in which I am carrying all the leads that, alas, a techno-nomad (in this current iteration) is compelled to have with him. There should also be my ‘little green bag’ that I’ve just noticed I forgot to put in the shot. The heap of other stuff is tat; both Scottish and football related, that Lloyd, an experienced ‘Iran hand’ advised me to take to distribute among the various children I am likely to encounter. Though this is a sentiment I applaud, the business of buying the stuff and lugging it around somewhat goes against my ‘religion’.

A final thought, before I go and experience Justinian’s sublime basilica – the historian Arnold Toynbee proposed a theory of ‘culture and transmission’ in which he postulated that the relative rates of cultural innovation and those of transmission determine how diverse culture becomes across the planet. He said that in the Neolithic, though the rate of transmission of cultural ideas (including technologies) was incredibly slow, the rate of innovation was even slower so that, effectively, a single culture spanned the whole globe. Later, when the rate of innovation began accelerating, regional centres generated cultural innovation faster than it could be transmitted and so we ended up with extremely distinct cultures: China and Rome, for example. The European maritime expansion, beginning in the 15th century, greatly accelerated a transmission that has gradually eroded cultural diversity. This so called process of ‘globalisation’ is churning ever faster and soon we will have a mono-culture dominating the planet. I abhor this – at least where it concerns culture – and am travelling to try and see some of this ‘other’ before it disappears. The irony, of course, is that by so doing I am contributing to the tourism that is the very cutting edge of globalisation. Alas, today, each one of us that flies to some ‘exotic’ destination, is being his very own Vasco de Gama or Christopher Columbus.

going, going…

Ricardo on 17th October 2011

Laurel & Hardy A Perfect Day…

Well, I have spent the past three days at the Persepolis conference and delivered my paper. I am pleased to say that it was very well received. When I have the time I will try and put it online and even, perhaps, put up a video of me babbling away – the whole thing was filmed.

So, I am finally off to Iran and I can only hope that this time it is for real. Tomorrow morning I will fly to Istanbul. On Tuesday evening I will board, the gloriously named, Trans-Asia Express for the four day journey to Tehran. I suspect that this is the closest I am ever going to get to something like a trip on the ‘Orient Express’.

I have recently discovered that the numerous wi-fi spots I believed to pepper Iran may well be a figment of my imagination. I got that information from somewhere, but when I tried to verify it the other day, I could find nothing but gloomy prognostications of endless vistas entirely devoid of wi-fi… So we shall see what kind of blogging I will be able to do… Hopefully you will be hearing from me soon…

steve jobs

Ricardo on 6th October 2011

I was literally woken this morning by the radio coming on announcing the death of Steve Jobs. I was shocked. Of course we all knew that he was ill, but I didn’t imagine that he would die so soon.

I came across my first mac in 1984 (all these ancient recollections are a bit imprecise when it comes to dates etc) when I worked for British Telecom as a development manager in their computer games division Firebird/Rainbird. Part of this operation was the then cutting edge desktop publishing software running on a number of macintosh computers – beige cubes with small black and white screens with attached laser printers. It wasn’t long before I became seduced by these little computers with their mice and graphical interface. So that, when I left to go and work on my own, I bought myself a Mac SE, with its capacious 1MByte hard disk and some few K of RAM for the princely sum of £2500 – not trivial now, and a fortune then.

I used this computer for years – or slightly better specced ones that I upgraded to – and I stuck with Apple (through laziness, habit, or misplaced loyalty) even when all around me PCs were blooming into riotous colour while I was still ghettoed in black and white. For a period, I worked on a PC and found its operating system simply too ugly, cumbersome and clunky for comfort. And then, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and began the amazing reincarnation of those principles that had drawn me to Macs in the first place.

So, I speak as someone who has lived within the Apple ecosystem for my whole working life. At one point I was loyal to the company the way some are to a football team – even more passionately so if they’re constantly losing. Then Apple rose and rose until my niche interest became a global phenomena. Now I am far more suspicious of Apple because, having grown larger, they are often one of the worst bullies in the playground. Nevertheless, I still cleave to the Apple ecosystem because, for me – and a large component of this may simply be my deep familiarity with it, though, in truth, it has changed and is changing a lot – it provides me with kit that is, most of the time, ‘transparent’ to me. I am not interested in the computers themselves except as windows into the computable world. I just want to be able to reach in and make and explore digital objects with as little awareness of the portal through which I pass. Beyond this primary consideration, I am also grateful that Apple kit does not disfigure the world I live in. For example, I work at a desk in the centre of my livingspace and so it is not inconsequential that my computing kit shouldn’t be some monstrous carbuncle *grin*

For all his reportedly unpleasant characteristics, it seems to me that Steve Jobs has striven always to make the interface between ourselves and the digital world as ergonomically functional as he could and thus he has helped make that world a natural extension of ourselves. Considering how much we now live in that world, that seems to me no mean legacy…

the conference, the paper and the iPad…

Ricardo on 4th October 2011

reliefs at Persepolis as they appear today © Ghirshman

It’s unusual for me to write another post so soon, but I am trying to get into practice for what I hope will be quite regular postings from Iran. To this end I have been spending quite a bit of time setting up all the apps, online services and interlinks that will allow me, hopefully, to blog from there on my iPad. In truth, this device is not really well geared at present for the task; at least not in the easy way I’m used to with Apple kit. Accessing this server-hosted wordpress blog, adding photos to a post from my iPhone (and hopefully from my camera by way of some media reader in an Iranian internet cafe) via Flickr and Picasa, has involved a lot of jiggery-pokery.

I have already described how excited I am at the prospect of attending this conference on Persepolis at Edinburgh University, what I haven’t told you is that I have been asked to give a paper. Someone dropped out and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (who admitted to me revelling in all those double Ls *grin*) asked me if I would give a paper on the problems faced by an author in handling the Achaemenid material. Of course I agreed – not only do I have a lot of issues I would like to address, but I get to attend two dinners given for the speakers.

I am beginning to flesh out my talk, titled Paradises Lost, today. A central theme will be considering how much it is possible to align my aesthetics with that of the Achaemenid Persians – a not entirely trivial pursuit if you consider the included photographs that show how the ancient Persians disfigured their beautiful stone reliefs with garish colour (as did the ancient Greeks – even the Elgin Marbles would have been originally painted in such primary colours) – at least that’s how it can appear to us brought up as we have been on the minimalism of plain stone. What may also perhaps be of interest to my academic audience is the distinction I will try to make between the approach that I have had to take towards the material and the approach that they naturally take: for they must come at the data objectively, whereas I, as a novelist, come at it from a direction that is decidedly subjective.

grasp…

Ricardo on 3rd October 2011

T’ai Chi taught me many things but perhaps nothing quite as useful as the unlearning of the reflex to grasp. This reflex – to grab hold of something, most often with the dominant hand – becomes a liability in any kind of fight. One problem is that it focuses the mind on the grasping hand: thus focused, the mind loses the ability to see ‘the bigger picture’. Another is that an attempt to grab some part of an opponent is a necessarily difficult procedure: he is most likely to be in motion, and the desire to coordinate the grasping hand with the moving target absorbs altogether too much of your attention. Further, even if you succeed in grasping your target you will become attached to the other person by your own grasp in a way that can be used against you. While all this is going on, much of what your opponent is up to will most likely elude you, and, because of your focus, you are open to essentially ‘surprise attacks’ from those parts of your opponent that you are not monitoring. All in all this is not a brilliant tactic.

Thus T’ai Chi seeks to disarm the ‘grasp reflex’, instead training you to remain in a state of overall awareness, and using, for example, the back of the hand, the wrist and the forearm, to make contact with your opponent. This is not done randomly, but with an interest in the areas above or below joints, elbows and knees, the hips etc. Once contact is achieved it is allowed to slide across your body as you roll into your opponent, sensing the movement of his body in space, the dynamics of his weight shifting, until you feel one of his joints nearing a position of disadvantage, his weight passing near a fulcrum where he is close to losing his balance. Only at this point is focus narrowed and your force deployed against him.

The aim is to remain uncommitted until the last moment. Thus the practice of the ‘forms’ that, to an outsider, appear to be a gentle dance, but that is the attempt to keep muscles and joints relaxed while in constant motion and, with paired work (‘pushing hands’), maintaining this while impacting and being in contact with the other.

I believe this principle is related to the balance of the hemispheres of the brain. What concerns me here, however, is how ‘grasp’ is metaphorically extended to the mental attempt to understand something. It seems to me that everything I have described above can also be applied to this. That when we attempt to understand an issue of any complexity – as the movement of a human opponent in space is complex – any attempt to directly ‘grasp’ that issue will lead only to a clumsy, partial understanding, if not indeed to confusion as it defeats you. When faced with such complexity I have found that it is better to engage it using the ‘edges’ of my mind, to forgo coming to quick conclusions, to keep my mind gently out of focus: understanding naturally emerges from this process, hardening to clarity in its own time.

Author: Ricardo

in Yazd

perspectives…

the kindness of strangers…

In Tehran

on the Trans-Asia Express…

arrival in Istanbul

going, going…

steve jobs

the conference, the paper and the iPad…

grasp…

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