Yazd to Shiraz
Day 3: Sunday 20 May 2000
We set off early the next morning for Shiraz. This journey is marked by its beautiful and subtly changing landscape, as we travel from the deserts (the Dasht e-Kevir and the Dasht e-Lut) in which Yazd lies to the high harsh and dry mountains around Shiraz.
The haze makes the highest peaks almost disappear, leaving just a half-felt presence. Eagle Peak is a famous local landmark which does, indeed, look like an eagle in profile. And another mountain looks as if it had a man climbing up its flank. Dotted around the desert are occasional patches of green where water is drawn from qanats, underground water channels dating back some 2,000 years and running for many scores of miles through which the country is irrigated. Sadly, the art is being lost now and most of the qanats are falling into disrepair.
Then we cross an expanse of pure desert, no shade, no shelter, just a shimmering blazing heat, with mirages and, at regular intervals (a day's camel ride), a semi-ruined caravanserai. These are quasi-fortified inns spread out along recognized trade routes which would have offered accommodation and safety to traders and travellers. They were arranged along very sophisticated lines and indeed after a while you could predict by looking at your watch almost exactly when the next one was due. I think they were about every 12 kms or so.
...
Musical interlude
Mehdi has one tape and we listen to this for the entire trip end-to-end, side-to-side all the time we are driving. I can still remember some of the order even now:
- El Mariachi theme tune
- A song by Cher called something like 'Dove l'amore', the rhyme to which is, risibly, 'here is ma story...'
- 'I am your lady and you are my man' - Celine Dion
- Theme song (Neli's theme, private joke) from Titanic - Celine
- 'That's the way it is' - Celine (actually a cracking good song, surprisingly - I thought it was by Shania Twain, so it became better by a process of lust transference!)
- Some very good songs by a Persian singer called Moeen, including one called 'Elahe y naaz'
and then back to El Mariachi again...and again...and again...
...back to the main story
We reach Abarku, first stopping at an old towered tomb on a hill overlooking the town and looking out at the vast expanses of desert spreading in all directions. Cat stops for a pee in the vastness, then we descend to the town and pause at a large old plain brown and white mosque, deserted save for the caretaker and whose walls are riven with deep cracks from earthquakes. The mosque dates from about 1350 CE and has an almost Brunelleschi-like feel in its simplicity.
Mehdi then thoughtfully buys us ice-cream, biscuits and some grape juice which we polish off under a 5,000 year old cypress tree on the outskirts of town, watched attentively if discreetly by two little girls and a rather surly, but probably just shy boy of about 12 or so.
Driving on to Shiraz we climb into and over the Zagros mountains, the landscape changing again, getting softer. Trees appear, crops, water. We pass Pasargadae, Takht-e Jamshid and finally enter Shiraz itself.
Shiraz
We are staying in the Homa Hotel, which is rather along Soviet 'bunker' lines (like the Hotel Cham in Palmyra and the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, London) and has a very large model of an Iran Air 747 in the lobby.
We sleep and shower, then Mehdi takes us to Military Museum No. 2, formerly the palace of the Shah's wife and now a weaponry museum, showing everything from captured Iraqi tanks to ancient daggers to trench mortars, via some rather handsome old English shotguns, a Colt .45, a Lewis gun (how did that get there ?!) and a Thompson sub-machine gun. A flock of teenage schoolgirls seemed fascinated by it all and indeed I lost Cat amongst them (imagine 37 small black-clad girls with headscarves) until I spotted her pink rucksack (Gucci, please). The former palace itself is a pastiche of Versailles (enough said), but a jolly singing soldier set the right tone. We had a cup of tea in the chaykhane (or teahouse), and then had a quick whizz round downtown Shiraz - teeming bazaar and beautiful mosque - buying a kilo of tiny strawberries en route. I spotted this rather wonderful sign on one of the main streets, Zand Boulevard:
"With leaning on this peoples power we never feel weakness towards any world power".
Quite.
We take dinner in the outside restaurant of the hotel. There is a tour group from Bales (hello, Doreen) and a grotesque gathering of Saga Dutch people, including one woman who keeps breaking wind loudly and apparently unabashedly. There are also some handsome cats, aloofly keeping an eye on the main chance in the garden.
We call Georgia that evening. She is very chatty (though only a year old) and we then turn in, happy.