We spent our week in Prague with friends from the States, Gena & Chris. It was really nice exploring a place with other people for a change! Gena had found some walking tours of Prague online before she arrived so we followed a few of these which was great as they took us to slightly random places we might otherwise have missed, for example the John Lennon Wall & the Piss Sculpture. I kid you not, nearish the Charles Bridge on the Castle side there […]
Bridges
Dezful – West Iran
Dezful doesn’t even get a mention in the Lonely Planet Guide for Iran but we had a fantastic stay here and used it as a base to get to a couple of amazing places – actually some of our favourite spots in a country of outstanding destinations – but more on those in a separate post. Dezful itself is a town of around 420,000 people located in the west of Iran, about halfway between where we started our trip in the south (Bandar Abbas) […]
Esfahan
Esfahan is home to about 1.8 million people and is Iran’s number one tourist destination – and with good reason. It is a beautiful city and we were lucky to see it when the river was full of water (not always the case!). The first night we were there our lovely couch surf host Mohammad and his sister took us into town where we walked along the Zayandeh River admiring many different bridges, old and new. The Si-o-seh bridge (pictured below) was built between […]
Singing under the bridge, Esfahan
One of the more memorable moments from our trip was hanging out under Khaju bridge in Esfahan one night, together with new German friends Reiner & Theresa, our host Mohammad and also Omid – a friend I have from the language exchange website italki. We listened to people sing all sorts of traditional Persian songs unaccompanied. It was only men singing as it is forbidden for females to sing in Iran. There were lots of people gathered all the way along the bridge and […]
A movie mad host, a paraglider, a wrestler & a businessman…
We will not forget any of our couch surf experiences in Iran – from the movie mad Tarantino fan Ahmad in Ahvaz who lived alone with his sweet, illiterate mother, looked a little like Borat, worked as a chemical lab assistant in the petroleum industry and had a friend with an encyclopaedic knowledge about everything, to the former wrestler now hiking guide Mehdi in Dezful, who despite having an Islamic theologian for a father, had no interest in religion. (Phew that was a looong […]