by It was a six hour bus journey to Shiraz from Yazd, broken by a couple of entertaining moments.The woman sitting next to me couldn’t work her seatbelt (the police are very strict about the wearing of seatbelts, even in coaches), so I helped her sort that out without an intelligible word between us, not sharing a language. At some point in the journey, as is common on long-distance bus journeys in Iran, we were given a snack of cake in a packet and juice in a pouch. The problem was that there was no way to pierce the pouch with the blunt-ended straw – the pointless stabbing at it caused the woman sitting next to me and me to get the giggles. A guy sitting across the aisle came to the rescue with a biro, demonstrating that it was easier to pierce the base. The landscapes we passed through were spectacular – mountains, some snow-capped; and rugged desert. I happened to be reading Herodotus’s description of Darius chasing the Scythians across a vast space of nothingness during the journey, which seemed appropriate. As we neared Shiraz, the landscape got greener – in fact there was even some rain.
Shiraz has the most civilised taxi service I’ve come across anywhere. At the bus station, you go to a window of the taxi-office, say where you want to go, pay and a taxi driver comes to get you and takes you to your destination. This, consequently, must make it one of the very few places world-wide where you can’t be ripped off by your taxi-driver.
Shiraz was more big-city-ish after Yazd and consequently there was a bit of edge to the place. It has a fantastic bazaar – not quite as large as Esfahan’s but equally labyrinthine as bazaars are. I hate shopping; wandering about the shops strikes me as a pastime only for those lacking the imagination to do anything more interesting, particularly in our western world of boring chains all selling the same thing. Wandering about a bazaar or a market in a foreign land is, though, another matter. Here you get hundreds of small shops specialising in anything you could ever possibly want or need: beautiful carpets and bolts of fabric; clothes; kitchen things; spices, tea, sweeties, nuts, toys, tools, jewellery, clocks, pictures. I broke my wanderings for a while in a small tea house, in desperate need of a coffee. Despite my best attempts I failed to avoid the dreaded instant coffee but the caffeine, and the Shiraz sweet that I also ordered, were appreciated.
Shiraz also has a fort – one tower rivalling the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the prize for precariously angled buildings; it has subsided into an underground cistern built to serve its bathhouse. I went in to visit the fort – a cheerful man selling the tickets asked how I found the weather ‘hot’ was my reply; ‘but it’s winter’ was his. So I mentioned I came from Ireland, to which he just laughed. There wasn’t a lot to see but some surviving interiors and the bathhouse was lovely, and there was an orange grove taking up most of the central courtyard.
One place I really did want to see in Shiraz was the tomb of Hafiz, one of Iran’s most famous poets and something like a patron saint. I walked out to the garden in which he is buried; en route I passed a building that looked like a mosque had been attached to a bank, or was it the other way round? Once at the gateway to the garden in which Hafiz’s tomb is, I had to queue briefly to get in. This says a lot about Iran– where else would you queue to get in to see a poet’s tomb – and a lot about how he is still revered. He had lots of visitors, even the occasional woman clutching a red rose to lay on his simple marble tomb. Hafiz was born in Shiraz in the fourteenth century but his poetry is still widely regarded; apparently some people wanting to know what the future holds for them, take a book of his poetry in their hands and then let it fall open, the poem it opens on considered to provide the answer.
Although I’d finally organised to get out of the Iran again in Yazd, my travails with getting train tickets were not over. After Persepolis I was planning to travel into western Iran, and really wanted to be able to take a train from Andimesk to Tehran, by all accounts quite a spectacular journey. According to the Lonely Planet, such a train did exist but as with all trains in Iran it is a good idea to book them as they get very busy. I went into a travel agents dealing with train tickets, but their internet connection was down (a common problem in Iran it seems), would I come back later. On the third return, they seemed quite doubtful about such a train, and the internet was still not working so she suggested I come back on Saturday or Sunday (the next day was Friday), but I was off to Persepolisso that was no good. No doubt there would be a bus service, even though west Iran is a little off the beaten track. Besides, I was too busy looking forward to visiting Persepolisto worry unduly about it.
Read Caroline’s previous posts about her trip to Iran here:
Welcome to Iran: first stop Tehran
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