Curious facts about Iran:
The Sydney Morning Herald website is filtered, but New York Times loads fine.
Chris de Burgh is the only Western artist to have performed in post-Revolution Iran.
Persian (Farsi) is in the top three most common blogger language, as Iranians take to the internet to vent.
Saffron ice cream tastes kind of dusty.
More to come…
Deep excitement, people! I bought a carpet. Of course. Could you imagine going to Persia and NOT buying a carpet? The total excitement about it is that I am in Yazd, which is a relatively sleepy, though very, very beautiful town made of mudbricks, but local wisdom says that carpets should be bought only in Isfahan.
Now, I haven’t been to Isfahan yet, but their rivals, the Yazdi, say Isfahanis are stingy and would do anything for money. In comparison, the Shirazi don’t like to work, instead preferring to spend life in one long picnic. I’m quite ok with that. I did notice that in a city of allegedly 1.6 million people, there were very few on the streets of Shiraz.
Anyway, back to carpets. So me and my new guide Abdullah were wandering through town once the heat of the day had subsided, took some gorgeous photos of the main square and old marketplace, and were wandering aimlessly through labyrinths of laneways, which are covered in mudbrick domes, when we ran into a nice guide and his driver and were chatting, and I looked over their shoulders, and there it was: the carpet that won one of the top prizes in the European carpet fairs this year. 
I saw, I fell in love, I desired. We hit on a mutually acceptable price (two-thirds of his original asking price) and he unpinned the piece from the wall. The owner of the shop, Matris Carpet & Killim Company, is also a direct manufacturer and buys and dyes the wool, has local women weaving it on long, thin looms, and these pieces are then stitched together to make the final product, which is a 2 x 1.5m carpet called a jajeem.
I also didn’t have enough ready money.
Since the US put sanctions on Iran years ago, Iran is a curiously nationalistic city – your plastic bags, soap, cars and even banks are all Iranian, and have no links to the international banking system, save a few big dealers in Isfahan who have circuited the loop by linking up with Dubai banks, so buyers don’t have to think about bringing in an extra US$1000 in cash if they want to some serious carpet shopping.
However, once again, travellers cheques came to my aid – yes, the daggiest form of money around. Less sexy than even the Iranian rial or the Egyptian pound, and that’s pushing it. He took the cheques, I took the carpet. We will both sleep happily tonight.
I love Shiraz – deep, red and Australian. But Shiraz the city from which the grapes originated, is nice too. Set in central Iran, the modern city of 1.6 million dwells alongside the ancient seat of power of the great Achaemenid dynasty, Persepolis.
Excavated in the 1930s from the layers of dirt from the encroaching desert and earthquakes that have shaken this land in past centuries, Persepolis is up there with Rome’s ruins, those colosseums on the Greek isles, Egypt’s great monuments… High columns still tower over the plains below, and the faces of lions, bulls and mankind stare into the past.
The 2500-year-old site is heavy with symbolism – bulls for protection, eagles for freedom, the griffin for royalty and man… for wisdom. There are sphinxes everywhere – a man’s body with a bull’s head, or with a lion’s head – mounted on columns up to 17 meters high or lining what were grand entrances where foreign ambassadors and local dignitaries entered the Persian court. During its reign, the dynasty’s lands spread from India to the Danube River.
Alexander the Great, that muscular Macedonian who managed to charm countries such as Egypt into giving themselves unto him, was not so charming by the time he hit Persia. He sacked and burnt Persepolis in the 320s BC, after he’d sent a caravan of 30,000 horses and camels back home, carrying the city’s great treasures.
Shiraz is flanked by stony mountain ranges in which the ancient kings of the Achaemenid tribe are buried. High up in a cliff face, their graves are dug deep into the stone, with stories of their empires carved around the portal where their bones were interred after being snacked on by vultures.
I remember the kings’ names from the few periods when I was awake during Ancient History: there was Darius the Great, Xerxes, Artaxerxes and Darius the second, the stars of Herodotus’ ‘The Persian Wars’.
“I fell asleep in Ancient History at school,” I confessed to my guide, the glamorous Yasma.
“So did I,” she confessed.
And together, travel writer and tour guide looked up at the bas reliefs of past wars and hard-won victories, as the swallows flew in and out of the empty tombs far above us.
Day One in Iran and the novelty of doing a French Lieutenant’s Woman hasn’t yet worn off. By that I mean wearing the hijab, or head scarf, that is compulsory for all females above the age of nine under Islamic law. Actually, nine is an arbitrary age, it really means when a girl reaches maturity.
Sinfully early this morning at customs, I saw a Japanese girl turned back because she hadn’t put her headscarf on while passing the last hurdle to wandering free in Iran. It wasn’t until a businessman in the queue behind her took the lime green scarf from her hand and ever so tenderly tied it under her chin that she was let loose in the country.
Had I known that coloured headscarves are all the rage, I would have brought one of my brightly coloured ones from Cairo. But I opted for black on the advice that muted tones of grey, dark green and blue are most common, and at least half the population wears black. But many other colours, including white and aqua were frequently spotted as my guide Reza and I tottered around Golestan Palace, Tehran bazaar and a former arsenal that is now a cool park with café and art gallery.
As it was, I left my hairdryer at home (who needs to do their hair when it’s covered all day?) but I might run into difficulty when I enter a private home (it’s on the cards) and take my scarf off to reveal… higab hair! Flattened to a pancake, it’s none too flattering, let me tell you after a day under wraps.
Hip Tehran girls tease the life out of their hair, so the fringe stands up like a 60s quiff that their scarf is then draped oh-so casually from. Actually, the boys are doing the same, without the scarf, and long, lush dark hair is gelled into gravity-defying waves that give them another six inches’ height.
As has been well reported elsewhere, nose jobs, once the preserve of the rich, have been around in Iran for at least 15 years, and are now quite common, though I saw only one plastered nose, and that was on a young guy.
The city is very safe, very clean and damned organised, by Cairo standards, though the traffic is a little vicious. If I was coming straight from Australia, it’d be different, but Tehran certainly has its own quirks, not least all the billboards of the mullahs and martyrs of the revolution around the city.
My headscarf just fell off hahahahahah. Lucky I’m sitting on my own little balcony! Signing out from Tehran…
Sorry for the delay on this second installment on Sharm, I’ve had flu, deadlines and no internet. I’m going to do a shameless plug for two things – one, the hotel, Creative Grand Sharm, a 3-star with the most fantastic pool, and the hotel booking website, http://www.booking.com/, which got me a room for US$20/night, less than half the price of rack, including breakfast. Check them out, that’s the pool below.
Unlike the Ritz, My hotel was around the corner, a slightly less fabulous, though more friendly affair, where the room was more an apartment with a fridge and kitchen (though no utensils), a lounge room and large terrace. Great value.
Across the road is the staggering Alf Leila We Leila (1001 Nights), which quickly was rebranded as the Kremlin. “It’s sooo Arabic,” said Mohommad, the super-helpful pharmacist whose shop was nearby. It’s so Russian. What do you think?
Inside is a cinema, several nightclubs, a sound and light show including a reproduction of Abu Simbel and a hotel is in the making. It’s massive. All around are shops selling the usual gumpf – shisha pipes, riotous belly dancing costumes, fake Dolce & Gabbana bags and perfume. They also offer to organise you anything from quad biking to slightly illicit activities. 
The resort that is Sharm el-Sheik stretches across several bays, from the original fishing village in the south where the Old Market is located, up to the pumping Na’ama Bay, home of countless shisha cafes which use various tactics from pleading with visitors to enter to dressing the staff in white gellibayas and making them dance what looks suspiciously like the Bus Stop to the nasal whine of Akon.
Further north, the area around the airport is booming, with new high-end hotels and restaurants coming on line as we breathe – featured are restaurants from Ukraine, Britain and Russia. I’m not sure there’s an Egyptian one, but there in Naama Bay is a branch of the sensational Abu El Sid, which has its roots in Cairo’s Zamalek, and serves excellent Egyptian food in up-market surrounds.
My chemist Mohommad also dispensed advice (as well as Viagra and Cialis, as announced by the display cabinet on his desk), which led me to Sadiki Café on a hilltop at Faraana Bay, in Hadaba, which looks out onto the pontoons and dive boats in the blue ocean below. It would be awesome at sunset, but alas, I found it on my last afternoon, and sunset was already booked to be viewed from the pool at the Ritz. Tough gig.
It’s a mark of what to expect when I hit the southern Sinai resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh when am chatting with a guy in the sandwich queue in the town before Sharm, and he shows me, using fingers hidden beneath the counter, how much the sandwiches really are, and not the foreigner price.
Sharm is known throughout the northern hemisphere as the land of cheap package tours, and I was addressed in Russian more than Arabic or English.
The trip to the Sinai peninsula passes through the Ahmed Hamdi tunnel, an hour from Cairo. The tunnel goes under the Suez Canal, 1.5 minutes of darkness broken rhythmically by flouro lights through the tunnel, so we flicker between dark and bright light and back into the flat, hot, grey sky and stony sand on either side of the bus.
The tunnel was where were first checked over by a plainclothes guard which a black holster at each hip, who meditatively picked his nose as he watched us drive off.
Our tickets were checked twice and our identity documents also twice, though the second time, the guard didn’t bother making it to the end of the bus, where I sat. Sure it won’t be like that when Obama hits town.
When Bush stayed in Sharm el-Sheikh years ago, he booked out the entire Hyatt, which strikes me as just being greedy.
The Ritz-Carlton is another contender for a presidential visitor, and people, trust me when I say the security is up for it. I wandered into the hotel (yes, that’s the pool up above) several times for dinner or drinks or pool time with the swinging London contingent who’d drawn me down to Sharm in the first place, and the hotel is gorgeous.
I just WISH they’d stop escorting me off the premises like a criminal. Albiet a fabulous criminal, as the escorting has taken place on golf buggies at times.
If you wanted to tear through the congested Cairo streets at 200km/hour, last night would have been a good time to do it, as 20 million people were all glued to the TV or at the football stadium in Alexandria as the reigning champions of Egyptian soccer, El Ahly, played the young guns of Ismalia. It was billed as a match between youth and experience. El Ahly scored in the fifth minute, the ball headed in by Flavio, the player they call, rightly, the Golden Head. In the crowd, boys pulled off their bright red Ahly shirts leapt up and down in unison. The crowd was a sea of red, a marked absence of the blue and yellow of Ismalia. Other giants of El Ahly included Wael Gomma, who looks suspiciously like Vin Diesel, and the god of football, Abu Treka, widely tipped to do all the scoring.I was half listening to the commentary while I worked and thought, How impartial is this commentator? Then I realized, it’s El Ahly TV (yes, the football team has its own TV station). So what do you think? Even I could it work out, cos the commentator yelled ‘mabrook’ (congratulations) on every forced offside and foul.El Ahly won, 0-1, the captain, Shady, climbed up on the goal posts, goading his fans on to get louder, and the station showed its colours…“Your sympathy is not enough,” said the (totally partial) commentator in the glitter-laden post-match dissection of other teams in the league who were supporting Ismalia in a bid to end El Ahly’s iron grip on the league. “You can compete with us, but you can’t take it.” Humility, obviously, is not a quality prized in the Egyptian league.
Rumour has it on the streets that the government is selling pork meat for the stunningly low price of LE5 (just over a US dollar) a kilo. Of course, the pork comes from the pigs who have been slaughtered in the fever of swine flu. A further rumour, which I’m SURE is not true, is that unscrupulous butchers are mixing the meat with that of beef and lamb to flesh out their supplies. I don’t rate this one because surely no butcher would be so bad as to mix what’s considered unclean meat to Muslims, who comprise around 80% of the Egyptian population. But rumours, like the flu, have no boundaries.
On the way to Alexandria the other afternoon, a big billboard reared its head up on the horizon 59km till Alex. Lion Village. What to be done? We pulled over, of course.
Then we hit the naughty Dalmatian puppies, the Newfoundland hounds clipped to look like lions and last, but not least, three beautiful little dachshunds, one of which snuck through the bars for a casual wander around the little open-air zoo.
Later, the largest of the Newfoundlands would do the same, wandering sad-eyed through the café tables hoping for scraps of cooked ostrich. No wonder the ostriches looked so disturbed, pecking viciously at the paint on their bars. 
The other lions were Samshoon and his wife Nancy (asleep), and Dollar and and his missus Farah, who is actually a tiger. They weren’t on display, Dollar was yelling somewhere in th
e background, but a sign told us they have had babies, who are ‘ligers’, a cross between tiger and lion, the first to have been born in the Middle East.
There were also signs up about a strongman, Ahmed the Crocodile, who puts his head in lions’ mouths while wearing tight pants. In all, an excellent diversion on the road to Alex.
Lion Village, Km 59, Alex-Cairo Desert Rd., Alexandria, phone 010 4976028 – 010 573086
Is anyone else getting bombarded by Turkish Airlines ads featuring Kevin Costner? It’s one of those weird ‘Lost in Translation’ famous-people-go-to-weird-places to make-a-lot-of-money scenarios, I think. Is it confined only to this part of the world?
The statement from Turkish Airlines says it all: they chosen Kev because he was a very good actor and that he was very famous and handsome. Nuff said.