Iran - Page 2

This is my first taxi ride through Tehran, here is the Azadi monument. Negotiating Tehrani traffic is one of the riskiest activities I've ever done, after a few close calls I reverted back to the saying my mother had taught me when I was five years old. "Look BOTH ways before crossing the street", traffic frequently comes very quickly down the the wrong side of the road, even city buses.

A friend of mine, Zaki, leaning against the wall of the old US Embassy. Zaki is a displaced Afghani currently living in Peshawar, Pakistan. He has been through some amazing things in life, the latest of which was getting caught in Turkey while trying to smuggle himself to Europe. Turkish army snipers put a bullet hole in his backpack from across a valley, while he was illegally crossing the Turkish-Iranian border on the side of a mountain. He was later caught travelling in the back of a cargo truck, detained, and accused of being a member of al-Qaeda. Zaki was also seriously injured from a rocket when he was younger in Kabul, caught in a battle between rival Mujaheddin factions. These and other stories from Zaki kept me intrigued for many warm spring evenings, and my jaw usually on the floor with amazement. Despite all the obvious hardships Zaki faced, he's still a fantastic example of a kind, humourous, tolerant young man, and I have infinite respect for him. The guesthouse I stayed in in Tehran was very much involved in this whole people smuggling business that Zaki was a part of. Groups of refugees or just normal people from disadvantaged countries wanting to get to Europe would come and go with their "agents". It was a totally safe place, everyone was super friendly and I learned a lot of things about underground goings on, about smuggling and so on, that I never would have had the oportunity to know otherwise. Email me if you want the name of that guesthouse, I wholeheartedly recommed it!

More propaganda, along the wall of the old US Embassy. It's now called the "US Den of Espionage"...

Normally, as mentioned, Tehran has some of the worst traffic I've ever seen. This however was the holiday marking the aniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomenei. We had the city to ourselves, as Zaki demonstrates.

From Tehran, two fellow travellers, Laurent and Radka, and I set out for some trekking on Mt. Damavand. A 5680m high volcano, it looked pretty daunting from below, the top is poking out of the clouds there.

It took two days of climbing to reach this second concrete shelter on the mountain. There were a few German climbers there, a number of Iranian guides, and some propane cooking stoves that seemed to be contiually boiling tea for everybody. It was bloody cold sleeping on that concrete at night, I wore two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, two pairs of underwear, three t-shirts, a button up shirt, my fleece coat and my hat inside my sleeping bag. Laurant and Radka even resorted to stuffing their feet, and the bottom part of their sleeping bags, inside their backpacks for better insulation. The only clothing that I didn't have on was one pair of shorts which I sort of wrapped around a thick wad of worthless Iranian cash to use as a pillow. The view from up there at night though was utterly astounding, the stars were brighter than I'd ever seen before and the lights of tiny mountain villages appeared below as though viewed from an airplane window!

On the third day of climbing, after making a stab for the summet, but only making it to 5200m, we had the treat of "skiing" down. The snow was the perfect consistency for us to slide down, with a few spills, very quickly in our shoes. The shelter is the little orange dot near where the snow ends.