There’s no point hiding it, we were excited and proud to enter Iran on foot, after having made all our way over land through Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. We knew Iran would be different, we would not understand a single word for a start, there would be new rules to respect, and no toilet paper, but these had been the rules of the game most of the time during our journey anyway.

Entering Iran on foot in June is not a good idea. A long concrete bridge under a scorching sun is the only point of contact between Armenia and Iran, separated by the Aras river, one of the longest in the Caucasus, and historically important both in ancient times, as well as in modern times as it has become the dividing river of countries, marking the boundaries between the Persian Empire and the Russian Empire, then the USSR, and today between Iran and Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Entering Iran takes time, border checks are slow, but everyone smiles and is happy to greet the foreigners coming in. Not many choose to enter from Armenia, but one or two travellers probably show up everyday.
Hitch-hiking in Iran proved incomprehensible from the start. Some people picked us up when we weren’t looking for anyone to pick us up, but most people asked for money as we soon discovered practically any car can become a shared taxi if the driver decides to do so. Fares were cheap and we weren’t going to complain.

In the afternoon we reached Tabriz where we spent a couple of days mostly in city’s gorgeous old bazaar, miles of alleyways and small squares bursting with fruit, pistachios, carpets and jewellery; we met an old man who spoke the kind of English one learns at school filled with outdated expressions. He took us to smoky coffee dens and promised to make us a gift of two coins bearing the Shah Reza’s effigy, all the time making sure no one would understand our conversation in the crowded tables of the hookah bar. Sadly, we did not see him again the next day. Soon, however, we wanted out from the constant shouting, traffic and bustle of the city, and back into the mountains to the south. Tabriz is the capital of the Eastern Azerbaijan Province, people are Azeri and speak Azeri, similar to Turkish, so we could speak, but there was no way to convey the concept of hitch-hiking. But everything could be bargained, and so we bargained for a cheap taxi fare out of the city.

Early in the afternoon we were in Kandovan, a village in the mountains where the houses are dug out of the volcanic rock, similar to Cappadocia, but with one crucial difference: whereas in Cappadocia nearly all the caves have been turned into hotels and museums, here people still lived in the houses carved out of the rock.
The town was obviously a tourist resort for locals too, and we met a few students eager to talk to us, the girls shaking our hands, something we’d been told would never ever happen in Iran.
That evening we climbed up on a hill overlooking the town and pitched our tent as heavy clouds started to gather. Three generations of farmers with their donkeys offered us tea on top of the small mound, pouring cinnamon flavoured tea into burnt black metal cups. We learned to drink tea the Iranian way, with the irregular lumps of sugar stuck in between the teeth, a custom started when an Imam imposed a fatwa against sugar in the 18th century to counter the acquisition of the sugar monopoly by the Belgian monarchy. Depriving Persians of sugar in the tea was impossible, and a few years later a counter-fatwa was introduced allowing people to use sugar, but not mixing it with the tea.

That night we experienced the first of a series of terrifying storms that hit us every time we camped in the open in Iran. Flashes of lightning right over our heads illuminated the village, casting shadows among the rock towers and the houses. Once the storm had passed, we were berated for the rest of the night by a pack of wild dogs circling our tent until the farmers returned the next morning.

From Kendovan we hit the road and this time we succeeded in hitch-hiking. Our goal was to follow the same road that Robert Byron had taken in his Road to Oxiana, from lake Urmiah along the road to Maragheh to see the astronomical observatory, one of the greatest of the middle ages, built by Persian astronomers in the 13th century. In Maragheh we were hosted by a young cyclist and owner of an outdoors gear shop. As soon as we walked in he closed the shop and drove us around town with his car, we joined his friends and drove around to celebrate Imam Mahdi’s birthday, the twelfth imam of the Shia, while all over town children were handing out sherbets and juice in plastic cups. We briefly escaped the celebrations out into the countryside among groves of sour plum trees, on offroads lined by mud-brick walls until we reached a clearing by a graveyard, with an entrance to a cave, an ancient Mithraist temple, according to our friends, and a place of worship of the sun in pre-islamic times.

Our friend hosted us in his family’s apartment where we enjoyed our first real Iranian meal, sitting and lying on the floor with the food laid before us, with Tah-dig (golden crusted) Persian rice and chicken. BBC news was on in their large television covering the ongoing talks in Vienna between American, European and Iranian diplomats.
The next morning our new friend thumbed down a slow large yellow truck which was going all the way to Shiraz. We rode most of the day across the dry sun-beaten north Iranian plateau to Qazvin, old capital of Persia under the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century. The road had been slow and uncomfortable, and made worse by the impossibility of talking to the truck driver whose mood changed all the time. Eventually we arrived in Qazvin in late afternoon, in a semi-desert city as most of the inhabitants had left to spend the weekend in the Elburz mountains to celebrate the longest holiday of the year as Imam Mahdi’s birthday was followed by the weekend (Thursday and Friday) and then the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. Whatever the Iranian’s political and religious views, they were all making the most of it in the fresh air of the mountains.