Yazd, Iran
Saturday, December 16, 2006
The weather was bad next morning, so we had a long sleep. Damon a little too long, cause he should have been working. The people from
Shiraz is famous for being lazy, so I guess he wasn't an exception. After breakfast I went to Persepolis 50 km from central Shiraz. Persepolis is an ancient stone-city of old Persia around 4000 years old. Not much is left - or at least it's broken, cause Alexander the Great destroyed it 2000 years ago.. I'm not really a big fan of these kinds of places, bus it's really impressive how people had made this big stone pillars and sculptures with perfection at a time where people were throwing stones at each others in Denmark. I was still much concerned about weather I should go straight to Bander-e Abbas or go to
Yazd closer to
Esfahan. While I was wandering around thinking some well dressed guys come over to talk. One of them turn out to be the major candidate, from the local city; Marv Dasht, where the election was going on a few days later. He was together with a group of university students, that wanted to ask me a lot of questions
. Afterward their guide, Sinar, comes over to tell me that could show me around for free. In the beginning i was a little sceptic, until I found out he was just being nice. When he found out what I was doing, he said I could stay at his place for the night and he wanted to show me to his family. He furthermore had a English institute, where he was teaching as well. His English was pretty good, but he had learned all English from listening to tapes - therefore he's accent was very weird. He took me to his institute and I went to be special guest star answering questions about myself and my country for a female class. Good experience. Sinar also wanted to show me more around in
Shiraz, so we went back there for the evening with his wife. After pizza-dinner we went back and very late his under-brother and a friend of them came over - to see the interesting foreigner... I showed them some pictures on my camera that we connected to the telly and then went to bed. They had actually been talking about joining me to
Yazd (I had made up my mind) that night, but when I woke up on the floor next morning Sinar told me that it wasn't possible for them. It was okay though and they drove me to one of their friends shop - where they thought a lot of trucks would pass by. But they wouldn't. After waiting over an hour there no trucker had been stopping, so I went to take care of the struggles myself. 100 m down the road I found a truck that was stopping for buying fruits, but I could only go with them for a little hour
. I got a few more rides through the deserted and sometimes snowy landscape in Central Iran. I was cold, but I think, still better than the killing high temperatures in the summer. An the last truck that to me from the fine city of Aber Kuh, into the wall of mountains and bad weather to
Yazd, had ripped out the seats and substituted it with a then carpet. Not comfortable for me and the ride became very long for my part. When I got to Yazd it was rainy, my back hurt and for some reason my mind was all most blowing. It was probably a combination of many things; it was hard to explain people I was hitchhiking, no one to speak English and all this not knowing if it would be possible to get to Pakistan or not. Suddenly I just lost my hitchhiking-lust I had head egg-ish feeling, so when I found the hostel I had the address on I really needed rest. I went to have dinner briefly with a French bicycle couple, but afterwards I went right to sleep. All the next I all so didn't do much else than hanging around and eating all the time.
Yazd was actually a nice desert-town with special architecture and sand coloured buildings. It was cold by the time I was there, but in the summer I guess it will be up to 50 °C and therefore there were a lot of the "wind catchers" on the houses. It was like a chimney that cached the wind to make it blow into the house and make it work as an old fashioned air conditioner. Because of weekend the hostel just closed, after 2 nights there, and I had to even find a place or just make my way out of town.
