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Hi there! Salaam!!!
It's been a while and a lot has been seen and done in Iran! Since I last wrote in Esfahan and whilst still travelling with Alex, i have met a lot of young Iranian people, ran away from a mad American/Iranian nutcase after having tea in his house, smoked some cheeky Afghan hash in the middle of the desert in a place called Yazd and visited one of the world's most famous ruins, Persepolis.
So its all been happening! Time here in Iran has flown, been here 18 days already and will probably stay for 7 more days (While i wait for my Turkmenistan visa - a very lengthy and frustrating process)! Luckily i have my Uzbekistan visa now ( 3 day transit for 50 USD ouch) and 14 day visa for Kyrgyzstan (also USD 50). Thankfully everything else is pretty cheap here. For example petrol is 10 cents per litre (government just put it up from 7 cents). Bus journeys are cheap (12 hours for around 6 dollars), cheap hotels are funnily enough pretty cheap - at 4 bucks per night and kebabs (my staple diet) are around 1-2 bucks!!!
So, after leaving the beautiful city of Esfahan i travelled down to Yazd with Alex. The original plan was to actually get to Shiraz but by the time we got to the bus station, all the buses to Shiraz had left! So it was off to Yazd instead! Yazd is one of the oldest cities in the world (there are a lot of them around here) and smack bang in the middle of the desert, so not much happened between 12-4 in the afternoon as it was mid 40's the temperature so you don't feel like doing too much in that heat! The city is all mud brick and also has massive wind chimneys to cool the houses, so looks spectacular. We did a trip with a french couple out to the desert and saw some amazing ruins, including a deserted village which was photogenically sat on the top of a hill and was great fun to explore. (photos to come....)
The hotels and restaurants were in beautifully restored houses and added a special touch to Yazd. That combined with the first opportunity to relax in a while meant it was a special city in Iran.
After Yazd, we pushed on to Shiraz. Which, like a lof of cities in Iran, is settled into a valley surrounded by big mountain ranges. It was full of parks and fountains and would have been good to stay a little longer but my visa business was pressing!
So up early the next morning and took some public transport to Persepolis. Set underneath some largish hills and with many columns still standing, you could picture what it would have been like before old Alexander the Great came along and sacked it, then set fire to it. This meant the palace of 100 columns had roughly 7 columns and the hallway of 30 columns had 0 columns left. But the overall picture of the wealth and power of the Persian empire at the time was obvious to see. It was an impressive place!
From Shiraz (which is in the South West) i took a 14 hour overnight bus to Tehran leaving Alex who was off to Kerman in the South East. This was possibly the slowest, bumpiest, stopped the mostest bus i have ever taken. I got some sleep but not much! It was pretty painful! Without time for breakkie i raced straight up to the North of Tehran and managed to secure visas for Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and start the process for the frustratingly hard to secure Turkmenistan visa! This will take another week, so i will visit a little more of Iran while i wait and will need to extend my Iran visa in the meantime!!!
So a lovely day in Tehran today, just bought some grandpa trousers (after the 2 trousers i bought from H&M officially fell apart) and then an overnight train to Kerman tonight where i will hopefully be able to put some cool pictures on for you all!
Oh and one last thing, Rach has just told me my Highly Skilled Migrant Visa came through for the UK - which means i will be able to work in any field i can find a job in now!
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