The luxury of lapis, two revolutions and the art of the holiday

Tabriz, Iran

Tabriz is an attractive city with a lovely climate in summer. After the searing heat and humidity of the coast, it was delightful to be in a temperate, warm climate.

“We arrived in the city of Tabriz....and encamped outside it in a place called al-Sham. At that place is the grave of Qazan, king of al-Iraq, and alongside it a fine madrasa and a hospice in which food is supplied to all wayfarers, consisting of bread, meat, rice cooked in ghee, and sweetmeats. On the following morning I entered the city by a gate called the Baghdad Gate, and we came to an immense bazaar, one of the finest bazaars I have seen the world over. Each trade has its own location in it, separate from every other.”

The tea bazaar, Tabriz

We went to the bazaar on arrival, which is indeed spectacular and rivals the bazaar of Isfahan. Walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, dates, hibiscus tea, rose tea, honey, sunflower seeds, saffron, spices, sugar candy – burlap sacks were everywhere stuffed and overflowing, the smells over the years seeming to have permeated the very stone of the vaulted covered corridors. Tabriz is famous for its mixtures of roasted, salted nuts as well as shirinee, a kind of cookie made of egg white, almond and pistachio.


The spice bazaar, Tabriz

Fortunately, being Thursday, the carpet bazaar was closed - I did not want to be tempted. But there were plenty of other things to buy. In the evening we walked through the fresh fruit bazaar where cherries were on sale for 6000 Iranian riyals a kilo which is about 65 cents, (the current rate of exchange is approx. 9000 riyals to $1), fava beans were 5000IR a kilo and strawberries were 12,000 IR per kilo. As I have mentioned before the fruits and vegetables in Iran are delicious, because they are grown and sold locally and eaten seasonally as they should be.

Mr. Bean goes to Kish and the Last of the Pearls

Bandar Assouleh & Kish (Qais), Iran

There was no hotel in Siraf so we had to go to Bandar Assouleh to spend the night. This is one of Iran’s new industrial areas and is a center of oil and natural gas refining. We first of all could not find the exit off the highway and in fact we never did – we had to cut across a dirt track to enter the town which was utterly nondescript with the exception of the esplanade.

The esplanade of Bandar Assouleh - the flares behind the streetlamps are oil (and/or gas) refinery flares.
We could not find our hotel and hard as this may be to believe, the guide did not have the phone number. He only had the name. The hotel had changed its name. We drove around for two hours, nobody knew where the hotel was – everyone here comes from somewhere else as they come for work – and eventually the driver, by now furious with the guide for being so incompetent, said he would drop us off at a restaurant and he would try to find it. Because it was Friday the office was closed and the guide did not want to call anyone at home..........

The driver came back and took us to the Persian Gulf hotel – nothing to do with the name we had which was the Bandar Assouleh Inn. The guide had been telling me it was a government-run tourist inn such as we had stayed in the night before. It was not. It was filthy. It was apparently the best hotel in town and you would not have put a rabid dog in it. Nobody could use the loo, the cockroaches were the size of small birds and they were legion. I tried to pee down a drain and one leapt up, followed in rapid succession by me, so that was the end of that. I closed the door and slept with all my clothes on, on top of my silk liner. The next morning I peered cautiously into the bathroom, the repulsive creatures were still there. I went to a gas station to use the loo. I did however have one of the best meals for breakfast I had yet had in the entire country – a plate of beans from a tiny hole-in-the-wall that had workers lined up down the street. That and a cup of strong tea did the trick. And thus fortified we set off from the unforgettable Bandar Assouleh……..