The night bus trip to Tehran was surprisingly comfortable. The bus was clean, the seats spacious and they reclined. Also to our surprise the bus crew served dinner of rice, chicken kebab and coke. Really quite civilized.

The first impression of Tehran was big, crowded and with chaotic traffic. Also the city looked very modern, with lots of freeways and in the northern section of the city many modern shopping centers and highrise apartment buildings.

Once out of the bus we caught a taxi to our hotel. The solution to the problem of communicating with the taxi driver was to give him the telephone number of the hotel and let him get directions from reception. At the hotel we flopped into bed and slept for a few hours.

Day 1

After our recovery sleep we took a walk south to Khomeni Square and visited the famous Jewels Museum. The Jewels Museum is housed in a large vault inside a buidling owned my Iran's Melli Bank, which seems like a strange arrangement but there you are. Once inside the visitors were organized into language based groups and assigned a museum guide. The guide explained that the treasures housed in the vault are here because of their monetary value not their historical value and that there are museums in the city that hold other displays of less value but more historically important artifacts.

The displays are breathtaking. The workmanship and opulence are astounding and really bring home to ignorant westerners like us that Persia has been a fabulously wealthy state for a longtime. In addition to a large number of highly decorated swords, daggers, coats, and household implements there were crowns and a magnificant jewel encrusted throne that is the size of a double bed. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed.

While in the museum we bumped into the people from that motorhome tour that we met at the border and again in Mashhad.

Back at the hotel we arranged for a guide to meet us at 9:00 the next morning.

Day 2

Next morning as promised our guide, a young lady named Saghar arrived. The original plan was that we would spend up to 4 hours with her and see the Golestan Palace and the central bazaar.

We walked the couple of kilometers from the hotel to the Golestan Palace and along the way Saghar gave us commentary on a number of the buildings and monuments we passed including a Christian church for the local Armenian population and a wonderful complex that was once an army barracks but now (in part) houses the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Golestan Palace was/is an amazing complex of buildings surrounding a large court yard garden. Inside this complex we visited the White Palace and its ethnographic museum where there was a really interesting display of clothing from the various regions of Iran. Next came the Mirror Palace which as its name implies had walls and ceilings decorated with elaborately arranged mirrored tiles. Finally we visisted the Reception Hall with its massive hand made carpets.

After lunch at a local restaurant we walked through the central bazar. A massive complex of dome covered alley ways that over time has grown so that today it spills out of its original confines onto and into the neighbouring streets.

Nina and Saghar dropped me back at the hotel so that I could spend some time chasing up the spare parts for the truck and they went off to do some more exploring of the bazaar. Interestingly they visited a part of the Golestan Palace where a previous king of Persia would sit and select from the passing women a temporary lover.

Saghar invited us to dinner at her place with her sister and (divorced) mother. So at 6:30 the hotel called us a taxi and we handed the driver the note with directions that Saghar had given us. The instructions worked well for about 30 minutes as we fought our way north through evening traffic but eventually it became clear that the driver was lost. The solution to this problem was for me to call Saghar and hand the driver my phone. We did this about half a dozen times before eventually arriving at the correct appartment building.

The three women shared a nice apartment on the 5th floor of a block and had a fine view south towards the center of the city. We spent a pleasant evening sharing life stories and getting tips on more things to see in Iran.

Day 3

The bus back to Shiraz was scheduled for 4:00 pm and so we had most of the day for more sightseeing and Nina had set her sights on another palace, this time the Sa'd Abad Museum Complex which was the summer palace of recent Shahs. It is located in the foothills of the mountains to the north of the city. So it was into another taxi, show the driver the name of the palace written in Farsi and we were off.

Sa'd Abad was an impressive complex of buidlings set in a very large forest. Some of the more quirky items at the complex were

  • A building devoted to a pair of Iranian brothers, Issa and Abdullah Omidvar, who traveled the world by motorcycle and car starting in the 1950s

  • A bronze statue outside the White Palace that consisted of only a very large pair of boots and legs. Apparenty this was once a very large statue of Reza Shah who was the last shah of Iran. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979 they cut off the statue at the top of the thigh.

We enjoyed our visit to Sa'd Abad.

Then it was back to the hotel, get our bags, and taxi to the bus depot for the return trip to Shiraz.