So, I got the hell out of Tehran. There’s still loads more there I’d like to see but I needed to get out of the big city and get somewhere calmer, and I’ve scheduled two days to finish off the capital at the end of the trip. One overnight bus later I was in the north-west town of Tabriz, once upon a time the capital of Iran/Persia (along with at least three other non-Tehran cities).

Tabriz was really nice – smaller, more manageable. I wandered around and visited the Blue Mosque which was destroyed by earthquake centuries ago but is only now being rebuilt, checked out the Poet’s Monument which is a study in concrete, and trekked out to the village of Kandawar in which houses are carved out of these bizarre stone outcrops in the mountains. I also discovered a street-snack called “potato egg” which is literally a boiled potato and a boiled egg mashed into a large flat piece of lavash-style bread, generously seasoned with butter, salt, paprika and oregano. With such a sensational starch bomb costing only 60 cents a pop I never wanted to leave.

At regular periods throughout my three days in Tabriz I was stopped by locals who wondered where I was from, welcomed me to Iran, and generally wanted to chat. This beautiful aspect of Iran was quickly becoming a dominant theme of the country.

Another overnight bus later I was in the central-Iranian city of Esfahan and after only one morning here I decided to create a drinking game. However, with Iran being a dry country the game can’t be played with alcohol so it’s instead played with Zam Zam Cola (Iran’s local Coca Cola). The game is called Zam Zam Slam and the rules are very simple: every time a local stops you and asks where you’re from you have to drink a Zam Zam; every time a local welcomes you to Iran you have a drink a Zam Zam; and every time a local wishes you a pleasant stay in [insert town here] you have to drink a Zam Zam. First one to pass out in a diabetic coma wins.

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Day three in Tehran and I was starting to get my groove. A bit. Over the past two days I’d managed to get my head around fundamentals like money and food, grappled with the basics of the language, worked out a couple of bus lines and the metro, and discovered how utterly exhausting it is to do stuff in a city like Tehran – especially with 40-degree weather like Tehran’s. The day before I’d gone too hard, spending most of the day out and about trying to do too much, too quickly; I had blisters on my toes, aching leg muscles, and pretty decent dehydration. So, this day I planned for only one activity, starting later in the morning and running for about four hours, allowing time for a rest and a shower before my night bus to Tabriz.

Catching a bus from my hotel in the extreme south of Tehran to the northern tip of the city nestled in the foothills of the great mountains was easy enough, and so should have been what came next. But the one-and-a-half kilometre uphill walk from the bus terminal to the Sa’d Abad Museum Complex was anything but easy. The Lonely Planet offers no enlarged map of this part of town so I had to rely upon the tiny-scale version with only main roads shown. I walked for ages in what I thought was the right direction, and followed the pointed hands offered with a smile by Tehranis in response to my, “Salam, Sa’d Abad?”, but still I could not find it. I can only guess how many kilometres I walked in the baking heat, mostly uphill, but by the time I stumbled across the complex over an hour after I started walking I was already wasted. Nursing feet that felt like they were bleeding inside my shoes, and cultivating what felt to be a nice dose of sunstroke, I bought my tickets and entered the museum grounds.

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Eight days ago I left Australia and immediately spent a most enjoyable five days in Ubud, Bali, with Lisa. We relaxed, ate way too much food, did a cooking course, ate more food, made some silver jewellery (hippies), swam in the pool, ate food, and slept in. Very nice, indeed. We headed down to Kuta on Tuesday afternoon so I could catch my early flight on Wednesday morning and so Lisa could head off to the Gili islands.

At 3:30am the next morning, after barely two hours’ sleep, I rolled out of bed in Kuta only to find that I had gastro, presumably as karma for having stayed in Kuta. Awesome. Gingerly, I flew to Kuala Lumpur where I endured an eleven-hour stopover, punctuated by dosages of stoppers, before flying to Tehran via Doha.

On the flight to Doha I had a chat to an Iranian woman who was flying home to Tehran after a holiday in Malaysia. She was a little shocked at the idea that I wanted to go to Iran for a holiday because it wasn’t very nice and there was nothing in Tehran or the other cities that she could imagine I would want to see and the hotels aren’t very nice and it’s dirty and polluted. I explained that a lot of travellers wanted to experience places and cultures different to their own even if it’s not a luxury holiday, and she understood this to a point but said that there are surely nicer places to experience.

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