August, 2010

Dave Keetch writes: The romantically-minded would consider the following sequence of events as a twist of fate; that somehow it was cosmically predetermined that we would find ourselves nibbling from a boiled sheep head in the lounge room of the Moroccan family with whom we were staying with during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. [...]

Crikey reader Jenny Kaldor writes: Travelling on a 12-hour train from Zurich to Budapest last week, I experienced the EU’s free movement of people at extreme close quarters. My partner Robbie and I boarded the Zurich-Budapest train late last Friday night. Having just had a week in Switzerland, we were high on the Swiss vision [...]

An anonymous Crikey reader writes: The odds were quite small. My father was in China on a consulting job at the same time as I was there, lazily observing the country’s hyper-growth, breaking up my flight to Europe. It was a strange coincidence, but not entirely unlikely. He’d been there plenty of times before in [...]

Meet Vali. Vali – homestay proprietor, carpet merchant, tour guide, polyglot, and all-round awesome guy – is the reason I stayed in the north-east Iranian town of Mashhad for four days instead of one. Mashhad is the second-largest city in Iran, boasting three million people and the second-holiest site in Shia Islam. For this reason [...]

In the words of Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder: are we losing a little of that travel magic by constantly relying on technology?

After a week or more stuck in cities – charming as they were – I was really keen to get out of the sightseeing loop and go do something a bit more adventurous than walk through a museum. After Shiraz, the next destination on my itinerary was the south-eastern town of Kerman which I was [...]

Crikey reader Dave Keetch writes: You know you’re a bit off the beaten track when you start having to fill in applications and hand over wads of cash to cross a border. Yep, you’re not in Europe anymore, white boy. It had only been a week or two earlier that the proverbial had hit the [...]

These three large central-Iranian cities form somewhat of a golden triangle for visitors to the country. Full of tick-the-box must-see sights, they may not have the charm of other activity-based (rather than attraction-based) destinations around Iran but they should be on every visitor’s itinerary. Esfahan Truly a global city that deserves to be mentioned in [...]