DAY 86 – SHIRAZ IN A DAY
Walked Shiraz town with Jeremy. Saw every major shrine and mosque in town except the really good one that non-Muslims are not allowed into. Why?
Met a third solo Kiwi backpacker in Shiraz. What are the chances of that?
Met an Eastern European couple who are backpacking and writing a story on the city of Bam (more on Bam later). The EE girl was absolutely mauled by an excited crowd of Iranian school girls who wanted to touch and talk to her. They bought her gifts and took turns taking photos with her. Jennifer Lopez would have struggled to create more of a frenzy. Although that could be because J-Lo’s music is banned here. It is unclear if this is for religious or taste reasons.
Driving here is nuts. The roads are like some crazed dance where road users (cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses, livestock and pedestrians) continually jostle each other for position. Roads that are marked with two lanes are driven three abreast. Roads with three lanes are driven four abreast. Intersections are nothing less than highly competitive games of chicken where the waiting cars creep forward until a driver heading in the other direction buckles and then the vehicles in the stationary lane all dive in. Doing u-turns on motorways works in a similar fashion. This is common and they even have regular gaps in the medium barrier for it. Tooting your horn can mean ‘hi’ or ‘hurry up’ but usually means ‘I hope you know I am coming because I AM NOT SLOWING DOWN OR GIVING WAY UNDERANY CIRCUMSTANCES’.
The official stats say that an Iranian is killed on the roads every 24 minutes. Not bad going for a country of seventy million. While in Iran I saw four actual accidents. Everything else was one long series of near misses.
Most of their old taxi fleet here are a make called Paykan. I already know that I am the only person who finds this funny.
You take your life in your hands every time you cross the road. I often find myself perched on the side of the road for a ages, my face etched with fear, waiting for a gap that you could almost squeeze a stick of celery through only to have a local a few feet further down calmly step straight out into traffic like there are no vehicles on the road at all! It’s humiliating normally but it really smarts when its a woman dressed in a black tent carrying a baby at night time. To start with I did my j-walking in a series of panicked runs whilst trying not to scream like a child.
Flew to Esfahan. Shared a taxi into town with a German who kept his Air Iran airsickness bag to sell on Ebay. Those kooky Germans.
Am starting to get some funny looks from the lower class of backpacker for my use of advanced backpacker transportation techniques (flying).
Staying at Amir Kabir Hostel which is great if you are a guy but if you are a girl you might wake up with and old guy inside your locked room standing at the end of your bed. True story.
