The minibus waiting outside arrivals at Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport still had a paper cup of tea on the dashboard, cold by then. Our driver, Mehran, checked that every bag was in the back, turned the key and said, 'Now we begin.' He said it each time the engine started, including a two-minute run to a petrol station, and by the third day the group was saying it with him. I travel with a paper notebook of opening hours and tea houses, fifteen seasons of them, and Iran filled more pages in three weeks than France managed in a year.
Twenty-two days reads as a line of dates and drives as one road. We went south from Tehran through gardens and mountain villages, sat three days in Isfahan, carried on to Shiraz and the ruins behind it, crossed the desert towns to the Caspian, flew east to Mashhad, then pushed west again to the caves and carved rock near the border.
Tehran: carpets, glass, a hill of ash
The Carpet Museum sits low beside the park lake and the guard opens it before the first coaches arrive. Rugs from every province hang in two long halls; walk one side slowly and come back up the other instead of reading every label. Ninety minutes was enough, then across town to the Abghineh Museum, which keeps its glass, ceramics and crystal inside an old palace - the Achaemenid pieces hold people longest, small and evenly blown. The archaeological museum went into the afternoon, when the stone figures in the courtyard stop glaring and the hall is quiet enough to hear your own shoes.
Kashan is an hour further south, and the Fin garden is where I stopped first: water in narrow channels past the cypress, and a tea house at the back where you can sit with a glass and listen to it. Before ten the shade still reaches the water. The Taba-Tabai house, a nineteenth-century merchant's residence with painted rooms and a wind tower over its courtyard, is a short walk; Sialk hill, the excavation mound with open pits and stray sherds on the surface, a few minutes more. The day closed at the Agha Bozorg mosque, its courtyard dropped below street level so the traffic stays above it and the prayer hall keeps its cool.
Abyaneh is held in the mountains above that road, red mud walls and lanes too narrow for the bus, older women in patterned scarves who will tell you without ceremony when a camera is pointed the wrong way. Walk the lanes rather than shooting from the pull-out. At Natanz we stopped at the Friday mosque, then dropped into Isfahan at the end of the day and walked straight onto the bridges, because the road ends there.
Isfahan after eight at night
The bridges are where Isfahan spends its evening. Under the Khaju bridge the stone ledges are worn smooth by people sitting on them with thermoses, and a man works the steps selling roasted corn from a paper bag. The 33 arches runs long enough that the far bank looks farther than it is, and we walked it twice because the group kept stopping. Come after eight, when the heat has left the stone and the coaches have gone, and keep to the dry middle band - the edges sweat and moss comes up under a soft sole.
Daylight belonged to the halls. We took Chehel Sotoun first, the pavilion of forty columns doubled in its own pool, then the Armenian quarter for lunch at a table nobody hurried us from, then the Friday mosque in the flat heat of the afternoon, when light comes down the dome in a single vertical shaft.
In the late afternoon the square fills: the Royal Palace, the Imam Mosque with its four iwans, and Sheikh Lotfollah, raised without minarets, which older guides still call the women's mosque. A tea-house man by the bazaar entrance told me to come back at nine, when the porters were stacking the shutters and the carpet dealers had time to look at you rather than the door.
Sixty kilometres to Persepolis
We came into Shiraz at the end of the day and went straight to the Shah Cheragh mausoleum, where the hall is mirrored floor to ceiling and the light breaks into pieces a camera will not take. Scarves and shoe covers are handed out at the door, and evening is the quiet hour to stand in it.
The ruins are 60 km out of Shiraz, and Naqsh-e Rostam, the tombs cut into the cliff, lies another 7 km past the turn. I was at the gate at opening with two other photographers, and for half an hour the light lay flat on the stone before the first group arrived; carry water from the parking area, because the kiosk inside is empty by eleven. Back in the city the same evening: the Quran gate, where the traveller is meant to wish the road well and the city welcomes whoever passes under it, then the tomb of Khajoye Kermani, the thirteenth-century poet who taught Hafez his trade, the Qur'anic school, and the gardens of Hafez and Saadi. The Nasir al-Molk mosque goes last, before the bazaar shuts - coloured tile over a carpeted floor you take your shoes off for.
Two families left in Farahzad
Yazd is 371 km from Shiraz, with a stop at Abar Gho village on the way, and the Towers of Silence wait on the ridge above the city, circles of stone on bare ground. Inside the walls there is the Friday mosque, the old quarter, Mir Chakhmagh square, the Seyyed Roknoddin mausoleum, the fire temple with its guarded flame, and the bazaar. Give it a full day and go into the bazaar before eleven, while the passageways are still in shade.
Then 351 km west through Maibod, Ardakan, Choupanan and Kour to Farahzad, a village down to two families. The innkeeper poured tea and pointed out his brother's house and the one that had been sold; the rest, he said, went to Yazd. There is a desert and a salt lake to walk and the track out to them takes an afternoon. I kept the window open that night because nothing outside it makes noise after nine.
From Farahzad it is 401 km across open desert to Damghan: the Tarihane, the oldest mosque in Iran, its first walls raised in the first century of the Hijra, the Tower of Forty Daughters, the Imamzadeh Jafar, the Lotfi House, and a Shah Abbasi caravanserai standing alone by the road. Buy pistachios in the bazaar here, scooped warm from the sack, and ask before photographing the caravanserai courtyard - somebody is usually living in one corner of it.
From the salt terraces to Bisotun
We took a lunch box north for Badab Surt, a natural site in Mazandaran, 95 km south of Sari and 7 km west of Orost village: stepped travertine terraces laid down over thousands of years as water from two mineral springs cooled and left its carbonate behind. They read like a frozen staircase the colour of strong tea. Wear shoes you do not mind soaking, because the rim paths stay wet all year.
Sari is where the desert stops and the sea starts - the Caspian, cold and grey that week after two weeks of dust, with a traditional bazaar where the fishmongers carry over the produce stalls. After the interior, the humidity feels like a second country.
Mashhad was the turn eastward, and the shrine of Imam Reza fills a quarter of the city: a chador is pressed into your hand at the gate by a woman who is not asking. Then the bazaar for saffron, sold by the gram from tin canisters, and a flight back to Tehran. From there we went 39 km out to Tus, to the tomb of Ferdowsi in a town that was a capital for a while, stopped at the Harounieh, the old prison attributed to Haroun, and at the mausoleum of Khaje Rabie, built between 1617 and 1622 on the order of Shah Abbas and set out on the plan of the Hasht Behesht palace in Isfahan.
The road west opened again: Ali Sadr cave first, a lake under the mountain that you cross by boat, half a day gone before anyone noticed. Hamedan gave us the tomb of Avicenna, the Achaemenid inscriptions at Ganj Nameh cut into the rock, Babataher's tomb, a lion stone of the same period standing in a roundabout, the Seljuk Alavian tomb, and a bazaar that empties by noon.
Into Kermanshah for the last stretch: the temple of Anahita, Bisotun 50 km out with its relief on the cliff where the old road climbed, Taq-e Bostan a few kilometres north of the city where Ardeshir II reigned in stone between 379 and 383, and the Tekiyeh Moaven al-Molk, painted for the Qajar period.
I went back to Taq-e Bostan at six the next morning, before the flight. The gate was chained, the grass wet through, a caretaker's bicycle leaning on the wall with nobody attached to it. For half an hour I photographed the investiture of Ardeshir in flat, unclaimed light, and the notebook page for Kermanshah ends where my pen did: 6:40, the man with the key. The first buses were already running down to the tombs, and I never got the name.