into the furnace in iran

8/18/2019 Into the furnace in Iran

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Into the furnace in Iran

Off-limits to tourists for decades, Iran is at last opening up, offering the chance to visit fairytale

cities, historic sites and the hottest place on earth

AlamyWalking into the Lut Desert near Kerman

Unsurprisingly, Amir Shafi Abadi lived in the village of Shafi Abad. He had done all his life, herding

sheep and growing dates on the edge of the Lut Desert. But change was in the air and Amir sensedan opportunity. We were sitting cross-legged on a carpet drinking black tea in his newly built

courtyard. He was preparing for a surge of foreign visitors.

Amirs village is the last settlement before a 190km stretch of desert, an area under consideration as

a Unesco World Heritage Site thanks to its unique landscape. It also happens to be where the hottest

temperature ever recorded on the Earths surface was logged. In 2005, a global satellite survey

registered a ground temperature of 70.7C.

This is why Id come. Im attracted to extreme locations. Having already trekked in the worlds hottest

place in terms of average air temperature (Ethiopias Danakil Desert), I was eager to add the Lut tomy list. I had long known about this region but never dared to imagine Id actually be here. Now, the

opening of Iran to westerners, following last years nuclear deal, had given me the chance. The UK

Foreign Office has dropped its warning against visiting the country; British Airways, Air France and

KLM are all restarting flights; tour operators are competing to launch new itineraries and the sense

of opportunity has even reached little Shafi Abad, on the edge of the Lut Desert.

Accommodation at Amirs was arranged along two sides of his compound: simple sleeping spaces

divided by traditional palm-frond partitions. He was certainly well located for the desert, while

simultaneously close enough to the snow-capped Sirch Mountains for them to peep over the high

mud-brick walls. But his secret weapon was his wife Zahras cooking. We were reclining after a lunch

of kashk-e bademjan, a thick aubergine dip with fried onions and whey, scooped up with flatbread.

Zahra had baked the bread in the outdoor clay oven next to their small kitchen garden, the source of

the bowls full of fresh herbs to sprinkle over our meal.



Whey, a thick byproduct of milk, is a popular ingredient in Persian cooking, Amir explained as we

lounged on plump cushions. There was some discussion before with the aid of his iPhones bilingual

dictionary app I understood what he was referring to. Instantly I thought of Little Miss Muffet, the

nursery rhyme character, perched on her tuffet. It was not an image Id expected to encounter on the

edge of the Lut Desert.

Nick

MiddletonVisitors to the restored adobe citadel at Bam

South-east Iran is full of dramatic imagery, both real and surreal. Midway between the two lies Bam,

home of the worlds largest adobe citadel, where my journey to the Lut had begun after an internal

flight from Tehran.

Bams ancient fortress was devastated by an earthquake in 2003, and the local authorities have been

rebuilding ever since. Today, much of it has risen again out of the desert, like a giants sandcastle on

the beach. Bam dates back at least to 500BC and sits at a junction of Silk Road trade routes

threaded through the surrounding desert. Following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, I traced one of

these routes westward. The highway leading out of town was lined with cartoon-style tiled hoardingsof local characters martyred in the Iran-Iraq war, a terrible encounter that resulted in up to a million

casualties in the 1980s.

An hour or so of arid, featureless plain later, I saw men standing on walls to pick almonds from

skeletal trees on the outskirts of Mahan, a small town known for its shrine to a renowned Persian

scholar, mystic and poet. Shah Nematollah Vali died in 1431, aged 101, and his mausoleum complex

was a maze of shimmering blue tiles topped by a turquoise dome.

The sky was cerulean blue; the sunshine intense. There was not a breath of wind to leaven its fierce

heat

Kerman, another ancient trading hub just down the road, is the provincial capital. Its mud-brick core

boasts the countrys longest bazaar, stretching for more than a kilometre beneath an endless series



of shady domes that echo to the tapping of coppersmiths. This is Irans second-largest province,

famed for its pistachios and spices. Taking cumin to Kerman is an Iranian way of describing a

pointless course of action, akin to the British idiom concerning coals and Newcastle. I stocked up on

pistachios for the drive across the Sirch Mountains. Bewildered by the range on offer, I chose the

recommended akbari nuts, long and extra tasty, so my guide assured me, and not because they

coincidentally bore his family name.

Mohammad Reza Akbari drove a car assembled in Tehran, a hybrid model called Horse, made of

Peugeot and Chinese parts, with an engine possibly from Italy, so he thought. It laboured up the

highway that wound its way through scenery put together in prehistoric times: spectacular displays

of gigantic rock strata that had been folded, crumpled and left to bake for eternity in the desert sun.

Valleys were pockmarked with squat, biscuit-coloured dwellings, many dug into the hillsides to

provide relief from the summer heat. In front of the houses were small groves of apricot and apple

trees, some struggling into bloom, tiny pink spots in the dun-coloured landscape.

Spring is one of the best times to visit the Lut. Granted, I didnt experience the heat at its most

ferocious, but it was oven-hot, even in late February. Summer is when the mercury peaks but this is

also the time of the Wind of 120 Days. This north-easterly can blow for days on end, reacheshurricane force, and whips up great billowing clouds of hot sand and dust. Further east, this gritty

gale strips trees of their leaves and causes structural damage to buildings due to sandblasting. The

Wind of 120 Days is also responsible for the Luts dramatic terrain. Millions of years of sandblasting

have produced thousands of streamlined ridges known locally as kaluts, wind-carved grooves in the

landscape on a huge scale. Some of these ridges are tens of metres high and several kilometres long.

They occupy an area of nearly 8,000 square kilometres.

AlamyA shrine to the Persian scholar

Mohammad Reza and I arrived in mid-afternoon, after our lunch with Amir. We left the car and

marched into the hyper-arid sculpture park, set on climbing the highest ridge we could find. The sky

was cerulean blue; the sunshine intense. There was not a breath of wind to leaven its fierce heat.



We trudged across the otherworldly topography, along wind-scoured mini-ravines loaded with dunes,

past gnarled rock fingers pointing towards the heavens. A couple of hours into the kaluts we

selected the highest ridge and began to clamber upwards. Exhausting cascades of sand thankfully

made way for firmer surfaces, some like walking on crunchy breadcrumbs, others cemented hard

and soundless with salt.

Approaching the top, I was sucking the warm air into my lungs. Mohammad Reza was there already,

just smiling at the vista. I felt my jaw slowly drop, as if by some means it had become unusually

heavy. This was followed by a sharp and involuntary intake of breath. Spread out in front of where I

stood, a good 60 metres above the landscape, was an unobstructed, 360-degree, cliff-edge panorama

of the kaluts.

As the sun slowly descended, the colours that had shifted from sandy yellows through a spectrum of

terracotta now approached rose-pink. Nearing the car once more, I encountered the first buzzing fly,

but it was listless and didnt stay long to spoil the show.

Nick MiddletonYazds historic adobe centre

Yazd, a very fine and noble settlement, according to Marco Polo, is a city like no other. It was also an

appropriate place in which to round off my desert trip after a days driving from the kaluts. Yazds

historic adobe centre is one of the oldest towns on Earth, with a skyline dominated by wind-catchers,

traditional vented tower structures designed to channel winds from the rooftops down inside

buildings to cool the rooms below.

Like Bam, Mahan, Kerman, and even Amirs kitchen garden, Yazd has thrived in the arid desert

thanks to an ingenious ancient Persian technology. All are nourished by underground canals, or

qanats, a secret irrigation system that has been flowing since the earliest of times. Many Iranian

qanats have been channelling water from aquifers for 5,000 years. One in Bam may be 8,000 yearsold. Yazd has probably the largest network of qanats anywhere in Iran, and includes the longest of

them all, the Zarch qanat, more than 80km in length.



Its long history as a desert trading centre has left Yazd with an assortment of elderly merchants

buildings, some of which now serve as hotels. I stayed in one, reached via a warren of narrow,

covered walkways that scurry through the bazaar, dipping left into a still narrower alley just after a

carpet shop.

The passageways must have been imbued with some sort of magical properties because they had

transported me back in time. I emerged into a courtyard fit for a sultan, a Persian dreamland with a

trickling fountain and white lilies sprouting from improbable flower beds. A group of young women

were enjoying a hubble-bubble pipe on one of the many carpet-covered day beds, a couple were

eating dinner on another. There were ornately carved window-frames and lavish balconies lit by oil

lamps. I felt like Alice after following the white rabbit down the hole, only Id emerged into the

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Nick MiddletonPomegranates for sale in Mahan

I shouldnt have been surprised. South-east Iran had been full of the unexpected, from the five types

of pistachio to boiled beetroot served with scrambled eggs at breakfast, to the unmistakable scent of saffron that wafted from one of my bath towels.

Tucking into a dinner of juicy Yazdi meatballs in the hotels fairytale courtyard, Mohammad Reza hit

me with one last revelation. We were reminiscing about the Lut, and he mentioned its sand dunes.

The biggest in the world, he said in passing. Beyond the kaluts they are 500 metres high.

My brow furrowed. A number of places lay claim to the worlds highest dunes, including Namibia and

the Badain Jaran Desert in China. I had climbed one in the Badain Jaran and it was well over 400

metres, but Id never heard of such whoppers in Iran. It struck me that, to western minds, this corner

of Asia remains almost as mysterious as it was during Marco Polos time. It gave me a very good

reason to plan another visit some day.

Nick Middleton is a fellow of St Annes College, Oxford, and specialises in desertification. His books



include Going to Extremes (2001) and most recently An Atlas of Countries that Dont Exist (2015)

Details

Nick Middleton was a guest of Magic Carpet Travel, a specialist in arranging small group trips to

Iran. Its two-week trip, Enchanting Persia, takes in Tehran, Isfahan, Kerman, Bam, Shiraz,

Persepolis and Yazd, from 2,950 per person (or one week from 1,650), excluding international flights

Going to the other extremes

ReutersOymyakon, Siberia

Coldest: Oymyakon, Siberia

The record for the coldest inhabited place on Earth minus 71.2C may have been set back in 1924 but

winter temperatures in Oymyakon routinely sink below minus 50C (and local residents only consider

it cold enough to shut the school at minus 56C). You must endure two days of hard driving from the

nearest major city, Yakutsk, to reach this small community of neat wooden houses the so-called pole

of cold. It is spread across the plain of the Indigirka river, suitable for a spot of ice-fishing once

youve hacked a hole through the metre-thick ice. Burbot or sturgeon make a welcome alternative to

the local horsemeat-heavy diet. Theres a monument to the record low temperature on the edge of

town and the mayor gives hardy tourists certificates to remember their visit.

Wettest: Mawsynram, India

Dont expect to see much if you make it to the village of Mawsynram in north-east India during the

monsoon: it is set in the small state of Meghalaya, a Sanskrit name that means abode of clouds.

Others call it the Scotland of the East, a name coined during the British Raj. The local Khasi people

still wander around with tartan shawls across their shoulders to keep out the cold the altitude is1,400 metres but this is Scotland with paddy fields and leeches. And an awful lot of rain. The

average annual rainfall at Mawsynram is 11,872mm, or nearly 39ft, most of it falling during the



monsoon.

Driest: Quillagua, Chile

Visit this village in the Atacama Desert any time you like and the weather will probably be fine.

Quillagua has an entry in the record books as the driest place on Earth (average annual precipitation

0.5mm) and the Atacama receives more solar radiation than any other spot on the planet. It rained

only once in the 1990s a whole decade with just one storm. The next rain came 23 years later, in

March last year. The Atacama has been dry for millions of years, but subterranean springs have

supported people for millennia. Just outside Quillagua, the hills are resplendent with stone patterns,

or geoglyphs, depicting stick men and animals up to 30 metres high, some dating back 3,000 years.

Photographs: Alamy, Nick Middleton; Reuters

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