At breakfast at the hotel, we bump into a motorcyclist we met at the hotel in Esfahan. There seem to be a number of people following a similar route to us via motorbike.
Another tour of bazaars and mosques does not appeal. I spend the afternoon going native and laying about on a carpet in the hotel courtyard, although Iranian men mostly do their laying about in mosques and Iranian women are probably not allowed to lay about in public. A few of us also go up to the roof. From here we can see more mosques and the surrounding homes and shops built with mud very convincingly doing the job of cement. I find out our hotel is one of them when I try too hard to climb a wall to get a better look, and bits of it crumble in my hand.
Later in the day, a member of the religious police comes into the courtyard to tell our women that they are breaking the law by not wearing their headscarves in the courtyard. Sneering, they reluctantly put them back on.
I go out to dinner with Meg, Dave, Gaz, Rhiannon, Andrew, big John and Tracy. Cliques have developed in the group and this is who I tend to spend my time with at this stage of the journey. We have dinner at an old bathhouse with tiled floors and partially filled group baths preserved from its previous use. We try to throw Andrew in the one near our table at one point. The restaurant is not busy so nobody is disturbed by our tussling. I have a tasty chicken, walnut and pomegranite stew called a Fesenjun. Iranians like to mix their sweet and savoury, and to good effect.
Outside the restaurant, John and I have a conversation with an Iranian who speaks very good English and who urges us to tell our friends that Iran is a good country and doesn’t want to be the west’s enemy.
Later we find out that some our crew have bumped into some Americans. In Iran! We had been told that 99.9% of visitors applications from US citizens do not get accepted and I had left my US passport at home (I am a dual national) so I didn’t get caught with it on me on my travels, especially in Iran and Pakistan. However, these guys on a work related trip for an oil company, and obviously not an American one, so they must be some of the very few Americans to visit Iran (and not get arrested).
Meanwhile, some of the ladies had gone out and got talking to a woman who invited them back to her family’s house for dinner where they were treated like old friends.
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