Review: Iran with The Wild Chronicles, by Tharasin

*** A review from Rath Panyowat ***

From 28 July to 8 August 2023, I traveled to Iran. I had wanted to go for a long time, and I happened to see a Wild Chronicles tour pop up on Facebook. I had followed the page for a long time and felt it had solid knowledge of the Middle East, so I thought traveling with the page would be interesting and I booked right away.

Actually the tour was not this long. The funny thing is, I did not know that what people usually do is the Classic Iran tour down through the central part of the country, but the tour I bought was a tour of northern Iran, which focuses on nature and is a completely different direction. But since I was going anyway, I stayed on for another 5 days by myself and went the Classic Iran way as well.

*** 28 July 2023: Arrival in Tehran ***

Nothing much today. I arrived late at night, and by the time I got through the gate and reached the Rexan Hotel, which is right across from the airport, it was past 2 a.m. By the time I had put my things away and showered it was past 3 a.m., so I went straight to sleep.

As for the travel itself, on the way there I flew Mahan Air. It was very hot, as if the air conditioning was broken or the heater was on too high, and it stayed that hot the whole trip. I could not sleep at all on the plane. On the way back it was not as hot, but still not cool. The food was okay, but the systems on board were not very good. In short, I was not very impressed with this airline.

*** 29 July 2023: Chalus - Ramsar *** Today we left Tehran and headed north toward the city of Chalus, then continued on to the city of Ramsar. On the way we had to cross the Alborz mountains, along the route called the Chalus Road or Road 59, a road Iranians love to take on road trips because of the beauty of those mountains. On the way there is the Karaj Dam, which you can stop to see.

...It was pretty, but there was not that much to it... Then we sat in the car for a long stretch on the Chalus Road. The scenery around was mountains like this. Just after leaving Tehran the mountains are rather dry, with trees in patches, but once you pass over the mountains it turns green, like a different country.

In Iran, people like to buy white cars. I would say about 80%, with another 15% black and the rest other colors. I asked why there are only white cars. Each person gave a slightly different answer, but from what I heard, the reasons seem to be 1) it is not hot, 2) it is easy to buy and easy to sell, 3) that is the only color they produce.

You need a little background here: they have long been under Western sanctions, so many things have to be made domestically, and cars are no exception. In recent years, though, they seem to have started importing.

*** 30 July 2023: Ramsar, Rudkhan Castle, Masuleh Village ***

It rained all day today. We started the day touring the city of Ramsar.

We began at Casino Boulevard, a road built to lead to a casino that was intended to open during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the last king). I am not sure if it ever opened, but after the Islamic Revolution all the casinos closed, and this road was renamed Teacher Boulevard.

The Ramsar Palace Museum. This museum was formerly a palace, I understand a kind of royal holiday home, built as early as the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi (the father of the last king). King Mohammad Reza himself used it as the honeymoon spot with his second wife. After the revolution it was turned into a museum open to visitors. Inside there are several buildings.

On we went. We left Ramsar and traveled on to the city of Fuman to visit Rudkhan Castle. P.S. Iranians love to smile and greet the camera. Sometimes as we were walking, people came up to ask for a photo or asked us to take one for them.

Rudkhan Castle is a castle from the Sasanian Empire, which lasted roughly from 200 to 600 CE, the last empire before the Arabs invaded and the religion changed to Islam. The castle was built to resist that invasion. Today almost nothing is left, only walls and a few ruins on top of the mountain, which takes about 2 hours to reach on foot from the foot of the mountain. Early on the way there are many shops and places to sit and chill.

We arrived at the castle quite a bit behind schedule, so we did not have enough time to go up to the castle itself, and could only take in the atmosphere of the shops along the path up. (I walked up for about 30 minutes before the shops ran out, which shows how many there are.) But reaching the castle itself is a lot further, so we decided to head back down. A pity.

We traveled on to our next destination, Masuleh Village. It is an old village that has existed since about 1000 CE (though there is evidence of a community in the area even before that). The highlight is that it is built on a hillside, with the roofs of the houses below serving as the gardens and walkways of the houses above, stacked on top of each other.

After that we traveled on to Bandar Anzali for the night. That night we stayed at an eco-style hotel whose name I cannot remember. In terms of beauty it was okay.

But in terms of service it might not have been quite ready. In the morning, for instance, the guide had to serve food to the guests room by room.

*** 31 July 2023: Caspian Sea, Ardabil ***

In the morning I stopped to take a few more photos of the hotel's atmosphere. It was lovely. Before leaving the city we stopped to see the Caspian Sea for a little while. The Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world, bordering 5 countries, but in photos it looks just like an ordinary sea.

The Anzali Lagoon is a body of shallow water separated from the sea. This city has a lagoon too, famous for its huge fields of lotus flowers, so we took a boat ride to see the lotuses. Honestly, it may not be that different from Thailand.

We traveled on to the city of Ardabil. On the way we had to cross the Alborz mountains again, which gave another scenic route, called the Heyran Pass. The guide said fuel is very cheap, less than ten baht a liter, and the state provides subsidized cheap fuel for the first few liters as well. There are a lot of cars too.

Overall, I rather liked walking around Iranian cities. The cities are lively, walkable and not hot, with lots of shops, not only concentrated in shopping malls.

*** 1 August 2023: Ardabil, Kandovan ***

The city of Ardabil is tied to the Safavid dynasty, around 1500-1700 CE, the era when Persia became unified again after invasions by various forces from the Arabs to the Mongols. Shah Ismail I, who founded the Safavid dynasty, began unifying the country from the city of Ardabil.

Sheikh Safi Al-Din Ardabili's Shrine has a very long name and is hard to read, but this place is the tomb of Sheikh Safi, the leader of the Sufi tradition of Islam. The guide said an Islamic shrine is similar to a mosque but has the body of a holy person inside (a mosque does not). Shah Ismail I believed in this Sufi tradition, so it was promoted heavily during the Safavid era.

On the way we passed the Aladaglar Mountains, multicolored mountains. I cannot remember what caused it, but it seems they have been like this for millions of years. Lovely.

And then we reached the day's destination, Kandovan, a village on a hillside built by carving rooms into the cave walls. Today it is a tourist spot, with both homestays where you stay with the villagers, and houses bought from villagers and turned into hotels. The hotel we stayed at today is the latter, I think called the Kandovan Laleh International Rocky Hotel. We went into the hotel to drop our things first.

*** 2 August 2023: Tabriz *** We left Kandovan late in the morning and traveled to Tabriz, which took about an hour and a half. Tabriz is the 6th largest city in the country by population.

It is the center of Iran's northwest, an ancient city dating from the Silk Road era. Marco Polo's records mention it too. Tabriz was a capital at certain periods, such as in the Safavid era, and because it lies in the Caucasus region near the Russian and Turkish borders, it sometimes fell to the Ottomans, and during the wars of the 1800s it also fell to Russia.

We reached the Tabriz Grand Bazaar around noon. The tour group split up to wander through the market, then agreed to meet at a restaurant around 1:30 p.m. At first I wondered why we ate lunch around 2 p.m. every day. It seems that is simply the usual mealtime for people here. They eat around then.

The Tabriz Grand Bazaar is one of the oldest markets in Iran, which has existed alongside the city of Tabriz since ancient times. UNESCO named this market a World Heritage site in 2010.

The Azerbaijan Museum collects things discovered in this region. Because the area has been inhabited for so long, the finds come from many different periods.

The Blue Mosque (Masjed-e Kabud) is an important mosque in the city, but not very old. It was built around the 1400s when Tabriz belonged to the Ottomans. I heard that many carpets went missing. After that there were several earthquakes, the worst in 1780, which destroyed almost all of it, leaving only the entrance section called the Iwan, a rectangular space open at the front with an arch, an architecture you see quite often in Islamic art.

After that the mosque was abandoned, and people came to steal things several times, until in the Pahlavi dynasty it was restored and rebuilt as a mosque again.

After that we went to rest at the city park. Nothing much there, just a walk to enjoy the atmosphere.

We arrived at Tabriz Airport to travel on to Tehran, but while I was at the airport something small happened to me. I went through check-in and the security check as usual until I got to the gate area, the zone with the benches. From the airports I have been to, normally they do not allow photos during the security check, but once you are through you can take them. Many airports are even decorated nicely for photos. At Tabriz there was no sign forbidding photos in this area either, and people were taking out their phones now and then. When I got to the gate, I took out my camera and took some too, but I filmed video, so the camera panned from side to side... In no time a security officer came over shouting. I could not understand, but I gathered he meant no filming...

Then he told me to follow him to another room. In my mind I thought, here we go, am I going to jail? So I turned to call the local guide to help, and the guide negotiated for me, until we walked to another room, where he called his boss to talk with me.

We talked for a while. They asked who I was, why I took the pictures, why I had to shoot video, asked to see all the photos I had taken, and so on. In the end they let me go, requiring me to delete everything I had taken at the airport (not bad, I thought they would confiscate my camera and memory card), and not to take any more pictures at the airport.

I went back to wait for the flight and eventually arrived in Tehran. (I made it back to Thailand in the end, so I was probably not put on any blacklist.) It was a bewildering experience. If there had been a sign, I might have understood that I was really at fault. This time there was no sign, and plenty of other people were taking photos. The only reason I can think of is that I used a camera that looked big, so maybe I looked like someone hired by an enemy nation to dig up secrets.

I would like to urge everyone traveling to Iran to be careful about taking photos, and do not take photos at airports. I cannot imagine how I would have gotten out of there without a local guide with me.

It took a little over an hour to reach Tehran. We stayed at the Ferdowsi International Grand Hotel. The atmosphere was okay.

*** 3 August 2023: Tehran, Day 1 ***

Today was a heat wave day in Tehran, hot enough that many government offices were ordered closed. Luckily most of the places we went to were not closed, but it was still very hot.

We started the day by stopping to see this gate, Bagh-e Melli (National Garden). It seems to be a gate built in the 1900s as the entrance to a military area, but later it became a public park, and many government buildings were built around it. One of them is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Then we came to the place everyone who visits Tehran has to go: Golestan Palace. This palace was actually built as early as 1200 CE.

But at that time it was only a small building, until the Qajar dynasty moved the capital to Tehran and chose this as their palace, which led to a major upgrade into what it is today. In the Pahlavi dynasty the palace was moved elsewhere, but this place was still used for important ceremonies such as coronations.

Not far from the palace is the Tehran Grand Bazaar. Overall I think it is not much different from Tabriz or other places, but the crowds are far larger. We did not stay here long before moving on.

After lunch we went on to the Azadi Tower. It is a tower near Mehrabad Airport, a domestic airport.

The tower was built by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the last king) to celebrate 2,500 years of the Persian empire, as kilometer 0 of the country. It was completed in 1971. At first it did not have this name; it was renamed Azadi, which means freedom, after the Islamic Revolution.

It is a lovely tower, futuristic yet mixed with the classic. Buildings like this often appear in sci-fi games with a retro theme.

Before the day ended we went to Chitgar Lake. The guide said this district is a newly built new town, and the government is trying to push people to leave Tehran and live around here. There are many new buildings under construction. It is a leisure spot for city residents. At 4 p.m. it was extremely hot, so there were not many people. With a bit better weather, this place would probably be very pleasant.

...After that my tour mates went to the airport to fly back to Thailand, while I went back to the hotel to wait to continue my trip...

That concludes the review. The Iran tour Magical Palaces & Desert has 2 rounds, 8 days and 6 nights in all. *Round 1: 12 – 19 April 2024 (during the Songkran holiday)

*Round 2: 26 April – 3 May 2024 (during Labour Day)

If you are interested in the itinerary, contact us by inbox or add the LINE OA @thewildchronicles (type @ in front) and type "Interested in the Iran tour." Right now there is a special discount. Don't wait, book now!