Isfahan: That is the town from a “golden age”, that is the great Meaydun-e-Imam, the waste square surrounded of arcades, the Lotfallah and the Imam Mosque, the Ali-Qapu-Palace and the bazaar. The square with its size of 510 x 150 m is one of the biggest in the world: only the Tjananmen Square in Peking is bigger. Anyway, I'd say that it is for sure the most beautiful square in the world as far as I am concerned! Isfahan: that is also the color turquoise: the roofs of the mosques and the Iwans are turquoise and beautifully ornamented. Isfahan: that is the beautiful bridges crossing the Zayand-e-Rud with its lovesick men singing lovely but heartbreaking tunes under the bridges’ arches.
Isfahan: that is a colorful bazaar! Here, we stayed a good week and explored the different parts of the town which was mostly built in the 16th Century by Shah Abbas. On the big square, he had his Polo-games playing and impressed European legates with huge military parades. It is even said, that – to impress the English legate – he let the troops walk by the square, then they left the square at one end, ran quickly through the mosque, the Madrasah and parts of the bazaar back to start and reentered the square again to add themselves to an impressive, never-ending flow of soldiers! Isfahan also has a beautiful Armenian church that is beautifully decorated in the orthodox style…
In the evening then a lazy stroll around the big square and diving into the bazaar for a while. The bazaar is very colorful and metal and copper works as well as wooden artwork and carpets are sold. In one corner, the fabric printers are located and you can look at how they print the tissues with old stamps in natural colors – beautiful, multicolored designs that take several rounds of stamping, each with another color. Around another corner, you hear the "clack-clack" of the metal workers and still in another coin, there are young men painting very concentrated on some miniatures. And then the spice bazaar: What colors and what smell!!!

One day, we went to a Sufi Tomb outside the city. Well, it was actually not the tomb that interested us but the architecture of the small built-in-brick mausoleum: It contains of a small Iwan that is flanked by two minarets (an Iwan, by the way, is a vaulted portal opening onto a courtyard and is a typical part of Iranian mosque architecture). For some strange reason, the whole building shakes when one of the minarets is shaken and the other minaret shakes with it, too. Every hour, one of the guards climbs up the one minaret and shakes it to show this amazing effect. To prove the shaking of the second, a small bell is fixed on it that rings when shaken. However, as soon as we got there, at least twenty people - apparently bored with the waiting for the attraction and looking for some other distraction - surrounded us and started to ask questions and taking pictures. So fascinated they were from us (and especially from me as being so white and unusually tall) that they even forgot about the shaking minarets and instead watched me taking photos of it (as this was not the first time that people showed so much interest in me, Nabi started to think about asking for some entry fee for anybody wanting to see me or taking photographs of me!).

Nabi showed me the places of his childhood and the gardens of his father with the pomegranates, figs and the beautiful big olive trees. Unlike in Europe, the Olive trees here grow slimmer and higher and together, they form a shadowy roof. Unfortunately, not much from the sites of N's childhood have remained as a catastrophic earthquake hit the region in 1990. We spent some time at Nabi’s house to have a break and meet with his family. He has five sisters and all of them are very warm and nice and cheerful. So it was a very nice stay and they pampered us from early morning until late at night. We undertook some nice trips in the North of Iran to the Caspian sea, passing the beautiful, very green rice fields and walking through intensely smelling tea plantations (it really smells as if you open a tea box of first quality black tea!), strolled in the high mountains above Rudbar and through the “Djangal”, the thick jungle of the northern Alburz. Towards the end of April, it was time to move on and we left the north to drive towards Isfahan.

And then, our last 500 km started towards the Iranian border: I started to become nervous. Not because of the idea to travel in the country of Iran but because of the border crossing itself. All horrible stories got into my mind - most of them at least 20 years old and possibly exaggerated… In Erzurum, the last town in Turkey, we needed to prepare the clothes for Iran: My scarf and the long blouses that come almost down to the knees - I need to take it out of my "Iran cloth box" before the border. So the last morning in Turkey, we spent with some kind of “fashion show” of me trying out the different clothes, which took the tension away a bit. The last bit through the Turkish "highlands" is a very beautiful route and the Turkish-Iranian border is right beneath the Ararat Mountain. The border passing went all well - no horrible scenes, no problems, no trouble with our luggage... but it took some three hours time. However, I was well prepared on a longer waiting time and anything below three hours would have surprised me. Finally, we started driving in Iran - meanwhile, it was almost 5 and Iran awaited us with a beautiful landscape and some tremendous light to take photos.

Did I already talk about the rules for women about what to wear (i.e. the "hijab", the "covering")? In Iran, women are obliged to cover their hair and to wear a coat that covers the shape of the body and should reach at least above the knees (called "manteau"). In many state-offered jobs such as teaching, women are asked to wear the "chador" that covers almost all. The official color of the chador is black - however, around the house and in the villages, many white or white with small flower designs are used, too. Chador, by the way, means "tent" - and having seen a small old lady in a mosque in Isfahan ducking herself in her black chador showed the true meaning of it! Well I am not wearing any chador and “manteau” as going towards south I would melt in the hot sun of the desert under such things. So my choice of clothing was long linen shirts with wide scarves that I can hang leisurely around my head. Did I say leisurely? Well that was the theory - in practice, the thing is having its own life and this life seems to be dedicated in just trying to get away from my hair or to sling itself around my neck like a snake trying to take away me breath! But I was confident that I would win the battle (I had a selection of needles, hair pins and other things with me to fix the thing on my head!!).

We finally arrived in Rudbar, Nabi’s hometown in the north of Iran some hundred kilometers from the Caspian Sea: As we did not announce our arrival, the first hours where somehow quiet: They would be the last quiet hours for a long time! As soon as the news spread along, the first the phone and later the door bells started ringing nonstop and people arrived in a one hour's rhythm! Almost in the same rhythm, we were kissed and hugged and invited to dinner and lunches and holidays and sightseeing tours and safaris and… ! Everybody was really nice and all together form a colorful, charming, laughing and amazingly energetic thunderstorm!

We then passed by Dubrovnik (a very nice town but very busy with tourists and raining again) and started with one of the more adventurous drives of our journey to Iran: Passing Montenegro and Albania. Montenegro was not bad at all, we were surprised to actually find it very nice with a beautiful though quite stormy coastline and nice, friendly shaped mountains and hills in the inland. Albania thought, was another story. Here, the streets were very bad – even what was marked in the cards as being a highway did not even have any plaster on it and was full of holes! So it took us more than fourteen hours for less than 400 kilometers! We spent the night - or what was left of it after a very late arrival - in a small hotel that apparently had beend closed during winter. It was very cold and after drawing the curtain we saw why: The window was broken. We fell to bed, completely exhausted. However, after about two hours' sleep we woke up again, freezing. We took all our clothes on that we had with us in our overnight bag. However after another hour freezing cold, we decided to leave and get some warmth in the car, driving towards Greece.

Here, it was nice and warm again. We wanted to take the opportunity to visit Meteora and so we drove straight into the center of the country and to Kalambaka with its famous monasteries and fantastic landscape. Here, sandstone rocks rise from the ground: continuous weathering by water, wind and earthquakes and extremes of temperature turned them into huge rock pillars, were orthodox monasteries are built upon. Very spectacular and beautiful! After Meteora, we continued towards Turkey, where we intended to visit the ruins of the Hethit capital of Hattusha and the Unesco heritage of Goereme. Hmm, Hattusha was a bit cold again and so we sat in a very cold region in a very cold hotel room with a heater in front of us on full power and listened to the rain outside. The next day was even worse - when we got up and looked out of the window, I could not believe what I saw: Snow again!! So the impressing ruins were covered with snow and the hills around were hidden behind thick, grey clouds. So we continued towards Goereme national Park. This is a waste region of very special rock formations. Here, people used to carve their places directly into the rocks. Among Goereme's very interesting and beautiful sites are the richly decorated Tokali Kilise, the Apple Church, and a number of homes and pigeon houses carved straight into the bizarre formations. We really enjoyed the days – the more as it was sunny weather again!

The next day, the weather was better and in the Po Valley, there was some spring again. The route passed by Venice (we decided not to go there as we had been last autumn) but to head straight through Slovenia into Croatia. Our plans were to visit the famous Plitvice national park. But - believe it or not - again, it started to rain first and to snow the higher we came up. Fortunately, we reached the peak of the pass before street got snowy and got down again into the rain. Here, we had a break for a day and visited the breath-taking environments: The Plitvice contains of sixteen lakes in a long canyon that are each separated from the other by some higher or smaller waterfalls. Around those lakes, there are paths so that we spent a beautiful and sunny day outside and had a seven hours walk in the region. Definitely a place to visit again

Our journey started on the 1st of April in Zurich. I have been working almost day and night before leaving to have all projects up to date for my absence. And we needed prepare our apartment as we let it to some good friends of us, a family with two beautiful teenage girls who had their apartment renovated during the time we were in Iran. So our apartment was not empty and we did not need to worry about thieves or other problems related to leaving a house unoccupied. So in the morning of the first April, we packed our car, checked our tent and all the baggage and started happily southwards. Our plan was to drive by Thusis and pass by the cementry to visit our parents there before we leave for Tessin, Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Iran. Beautiful weather expected us - it was snowing!!