From Isfahan, our train heads due north to the city of Kashan which lies about midway to Tehran and not too far from Iran’s second holiest city and home to the Supreme Leader and senior clerics, Qom. Unfortunately Qom is not on our itinerary even though on the next leg of the journey, we pass through the city. Not surprisingly, Qom is probably the most conservative city in Iran and is perhaps less welcoming to non-Islamic foreign visitors than other places we’ve visited on this journey

After Isfahan which has quite a European feel about it, Kashan definitely looks and feels far more conservative. We see a lot of clerics on the street and most women are cloaked from head to foot in black chadors. Other than street signs which as everywhere in Iran are written in both Farsi and English, we see few shop signs in anything other than Farsi. The bazaar in the heart of the old city is more traditional than any we’ve visited so far and not obviously one where the traders are on the look out for tourists. It’s mostly locals going about their daily business although quite surprising is the profusion of jewelry stores with a heavy emphasis on gold. The heart of the bazaar is an old caravanserei with a traditional tea house in the centre. 

As fascinating as the bazaar is, what really made us gasp is a visit to the Sohrabi Silk Weaving Workshop. Located at the bottom of a steep stone staircase behind a low door off a narrow alleyway, entering this workshop is like stepping back 500 years - look at the photos! Several elderly men weave cloth which they tell us is in much demand by Kurdish people, surrounded by religious posters and in working conditions that would cause Occupational Health and Safety to flee in panic!!

All Change...!

From Kashan our train heads west again to the town of Arak. The next leg of our journey is preceded by increasingly dire warnings from the tour leader of what’s in store for us. 

Just a quick explanation. The “tour leader” is in fact the onboard representative of Golden Eagle, the British company that operates the train. Just to complicate matters, our train is actually a Russian train, all the staff are Russian, the excellent food we’re served on board is Russian....and the tour leader is Russian. For the first part of our journey, the tour leader, Tatiana, had also been our tour leader a few years back when we did the Trans-Siberian journey. But the dire warnings we’re getting are coming from her replacement, Larissa, a Russian lady from head office in Manchester who’s visiting Iran for the first time. 

So why the “dire warnings”? Well in Arak, we’re transferring to a chartered Iranian train for 24 hours - so including a night - for a journey to Shushtar in southwestern Iran, very close to the border with Iraq. This involves crossing the Zardkouli Mountains, a spectacular but barren region with lots of railway tunnels too low for our Russian train to negotiate. The Russian train staff does a truly impressive job of transferring us with overnight bags and the kitchen and dining room staff with food and equipment, cabin attendants....in fact everything possible to make the next 24 hours as comfortable as the train we’re temporarily leaving behind. Each passenger is allotted their own 1st class cabin normally intended for four people. The only “discomfort” is that each carriage has only two toilets - one western, the other a squat job - but horror of horrors - no showers!!

Needless to say, we spend a very comfortable and restful night....and enjoy a fascinating morning in Shushtar and a relaxing afternoon traveling back through the mountains to Arak to rejoin our Russian train, where with even more impressive speed and efficiency, the Russian staff transfer everything back from the Iranian to the Russian train!

We’re visiting Shushtar to visit two of the most amazing sites in Iran. The Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System, described by UNESCO as a “masterpiece of creative genius” comprises a system of bridges, weirs, canals, tunnels and man-made waterfalls much of it dating back more than a thousand years. As well as providing water for the city, the waterfalls powered an ingenious system of mills and more recently powered an electricity generator. Although no longer in use, the system is an impressive demonstration of the development and sophistication of the technology already developed in this part of the world more than a thousand years ago!

Equally breathtaking is the Choqa Zanbil brick ziggurat in the blisteringly hot desert some 50 km south of Shushtar. Ziggurats are large pyramid-like temples built by the Elamites, a people who lived in Mesopotamia (what is now Iran and Iraq) in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. The Choqa Zanbil ziggurat is the largest such structure still remaining. It was actually “lost” for more than 2500 years until it was accidentally rediscovered during an aerial survey carried out by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the forerunner of BP) in the 1930’s). Although the summit is missing, much of the ziggurat is intact, restored by archeologists from bricks used in the original construction