Not surprisingly perhaps, we weren’t sure what to expect after touching down at Tehran’s Ayatollah Khomeini International Airport. The “Foreigner’s” line at passport control was long, mostly people clearly of Middle Eastern origin, but moved fairly quickly. Our passports stamped, we were then sent to another desk for secondary screening, a “privilege” apparently reserved for very few and we assumed we were picked out because of our passports. In the end, all that consisted of was asking us our address in Iran and a local phone number. So quickly out of the airport and on the way to our hotel in northern Tehran.

We had a free day in Tehran before our formal tour officially started. It became clear very quickly that we would have no problem going anywhere we wanted to. Taxis are plentiful and very cheap and people on the street very friendly if they took any notice of us at all. Background information we’d received before coming to Iran said that while it was a good idea to obtain some rials, dollars and Euros are widely accepted. That turned out not to be the case! Euros seemed of little interest and with few exceptions, nobody wanted to accept dollars. In the past few months, the rial has plummeted in value and the unofficial exchange rate to the dollar varies almost on a daily basis but was around 100,000 to the dollar when we arrived.

So armed with a stack of rials, a city map and the Lonley Planet guide, together with Kevin and Megan (who’d arrived from Perth a day before) we set off to explore, heading for a couple of “attractions” that we knew weren’t part of our official tour - the former US embassy, where 52 diplomats were held hostage for 444 days and called the “US Den of Espionage” since the 1979 revolution; and the spectacular multi-level Tabiat Bridge, a haven of peace and tranquility in central Tehran. The award winning, pedestrian only bridge connects two parks on either side of a busy freeway. It’s a popular hang-out spot for Tehranis, so coincidental that we managed to hail the only taxi driver in the city who had no idea how to get there and had to ask several other taxi drivers and street merchants for directions!!

Tehran is a vast sprawling metropolis of some 10 million people, set against the backdrop of the snow capped Alborz Mountains. The city has a massive traffic problem caused by too many cars and seriously chaotic drivers. For a city so crowded, it’s surprisingly clean and unlittered, with many well-tended parks and green spaces. Street art is prominent, quite a lot of it focused on the 1979 Islamic Revolution or revolutionary martyrs. There’s still a bit depicting crude anti-American propaganda, although it must be said, that’s far from prominent

The first official day of our tour included stops at two sites which perfectly demonstrate the conspicuous excesses of the last two dynasties of Iranian monarchs - the Golestan Palace and the Treasury of National Jewels. The latter, housed in a heavily guarded, specially constructed vault beneath the Central Bank of Iran (and only open to the public for two hours a day, four days a week) are the former Crown Jewels of Iran. This obscene and priceless collection (no photography allowed) of bejeweled crowns, thrones (including the jaw dropping Peacock Throne), swords, baubles of one sort or another and masses of loose, uncut precious and semi-precious gems makes the British Crown Jewels look like a few bits and pieces picked up at a dollar store! So great is the value of this collection, that in the early 20th Century, the collection was used to underwrite the value of the national currency! The museum was actually created by the last Shah the year before he was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution. If anything else was needed, it certainly would have further fanned the flames of revolution!!