Welsh Davids Travel Blog: 25 and 26 May

Moon rise over our campsite

Pictures taken as we travelled along

Local shops

A village scene

An old mud/brick fort

Modern Yazd

Leaving the bush camp at 0700 hours we travelled to Yazd and arrived about 1300 hours travelling on route 75N and 78S. During the drive the scenery changed so that it became greener with pistachio, walnut and apricot being the predominant crop. In Nabacor there was a cyprus tree that is still growing and is said to be 4000 years old. We were tolld after leaving Yazd and heading for the border that the country will be mostly desert. In Yazd we stayed in the Silk Road Hotel, nothing fancy, with a room for three of us, a toilet and shower, soap and toilet paper, quite a step up from some of the places we have been staying at.

The Silk Road Hotel with the bedroom, dining and communal area, and the courtyard.

We visited the Kabir Jamea Mosque, Yazd Fahadan Hotel, the Alexander Prison and the Mehr Hotel. I bought fresh bread, butter, and cold meats for dinner mainly because I did not want to pay the prices at the hotel restaurant. We were told that a number of local restaurants and cafes had closed because the hotels had opened their own restaurant and taken away the trade and that some visitors did not like going outside at night. It is at night that the towns and cities come alive, perhaps not to eat unless it is a picnic, but to do the shopping out of the heat of the day. Certainly there were families out shopping after 2100 hours every evening.

The Kabir Jameh Mosque

The Kabir Jameh Mosque

The dome of a town mosque

Pictures showing the canvas covering over the Yazd Fahadan Hotel, rooms and a television in the jacuzzi.

A wind tower for which Yazd is famous.

Badgirs or wind tower or wind catcher. These catch the wind and direct it to rooms below, often first blowing over flowing water in an aqueduct under the house or building, cooling the air and then directing the air through the house through various shafts. I was able to go into the one in the water museum and there was no doubt that it was cooler when the outside temperature was about 37C.

Courtyard

Scenes in the water museum. Aqueducts (qanats in Iranian) have been dug for 2000 years in Iran for the irrigation of crops and the supply of drinking water. They start in the hills and with a very small gradient transfer water to where it is required, which may be hundreds of miles away. The tunnels were, and are, only the width of a man but not usually as high as a man. The men digging the tunnels wore white so that if they were killed in a cave-in they would be prepared for death as white was the colour of the shroud. These were skilled men as they dug tunnels from both ends and met in the middle with only basic tools to get the direction and the slope correct. The tools used were little different to those used many years ago in coal mining and slate quarrying in the UK.

Wells were constructed on the aqueduct and the taking of water for each village was a serious business. A very simple water clock was constructed which consisted of a bowl of water on which a smaller bowl was floated. The smaller bowl had a small hole in the bottom which allowed the bowl to fill up and sink. The time taken for the bowl to sink was a measure of the time water could be taken from the well. A respected elder in the community would look after the ‘clock’ and a written record (still available to see) was kept of the water use by different people and villages.

Windlass

Water flowing through basement

Street scenes in Yazd

Painted green this is used for a festival and carried round the streets

Door with male and female door knobs

Clock Tower

Buy your baby buggy here

Blacksmith

Openings in the roof let natural light into the passageway

The local bike shop

Bazaar

A mosque at night

The local bakery-making lavash bread as it is called in Farsi

Getting the dough ready

Cooking

The bread ready for eating

During the civil war in Iran about 950 years ago the military initiated a martial arts and fitness regime to keep the men fit and not bored. After the war was finished the martial art was discontinued in the Army but kept up by a small number of the civilian population and is still practised by a few with regular competitions. We went to a club one evening to see a normal practise with instruments that imitate those that would have been used in war. A warm-up took over one hour before the practise started using clubs varying from 5 to 20 kilos in weight, steel bars and chains (imitating bows and arrows), and very heavy wooden boards which imitated shields. There was no actual fighting with the items, the object was to exercise with them in the most skilful of ways. What was strange was to see the men who had been practising leave at the end wearing suits or fashionable dress.