Day 205: Bandar Anzali - Tehran

Oct 25 - Am glad to leave our hotel. It is off season, so the place is virtually unattended and just entering ‘repair season’. Also, the humidity is so high that it is hard to feel warm with the clingy, cold air. We pile in the car and head south, past the city of Rasht, and up a smaller road to the village of Masouleh. This used to be the main highway crossing the Alborz from the coast to Tabriz and Tehran, but a new highway east ended that. The buildings here exhibit a great congruence of architectural style and coloration.

The village is built into a steep mountainside. Many of the rooves are level with the street and paths of level above and can be walked on.

A selfie with our guide Omid.

An unusual mosque style.

A house front just above the market street. The town has become a popular tourist destination for Iranians, so the market is dedicated to souvenirs. But it is blissfully quiet today.

The market streets of Masouleh, full of souvenirs and cafes. The photogenic quality of this town seems to have saved it from becoming forgotten when the through traffic disappeared. Like with other towns near Bandar Anzali, the local dialect is Gilaki.

There is a small waterfall just above the village along the valley.

Descend again into the coastal plain, and east toward the main highway south. On the way, we stop at the Saravan Forest Park. Here, there are on display several traditional homes from the province, that were dismantled, brought to this site, and reconstructed. Like a place we visited in Finland on Day 25. We are obliged to have another guide for this tour who can speak to the specifics of the houses (but only in Farsi).

A rice storage house. The place for the rice is in the ceiling, under the large pyramidal roof. Boards above the fluted wooden columns keep rats from finding a way to crawl up. The roof itself is normally thatched straw, replaced every few years.

It never occurred to me that rice was grown on the south Caspian coast. There are few places elsewhere in Iran where such a crop can be grown. Standing water out in a field would evaporate quickly in most of the areas we’ve visited. But here, rice fields abound. This has been the case since at least Parthian times, meaning that the art of rice growing came here from the east at some point even further back.

The guide explains this large home, previously owned by a rich family but abandoned for modern housing. The walls are mud brick with mud and straw plaster. Support beams, railings, and stairways are in wood (abundant here unlike in most of Iran). Straw mats were used for floor coverings, as carpets were predisposed to rot in the humid climate. At the moment, those mats are being hung outside to dry out (top of photo).

A commoner’s home. In pre-modern times, this house would have been inhabited by a peasant family that worked for a large estate owner in exchange for this plot of land to build a house. Like the serfdom experienced by most Europeans in medieval times.

A woman cooking deep deep-fried dough balls, like donut holes.

Clay jars were stored upside-down, to keep them drained of liquid when not in use, hence free of organic material that might grow in them.

This was also a house from an important family. The village it came from was often inundated by water certain times of the year, hence structures had to be elevated above ground level. A lot of know-how went into determining exactly where the ground supports needed to be positioned to hold the structure up.

From here we head into the mountains again. This is one of the busiest highways that connects the Caspian with the rest of the country. It winds up a wide valley with many rice fields (now harvested and dry), and within 30 minutes the climate has already dried such that olives are the dominant crop. In fact, there is a town here that is basically solid storefronts lining the highway, selling olive products. The highway itself, normally divided into two parts, one for cars and the other for trucks, merge at this town. This was the demand of the local sellers, who did not want to lose any business when the routes changed. We also pass a large dam, yet another river blocked from replenishing the Caspian Sea.

In another 30 minutes we are out of any green whatsoever, and into the brown and dusty expanse south of the Alborz. Pass through Qazvin again and onto the main highway to Tehran. Traffic is bad and we crawl along, arriving at the Marlik Hotel in Tehran at about 20:00.

Today’s route: (A) Bandar Anzali, (B) Masouleh, (C) Saravan, (D) Tehran.

Try to get some sleep, as we must go to the airport early tomorrow.

Iran