navigate:
Wednesday 2004-05-26 - Kandovān, Iran
Delays
We’re headed for Takāb today but we’re making a side trip to Kandovān first. Unfortunately, we leave much too late, and in Osku, a little before we reach Kandovān, we get another delay: there’s a big hole in the road and our “best bus in Iran” is much too large to be able to pass the hole in a bend, with the hole at one side and a steep channel at the other side. There’s nothing for it: the hole has to be filled first! The hole is part of a lot of digging going on all through the village; they’re building a natural gas pipeline here.
Kandovān is a bit touristy, but most of the tourists are from inside Iran: Kandovān is famous for its water which is supposed to have healing properties. Young couples often come here for that reason: the water is supposed to help with fertility problems.
Also interesting are the houses on the mountainside, many of them hewn into the rock so it’s always cool inside — much like similar houses in Cappadocia in Turkey. We drink tea in one of the houses and get a taste of local produce: dried apricots, plums, walnuts, almonds, and a delicious honey of which I would have liked to bring a pot home… not possible on this trip.
On the way back we see what we already feared: the hole in the road is not only back - it’s much bigger now! And of course has to be filled yet again. We’re running late…
Thursday 2004-05-27 - Takht-e Soleymān, Iran
Warm welcome in a Kurdish village
On the way to Sanandaj we make a visit to Takht-e Soleymān which has two attractions. One is “Suleiman’s prison” (Zendan-e Soleymān) — nothing to do with anyone’s prison but in reality an extinguished volcanic crater, and then the large citadel called (like the village) Takht-e Soleymān on top of the next mountain. Although the citadel is supposed to be very interesting, with an enclosed lake, most of us decide to skip it: we’ve seen so many citadels already! In-between the two mountains is the small Kurdish village named after the historical citadel (we’re still in Kurdish country here), to where a small group of us walk from the citadel.
First we drink tea at a tiny restaurant strategically located at the entrance of the village. We sit outside on the stoop, in the shade, and chat with a 14-year old boy helping out and the older owner (we never find out whether he’s the boy’s father or his granddad). There’s an old and very deaf grandma as well, and all three are willing subjects to have their photographs taken.
When we walk into the village, we don’t get very far - we’re almost immediately stopped by a woman who asks us to take her picture. She has a big smile with many gold teeth, and her husband, with a really beautiful old face, joins in the fun. We take many pictures of the couple. They even show us their passports (it seems they have to carry them!) with thumbprints and much younger pictures. Although we don’t share a word in any language, we manage to find out the couple have seven sons. They’re very nice and companionable together — I hope that will somehow be visible in the photographs!
Ten meters on we’re invited into a house where men are building an annexe — for the eldest daughter, it turns out later, who’s married to one of the men doing the building; she just had her first baby. Inside, we’re invited to drink tea, and watch the three daughters work on knotting a carpet stretched on a huge loom. It must take very long to make a carpet as big and intricate as they are making, even with three working on it. A little later, the men take a break from their building to have an early lunch (early for us, that is, but they probably started early in the day). We get a taste as well: flat, tasty bread, butter, yogurt, three kinds of cheese, all locally produced. And a little riddle is solved: we’d already often been served tea, with sugar for those who wanted is, but without a spoon to stir. That’s not the way they take their sugar here: the men take a sugar lump into their mouth, pour some of the tea from the glass into the dish, and drink it from there, ‘around’ the sugar. We also take many photographs of the family at their work.
Then the bus is hooting: it’s still a long way to Sanandaj; we never make it farther into the village.
Tuesday 2004-06-01 - Abyāneh, Iran
Museum village
On the way to Yazd we make a little side trip to Abyāneh — after the desert the river valley is in a surprisingly green: the village grew up in this oasis. Abyāneh is architecturally interesting, with all houses facing south to catch most of the sun during the very cold winters, overhanging bay windows in the second floors and all houses reddish in color as a result of the red mud used for plastering the walls. Still I find the visit somewhat disappointing: it’s become a museum village with a population thinned out by migration of those with a good education to Tehrān and other big cities, leaving behind only old people who try to make a living selling handicrafts to tourists. In winter, when there are no tourists, only a few hundred people actually live here. It just doesn’t feel like a ‘real’ village.
Friday 2004-06-04 - Rāyen, Iran
Bam in miniature
Originally, an excursion to Bam was on the program for today but since the earthquake last December that’s obviously off: we’re not into ‘disaster tourism’, the citadel is practically destroyed for now (we saw some shocking before-and-after photographs) and anyway we’d just be in the way while they’re rebuilding.
Instead, we go to Rāyen, a much smaller town south of Kermān, with a citadel much in the style of Bam, though naturally also much smaller. As with historical sites all over Iran, they’re busily restoring it. The outer wall, seemingly in good shape anyway, is fully reconstructed — using fired brick where the mud brick was missing in a few places — and the public-facing walls are already nicely plastered again. Inside there are several buildings; the restoration of the castle is also well advanced (the living spaces in the same style as the historical houses we saw in Kāshān), as is a small mosque. Elsewhere, only the outlines of buildings are indicated with low mud-plastered walls. At some unfinished buildings it’s interesting to be able to see how a domed roof is constructed on a square plan with nothing but adobe brick.
Many tours that would originally have gone to Bam are now coming here but Rāyen hasn’t quite adapted yet — but maybe they don’t want to? Apparently most tour buses just go up to the gate of the citadel and leave immediately after the visit. We go in search of a cup of tea instead but we can’t find a cup of tea anywhere in the village (rare in Iran) but a bottle of Iranian Cola and some chairs the shop owner lends us to sit on makes up for that — we even get some bread with it. A little farther on we find a simple but beautiful shrine in a small building with a nicely-tiled dome. Then it’s time to leave.
Saturday 2004-06-05 - Neyriz, Iran
Salt lakes
On the way to Shirāz, a very long trip today, we pass several large salt lakes. Just past Neyriz where the road winds through the mountains over two passes, there’s a beautiful view of enormous Lake Bakhtegān (Daryācheh-ye-Bakhtegān) and we stop for pictures. A wide fringe of the lake is white with encrusted salt which is mined here — before we stopped we saw many large sheds and big piles of white salt.
Further on, some 20 km before Shirāz, we make another stop near teh much smaller Lake Mahārlu where the road comes near the shore. A couple of avocets are feeding in the shallow water near the shore, but fly up when we approach over the salt-encrusted mud. Salt is mined at this lake, too (at the south end) though at a much smaller scale than at Lake Bakhtegān.
Thursday 2004-07-01 - Daheyan, Xinjiang (China)
Deserted desert
I wake up at seven; the sun is shining and an attendant is bringing a new thermos of hot water. We’re riding through a nice mountain landscape, obviously quite high but these mountains are covered with coarse grass; we see some snow-capped peaks behind. Every now and then we go through a tunnel or over a viaduct across a valley. There’s very little sign of human habitation.
Farther on, the landscape gets harsher, a mountainous desert. Curiously, we see a lot of small groups of houses along the railway, even villages — all completely deserted: only the walls stand, all roofs have disappeared. There’s no sign what the inhabitants of these houses could have lived from: no fields, no stables, just houses; yet they must have lived from something. The very sparse vegetation seems barely enough for grazing a few goats. At one point, we cross a river and upstream we see a whole town, also completely deserted: no roofs, no windows in any of the houses and apartment blocks; a power station that no longer works. Why were all these houses, villages and towns built? Were they here before the railway came — or built because of the railway and abandoned again when the railway was completed? Something else? The number of completely deserted villages here in the desert is remarkable but we see no explanation, no clue.
At a little past noon we arrive at Daheyan, a small factory town in the middle of the desert; a bus is waiting to take us on to Turpan, which isn’t on the railway line.
Sunday 2005-09-25 - Linxia, China
Muslim country
We can’t stay on the nice new road; we turn off onto a secondary road which is narrower and a lot worse. We’ve left Lanzhou and urban China far behind us now. When we make a short photo stop for the landscape, our driver checks his tires and finds he has a flat inner tire. While he changes the tire (with the help of his wife) we have a photo opportunity with the children from a few farms nearby. We’re at N 35.63526, E 103.45063, at an elevation of 2300m already — we’ll get still higher today.
In Linxia we make a lunch stop at a small Muslim restaurant. We taste our first “Muslim tea” here: a mix of green tea leaves, various herbs and fruits and lots of big sugar crystals; it’s delicious and healthy! This is a specialty of this area of China. We also have a wonderful vegetarian noodle soup (with fresh hand-made noodles) and various vegetable dishes.
I hadn’t realized it before we left but this whole area of China is actually predominantly Muslim; Buddhism arrived here much later. Both groups live peacefully together though and mix easily, buying in each others’ shops, Buddhist monks even eating at Muslim restaurants (though not the other way round since the other restaurants are not halal). We see many mosques in a bewildering variety of architectural styles but all somehow a mix of Chinese and Arabic Islamic; a minaret may look like it does in the Middle East or it may look like a Chinese pagoda. The men mostly wear white skullcaps, sometimes beautifully embroidered; women wear a simple white hat, sometimes covered with a headdress of black velvet lace; a flap that normally goes below the face is sometimes flipped up over the head. In one town where we turn off again I see a sea of white-capped heads along the main street.
Along the roads now we see many brick works: they make bricks and roof tiles while smaller workshops make stone or cement decorations — the whole area seems to support the building industry, as is also suggested by some big billboards along the road. The road itself gets really bad now: they’re building a new road but for now it’s just kilometer after kilometer of construction area. We’re being thoroughly shaken: it’s a long and tiring trip this way.
Thursday 2005-09-29 - Ta’ersi, China
Temple industry
At Ta’ersi there’s another big monastery of the Gelugpa Buddhist order — the reason for our stay here. Together with Carla and Gwendoline I walk in the direction of the monastery; we note there is still surprisingly little tourism here — at least they’re not spoiled by it yet. There are many shops along this road, some clearly catering to tourists but also selling religious paraphernalia, obviously catering to the monastery and maybe visiting monks. All shop holders are very friendly, no one minds if you look and don’t buy, or simply remark something is beautiful without any intention to buy. No one is pushy or comes after you to sell something. But we see no other westerners in the whole town, only a few Chinese groups.
Along this street we also find a courtyard with some workshops around it where we can watch how the Buddhist temple ornaments are made; a whole set is already on display in the middle of the courtyard and the metal workers are busy making more. Later, in another street, we see many more such workshops; apparently the monastery is large enough to provide them with enough business.
Saturday 2005-10-01 - Yan Shi Pin, Tibet (China)
Lunch break in the midst of poverty
We make a stop in a village along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway to allow our two drivers to eat lunch. The tiny restaurant is not really for tourists but the drivers invite some of us to share their Chinese hot pot (“don’t take meat, only the vegetables,” Marie Josee warns).
Together with Willemien I walk around a bit: some small buildings on both sides of the road — that’s all. The mostly Muslim inhabitants of this small village are very poor but amid the dirt (apart from the road there is no pavement at all) they’re still doing their best to keep things clean; we watch a woman sweeping her yard — she doesn’t even have glass in her windows, only a sheet of not-so-clear plastic with holes in it. Yet it must be bitterly cold here in winter: it’s very high at an elevation of 4558m (according to my GPS), located at N 33.58876, E 092.06429. One of our bus drivers writes down the name of the village for me: Yan Shi Pin.
Apart from the tiny restaurant, a beer house, two small shops and what must be a garage, it’s not clear what the inhabitants of this bleak village live on. At least there is a small clinic. What is noticeable is the power station though: a combination of some small windmills and a group of solar panels.
Thursday 2006-09-07 - P’yŏngyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Transportation
Bikes
Apart from public transportation (more about that later) the main means of transportation seems to be the bike and you see them in a large variety of shapes and ages. If you want to have a bike, you have to buy it in a shop (many second-hand from Japan; most local bikes are still of inferior quality, although there is now a joint venture with China to produce bikes). Once bought, the bike must be registered at the district security office (the equivalent of a police station) and you get a little round license plate, usually attached at the ubiquitous front basket on the handle bars (I have actually seen only a single bike without such a basket). These little baskets are used to transport all sorts of things, from schoolbooks and other papers to pet dogs and even small children.
Apart from the simple luggage rack (sometimes used for very heavy loads), there may be a basket mounted on the luggage rack as well, and once I saw a man peddling by with a whole gaggle of ducks in his back basket, all curiously peering around.
Apparently at one time women were not allowed to ride bikes but that is definitely not true any longer: I’ve seen women on bikes, and our Uni rides a bike as well. One remarkable feature about bikes in the DPRK: I see not a single bike with a lock — apparently bikes are not stolen here. In all, variation and usage of bikes here is very much like that in China, with the most noteworthy difference the lack of locks, and the fact that on average they’re a little older.
Cars
Apart from buses and trucks, there are actually very few cars in the DPRK, most of them “public” (state-owned) but there are some private cars as well. One way someone may get a private car is as an award for a special service to the country (say, winning at an international sports championship). Another is that relatives living abroad may send someone a car as a present. There are (at least) three different kind of license plates by which you can tell what type of car it is: all publicly owned cars (ordinary cars, taxis, buses and trucks) have a white plate; black is for the army, and yellow is for private cars — I noted only two of the latter, but of course with so much to see, I did not only look at license plates!
A huge problem is a serious shortage of oil (the country has none of its own, and the military comes first). This explains the curiously smoking trucks we sometimes see, especially in the countryside: they are powered by cokes, with a little gasification plant in the back (the part that is producing all the smoke — similar to how many cars were run in the Netherlands during the second world war: it’s a little more complicated than oil, but ingenious and effective.
The shortage of oil also causes blackouts, making the trams and trolleybuses used for public transportation not always very reliable, with the result that buses in P’yŏngyang are usually packed. Buses may have a series of stars painted on the side: one each for 50,000km safe transportation — I see quite a few with a whole series of stars.
