Travel story - West of Iran - part one

The Beginning

It started like many other good travels, few good friends and a little bit of free time (rather 4-5 days) to fill. Though planing for a travel is never easy, someone is busy on Sunday, the other one gotta do something important on Monday and the another guy got a meeting on Tuesday. And after all arrangements, there’s a guy who inform us, in the last moment, that he can’t come with us. After all these problems, finally we got our self a travel plan and three person willing to do it. Maybe three sounds like just very few people, but after trying to plan few travels (or being in the process, I realized it’s more than enough. You can’t expect more, everyone is busy, even if they don’t know it yet.

Anyway, we managed to do it, with this car, which considering its lack of trunk, can’t really carry more than 3 people for traveling. Nearly half of what we had was on the back seat.

The First Plan

Our destination was a wetland in west of Iran. Somewhere we could see birds and maybe other animals in their habitat. We had searched for it before leaving Isfahan, and found it interesting, because it had water and birds and was beautiful in the photos. But you know, photos in the introduction are usually deceiving. So we left Isfahan hoping we could see nature as it is, not through some deceiving lenses. To feel the nature and spend time there, to refresh our soul and come back stronger, more motivated. We all travel for a reason, to gain something, but while exploring the unknown, you should be ready for the unexpected. People change, weather changes, earth changes, we change.

[Took this shot a minute after previous shot. Interesting that you can be in the same place but think about completely different things and have very different view]

The Disappointment

When imagining different scenarios we tend to not think about the worst case scenario. Maybe we just make up very weird story but, but just to laugh at it and through it away, we don't examine it thoroughly. Because it’s not nice and we don’t want to think that bad things could really happen to us, we don’t want to think that traveling with this car and driving at night might actually kill us, or worse, disable us for life.

Fortunately the worst case scenario didn’t happen to us, but still it was a big disappointment when we reached the destination and asked a local where is the wetland. And he answered it’s here. After few years of drought, there was no water there. It wasn’t a wetland anymore, it was desert.

We didn't spend all our savings for this travel, but still driving around 700km to see this was not what we planned for. We had high hopes, even when we saw this, before asking the local, we joked that this is the wetland, we didn't know that's it for real.

Going back and canceling the whole plan was not an option. We just could't find an appropriate holidays soon. It was hard to re-plan another trip. But what options did we have?

Re-plan

We took our time. Close to that wetland, near the main road, there were two tree and a pool. We stopped there, rested for a little and started to search for another good destination that was also close to us.

It was cold and windy, but we tried our best to sleep for a quarter an hour or more. Then thanks to internet, google, few websites and google satellite view, we decided where our next destination is. It's obvious why we used google, to search for us in between thousands of websites with so many suggested destinations. After that initial search, we found three potential destinations. I can't remember why one was rejected just after it was suggested so just like most of the elections, we got down o two potential destination, two candidates. This was when google satellite view came in handy. I (we) wanted our destination to be in nature and far from cities and human's habitat. When I checked one of the destinations, it was nice, but very close to a residential area but the other one was about a kilometer or two far from city.

We started moving again and as Muslims we had to say our prayers. One of the best thing about Iran are small mosques in small cities and villages. You can free water, free w.c, a warm place (though usually it's better not to sleep in the main part of the mosque). Beside all the free things, it's also peaceful and quiet and beautiful.

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pre-part-2: we never regretted this trip...

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All photos are taken by me, except noted.