One of the main reasons travelers come Shiraz is to visit Persepolis. The city was the capital of the Persian Empire and was burned to the ground by Alexander the Great, some say in revenge for the Persian’s burning Athens. Anyway, all that happened in the 3rd century BC.
I had arranged with the hotel for a driver to take me out to Persepolis – it was less than $10 for a half-day visit – and after breakfast the driver showed up. He was a tall, thin guy in his early 20’s and didn’t speak any English. His car, a little white Iranian-built Paykan, must have been brand new. Every surface was covered with plastic: the seats, the floor and even the dash. He wasn’t taking any chances on anything getting dirty.
Persepolis is about an hour west of Shiraz and along the way out we saw herds of sheep strung out along the road. I had been told that this was the yearly migration of the nomads to their summer pasture. There seemed to be an endless line of sheep. They were broken into little groups of perhaps 100 animals, each watched over by two or three men and a dog. The women for the most part rode in separate groups with the household goods. I had seen these same women, noticeable in their brightly colored clothes, in the bazaar the day before. For at least the first 20 minutes we drove by these groups of nomads.
We arrived at Persepolis as it was opening up and for the first half-hour I had the huge site to myself. After a while groups of Iran school kids started to show up and my interest shifted to them. They walked around in little groups taking notes and a peeking every now and then at me. I walked around taking pictures, peeking back at them. Sometimes we smiled and said hello.
Outside I found my driver dusting his already clean car. Next he drove me to a nearby site that had some tombs of Persian leaders carved into a rock face. After a quick look around we headed back to Shiraz past more herds of sheep. Whenever the sheep were crossing the road there was mass confusion as the drivers impatiently tried to push through the flock.
After lunch I headed over to the bazaar yet again. I walked it end to end again and when I ran into both the student from yesterday and then later his friend the rug vendor, I realized I had been in Shiraz long enough. One of the things I like best about travel is the anonymity. When the vendors start recognizing me I know it’s time to move on.
Sitting in the hotel garden I realized I was getting bored with Iran – not that Iran is boring – but I had learned what I came to learn and had seen what I wanted to see. I lose interest in a place fairly quickly. Unlike some folks who want to know everything, I simply want to satisfy my curiosity and then move on.
I had some postcards to mail so I took them to the hotel desk. The manager said they needed the destination country written in Farsi and he offered to teach me how to do it. First he wrote the Farsi word for America and then I tried to duplicate it. The first problem was that Iranians write the opposite we do, from right to left. I tried to duplicate what he had written both ways. I found I could do better going the familiar right to left. We both thought that quite funny. After a few tries I deemed his writing better and asked him to address the post cards for me.
There was a bookstore just around the corner from the hotel and I stopped there later in the day for a quick look around. There is nothing I like better than nosing around some store. First, I looked at the computer books, a subject I have more than a passing interest in. There was all the standard stuff: Windows 95/98, Office 97, Corel Draw and such. The product names were written in English and the text in Farsi.
I kept looking around and stumbled on a copy of the Star Report, accounting President Clinton’s escapades written in Farsi. That started me thinking: I wondered how complete the report was and who would want to spend their precious money on it. This deal with Clinton was a subject I had studiously avoided at home, but I wanted to ask someone here what they thought of it all.
My chance came with a taxi driver in Tehran. He started telling me how much he liked America and Bill Clinton. I suggested that Bill had been a bad boy and gotten into a lot trouble. “Oh, it’s no problem,” the fellow laughed, “Many men have more than one girlfriend.” Yea, try telling that to the Republicans.