At then end of each trip I like to give you an overview of the practicalities of travelling to the country I've just visited. So this is a guide to Iran and Oman from my limited experience.
It's obvious as you travel through Iran that th...
Ali's first words to us when he picked us up at 8am this morning were ‘ok, let’s go buy a goat’.
Photos of the Sultan are everywhere in Oman - in hotel lobbies, on the street, in businesses. In most of them he is unsmiling, so I liked this one at Alila. As we drove to...
It was a very pretty dawn from our balcony at Alila this morning. Time to pack up to leave.
I had a grown-up looking Omani breakfast don't you think? We said goodbye to Alila and piled into Ali's car on our way to the grand canyon of Jabal Shams (Sun Mountain), also vis...
Junipers grow in Oman, but only up here on Jabal Akhdar. This one must be very old. Hardy and evergreen but extremely slow growing, they can easily be cut out. They're threatened on the mountain, so there's a nature reserve near the hotel for them and also the wild ol...
We slept very well in our desert tent, dreaming of Lawrence of Arabia or breakfast, and were up early to take a few photographs before the sun was too high.
Overnight all footprints had been erased as if they'd never been there, and little rills had been reformed in the...
For more formal occasions Omanis put the turban on over the cap because it gives a regular shape. Our model was on the desk of the Al Bustan Palace this morning - it's standard dress for staff at the hotel.
Here we are in Oman. What a change in climate! It's the same temperature as Iran, but we've gone from zip humidity in the desert, to 90% humidity on the ocean. It's so hot and sticky that when we walk out of a building our glasses fog up and so do our camera le...
The excitement today on the way to Kashan was to be seeing a nuclear plant. Habib has been saying for days that we are going to see one, and we must NOT take a photo or the bus will be stopped, our cameras will be inspected, we will be held for days, and the seriousne...
Today was a two palace day! First the Chehel Sotoun Palace. Shah Abbas II was the seventh Safavid Shah of Iran, ruling from 1642 to 1666. He finished the pavilion in 1647 basing the design on the Achaemenid idea of a porch with columns to bridge the gap between garden...
