Andrea Hearts Traveling

Made it to Cappadocia!

After a long 12 hour bus ride to Goreme I finally arrived.

Now it’s time for a new country… Turkey!

I think I was more sad about leaving Iran than excited to go and explore a new place but it was time to move on.

I arrived in Istanbul and after an hour + in the immigration line I finally got to the baggage claim to not find my bag… great!

My mom always says that whatever is yours is yours and it makes the way back to you so with that in mind I calmly went to pegasus’ lost baggage counter and asked if they had seen my bag. It actually turned out to be in the wrong belt with a different flight info on it. I left the airport and was ready to find the metro to get to my host’s (Funda) house in Istanbul. I walked around the airport and saw no signs for the metro and thought it was very weird. Since I had no cellphone nor wifi I decided to ask a local (by using sign language) if I could use their phone. I phoned my host and I was on my way. I went out with instruction from Funda to still find no metro. Well, long story short… 3 phone calls later from total strangers I figured out that I was in the wrong airport, way far from my host’s house. At the end it took me 2 hours to fly from Iran and 4 hours to get to Istanbul and be rescued on the street by one of Funda’s friends who came to pick me up and take me to her house.

For the last 2 nights in Iran I went to the house of my friend Hamed who had invited me to stay with his family.

I arrived late after my flight and met his lovely family and another couch surfer he was hosting, Simone. His mom had made fesenjoon, a traditional Iranian dish, for us so we sat at the table to eat and tried Hamed’s homemade vodka… it burned!!!!!!!! Since alcohol is banned in Iran the locals have found ways of making their own and I was able to tried Hamed's homemade wine as well (which by the way tasted nothing like wine! haha)

Ferry to Hormuz...

I arrived in Qeshm island at around 9am and the bus dropped me off in a town that was not Qeshm. Between my 25 words in farsi, hand gestures and the driver’s broken english I managed to tell them I needed to go to Qeshm, they said no problem and paid for a shared taxi to take me to the main town. In the Taxi I met Fariba, a girl doing her PhD studies in Qeshm and she told the driver where to drop me off to get a hotel.

I was dropped off in front of a tall building with a huge hotel sign, I immediately knew that it wasn’t really what I was looking for so I went to a store and got some more credit for my phone and started googleing where to go in Qeshm. Thirty minutes later I had figured out that I wanted to go to a local’s home and stay there. I immediately contacted Assad (the guesthouse owner) who told me he was fully booked but I could sleep in the living room, I had no problem with it so he sent a shared taxi to pick me up.

My favorite!!

We arrived in Shiraz under water and asked our driver to drop us off in a hotel that I had just called and asked for the rate for the dorm. We arrived to the hotel and it all started wrong, first with the guy at the front desk saying that he didn’t talk to me and he couldn’t give us the rate that I was told on the phone and then he asked for our passports and Marcos didn’t want the hotel to keep it so they started arguing, haha. We gave up on trying to argue the price down and I was mad because this guy was lying to me but since it was raining we decided to stay. I was taking a nap when Marcos figured out that we called a cell phone number and not a land line and that we should call back and see who we talked to. I dialed the phone number and it turned out that google had the owner’s cell phone as the primary business number and I told him what happened and asked us to go back to the front desk and he would clarify the rate.

In order to get to Shiraz we had 2 options, one was to take a night bus or to take a private car and make it a day tour, I had done all the math and figured out that it was going to be more time efficient and economical to take a private car/tour and stop by Persepolis on the way to Shiraz than taking the night bus and then do a day trip. Richard didn’t seem very keen on the idea of a private car so I went ahead and put my name on the list of a tour company to see if anybody would go to Shiraz on that day. Luckily, my friend Marcos came to join us in Yazd to do the day trip to Shiraz so Richard ended up joining us in the private car for $30 each.

We started the journey at 8:30am, we drove miles and miles admiring the beauty scenery of Iranian deserts and snow capped mountains. There really aren’t words to really describe the beauty of the landscape, it really just takes your breath away and no pictures or videos really capture the beauty of it.

Yazd is a small city so for one of the days we decided to book a tour to visit sites outside of the city.

Our first stop of the day was at Kharanagh, an abandoned village in the middle of the desert in Iran. I walked along the cobblestone streets of this old yet beautiful adobe-like village and got lost on the many alleys leading to the different parts of town. The best part was that there wasn’t anybody around; when we got there there were a couple of tourists but then it looked like the whole village was left to ourselves.

We left Varzaneh at around 12 in a shared taxi with Philip to Naein since there were no buses in Varzaneh. The taxi driver stopped in Naein and dropped Richard and myself off at the police station, he said that all busses must stop there so it would be easy to get a ride to Yazd.

This morning we left Javad’s house and headed to the desert!

After our quick tour of Abyaneh we were dropped off at a bus stand and took a shared taxi to Isfahan. An hour and a half later we finally reached Isfahan! Our taxi driver insisted to drop us off at the taxi stand but we actually got off at the bus station and caught a bus close to the center of the city. It is really funny to see how people push the taxis for the tourists even when we say we want to use the bus.

We entered the bus and of course everybody was staring at the two foreigners carrying backpacks! People were kind and asked for us to sit down.

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