After a short stay in Shiraz where I met Doro and Matze, my German friends from Yazd, by coincidence in a lovely restaurant I took the ten-hour bus ride to Kerman with them. We stayed at Jamal’s guesthouse. Jamal is a friendly German-speaking Iranian tour guide – as he says the only one in whole Kerman region. He convinced me to book a tour with Doro and Matze to the Lut desert. And I didn’t regret it. It was really great. The Lut desert has not just sand dunes. It is a desert full of huge Rocks called Kalut which were formed by the wind. The Lut desert is known as one of the hottest places on earth with just 24 millimetres rainfall per year.

We stayed for one night in a village at an oasis right at the edge of the Lut desert. They say in summer it get’s up to 70 °C and that you can easily fry your breakfast eggs on the road.

The Lut Desert

Kerman itself has a nice bazaar with lots of handicraft shops where old men hammer on copper pots. But what was really awful was a butcher selling sheep heads. It’s a traditional Iranian dish where they eat the whole head for breakfast.

Sheep heads. Ugh! Disgusting!

My next stop was Bam, a small and beautiful desert town. Unfortunately it suffered a lot from the destructive earthquake in 2003 where a big part of the population lost their lives. Bam is very hot and the streets are full of date trees. Besides the citadel there is not much to see in Bam. So the first afternoon after arriving I just walked around and enjoyed the atmosphere of the desert town. The next morning I went right to the citadel. Sadly there are just ruins now but you can imagine how it would have been before the earthquake.

The Arg-e Bam

Unfortunately you can’t go up to the top because it’s blocked for construction works. So I called one of the workers and after a short chat he told me that the third bar of the barrier is loose. So I sneaked through and went with the worker to a small barrack where the workers where resting. I had a great conversation with the workers and showed them lots of pictures from Austria on my camera. After that I made my way to the top of the Citadel. Since I was showing all the pictures of Austria to the workers all the charge of my camera was gone and I could not make any pictures from the beautiful view with my camera. But anyway, I had a great time with Iranian construction workers which was much better.

The next day I took a Savari (a shared car) from Bam to Minab and then hitchhiked to Bandar Abbas and took the ferry to Qeshm.

My work place

Here on Qeshm I’m having a great time working in the restaurant and improving my Farsi skills.

Learning the Persian language is a lot of fun and therefore quite easy. I stood up literally means ‘long became I’ and the word for student means as much as ‘knowledge finder’. And if you like someone very much you say you barbecue your liver for him. 🙂

More about my great time here on Qeshm in my next episode…