Yazd

You really wonder about why there's a city here - rocky desert, sandy desert, desert mountain, and... Yazd - a sprawling modern city and with a sprawling ancient mud-brick town. Unscathed by Genghis and Timur, it is now feeling the influence of a modern way of life, as fashionable youths hoon through the twisting mud-brick lanes on motorbikes with no regard for pedestrians. Still, it's easy to imagine what life was like 400 hundred years ago, as you pass men in turbans and women with black chador clenched in their teeth.

I feel awful. No particular reason. I walk through the old mud-brick lanes and get lost in the maze a few times. Finally I make it out onto a main road and stumble across an owner of an English school who all but offers me a job, and tells me how to find the Zoroastrian temple. Built last century, the temple is not so exciting, yet the flame has reputedly been burning since 400 A.D.

I take two busses and walk through what feels like a 2 km construction site. At the end of the road is my goal: The Towers of Silence. Given the Zoroastrian obsession with the purity of the elements, burial or cremation were not possible. Hence, bodies were left in these towers for the vultures to tear them apart. A priest would sit next to the body and watch which eye was torn out first to determine where the person would go in the afterlife - heaven or hell.

I climb up one tower then the other. I sit looking out over the desert for 3 hours, until I regain the desire to interact with fellow humans.

Then I visit the modern Zoroastrian cemetary. All the graves are made of marble and concrete - so that the body doesn't touch the earth. On my way out, I see a few people having a picnic. They call me over, they make me sit, they make me eat, they make me drink. The Zoroastrian women find my embarassment very amusing as they feed me soup, vegetables, bread, rose-water bisquits, lemonade, tea... Turns out that I've come across a funeral and this is the after-party.

A car comes and stops by the cemetary: an American-Iranian visiting the country for the first time, and his uncles friend. They tell me many things... for example, Parsi has about 10 words for "pimp". They take me to a tea-house in the garden of Regent Zand's holiday palace and we smoke a mint-hubbly and drink tea. Suddenly, I look up to see Junko standing across the other side of the garden fountain. The world is an amazing place.