In Iran, open arms, rich history await intrepid Westerners
TEHRAN -- "Beyond our ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."— Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet
Bob Augustine's last encounter with Iran was on a Pan Am plane, a few days before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took control as architect of the country's fundamentalist Islamic revolution. He remembers the panicked faces as plainclothes security men yanked passengers off the jet just before takeoff, and the sobs of relief when their pilot announced they had cleared Iranian airspace.
Thirty years later, the retired telecommunications executive from Bonita Springs, Fla., is back in the Axis of Evil — as a tourist.
An old map in hand and wife Jill by his side, Augustine is launching his eight-city Iranian odyssey with a mission to reconnect with the couple's former Tehran neighbors. Also reaching out: hardliner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is promoting foreign tourism as a "strategic bridge" at a time of escalating tensions between Iran and the West. And despite a State Department travel warning that U.S. citizens may be subject to harassment or arrest, a trickle of plucky Yankee tourists — about 1,600 so far this year — have been answering the call.
"There are many things that Americans justifiably find outrageous about the Iranian government," acknowledges guidebook guru Rick Steves, whose one-hour travel special about his own May trip airs on PBS stations in January.
But the peripatetic author says he's "never had so many preconceived notions torn apart," and proclaims the Middle Eastern powerhouse and political lightning rod the most "surprising and fascinating" land he's ever visited.
The Augustines, and 11 other participants (seven of them Americans) on Toronto-based G.A.P. Adventures' Discover Persia tour, would agree.
Their two-week swing by plane and bus through a country twice the size of Texas will take them from chaotic, lung-searing traffic in the capital, Tehran (population 12 million), to a one-room school in the mountain hamlet of Abyaneh (Lonely Planet's population estimate: "a few old women, most of the time.")
They'll wander the 2,500-year-old ruins of Persepolis, cradle of the Persian Empire until it was sacked and burned by Alexander the Great, and watch men gather for prayers beneath arches of staggeringly intricate tiles in Isfahan, a UNESCO Heritage city that ancient Persians proudly dubbed "half the world." They'll savor pistachio ice cream in the convoluted alleys of Yazd, a Silk Road outpost that 13th-century visitor Marco Polo declared "good and noble," and listen to the eerie strains of the ney, a wooden flute, at the shrine of a Sufi mystic in Mahan.
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