High Definition

As Iran opens up to visitors its monuments top every travel hitlist. But bypass the city spectaculars and seek out its mountain nomads instead

Everywhere I went on my first visit to Iran surprised me. Shiraz and Yazd, Kerman and Kashan confounded my expectations, and not just with their immense age and extraordinary beauty. Iran conjures the idea of ayatollahs and women in black and yet I saw no one praying in mosques and young women seemed to flaunt the veil injunction by draping headscarves off the back of high beehives. The towns and cities exuded a surprisingly fresh energy, as though in the process of remaking themselves. Nowhere impressed me more than Esfahan.

A green oasis in the middle of a rocky desert, cut through by the modestly named River of Life and surrounded by mountains, Esfahan is a city of broad boulevards lined with shade-giving trees. It has some of the most beautiful buildings in Iran, as well as my favourite hotel, some very good restaurants and brilliant shopping. On my first night I went straight to the huge central square, where I stood in wonder as the moon glittered on the mosaic domes of those most beautiful mosques. I hadn’t felt that sort of excitement since I first laid eyes on Marrakech.

On that visit I spent a couple of days in and around the square – which is actually a 510-metre-long rectangle – dodging horse-drawn carriages on the outer path (no cars or scooters allowed). I ate kebabs, rice and yogurt and sipped zero-per-cent beer while stretched out shoeless on a raised bench in the Banqueting Hall, a traditional restaurant with a big window looking onto the dome of one of the grand mosques. I drank strong coffee in antique shops with some of the city’s smart young crowd, and managed to break my rule about not buying a carpet before I had even reached the bazaar. Then at sunset, I did what so many in this town do and headed to the river.

When Shah Abbas rebuilt Esfahan in 1598, he made it an essential stop on the Silk Road, but it was his great-grandson who built the white-stone, two-storey Khaju Bridge. My favourite crossing over the river, this is where poets and their admirers gather at the end of the day, taking turns to sing, their voices lifting towards the setting of the sun. What are they singing about, I asked the man nearest me. ‘About women,’ he told me, ‘and love. What else is there?’

And now I am back in Esfahan. It is late spring and the city is blossoming with the pleasures of the season. Although many new restaurants and cafes have opened, at night the parks and squares are filled with families stretched out on rugs and tucking into tomato-and-pomegranate salads, chicken kebabs, barberry pilaf and trays of sabzi khordan, the mix of mint, tarragon, basil and other herbs eaten wrapped in flatbread with walnuts and feta. By the end of the day, even the river bank and bridges are lined with people feasting, while the upper tier of the Khaju Bridge is packed with young men and women.

One man catches my eye and reminds me why I have returned. Tall and upright, made taller by a bun-shaped, black felt hat, he is wearing a pair of baggy black trousers cinched at the waist. These are the traditional clothes of the Bakhtiari, one of the largest and most famous of Iran’s nomadic groups. I had once come across a book by Vita Sackville-West – one of several authors who travelled the tribal routes and wrote about the migration – and now I’m looking to the west and the looming Zagros mountains, towards Bakhtiari land where I am headed tomorrow.

As the westward road leaves the desert and rises into the mountains, brown gives way to green and the landscape’s true beauty emerges. So too do people selling buckets of melons, tomatoes and potatoes, and stalls piled with baggy trousers and straw hats. Beyond sleepy, tin-roofed Chelgerd, the mountains rise ever steeper. Timing is everything. Come in winter and there’s serious free-skiing to be done above the city. Go in May, as I have done, and the river rushes with snow melt, the valleys are carpeted with white, yellow and blue spring flowers, the slopes with fresh goat-thorn, and the Bakhtiari nomads are just arriving from their winter home on the west side of the mountains with their flocks and bundles. Look, there they are…

On a ridge above a valley, not far from Chelgerd, I see them walking across the Kouhrang River; on the opposite bank there is a camp where a handful of men are shearing sheep. ‘That,’ says Ali, my guide and driver, ‘is where we are staying.’ And as he says it, I can feel the tension of the journey – the entire day spent standing in the visa queue at the Iranian Embassy in London, the sleepless night flight, the lack of a room at my hotel in Esfahan – lift like a cloud over the horizon. This is exactly where I want to be staying.

It turns out we were looking at different tents. Ali leads me to one on our side of the water which at least has the advantage of the big view, a huge scope of the river, grasses, and what I now see are several separate nomad camps with corrals for goats and sheep, the stony slopes above them. Above the green there is a large stripe of brown rock; above it, the zigzag of the snowy, jagged ridge; above that, a perfect deep-blue sky. It is an epic landscape to inspire an epic journey, but first there is lunch.

We cross the fast river over a skinny flattened pipe that serves as a bridge and walk up to two tents: a round one serving as the family home and an open­-sided rectangular one into which I am welcomed by a man stoking coals and grilling lamb kebabs. In Bakhtiari land, men share the cooking.

His name is Siyavash, after a great Persian hero, and he is assisted on the grill by a solid man with a grizzled, stubbled face, Groucho Marx moustache and an impressive name: Jehangir, ‘conqueror of the world’. A plastic sheet is laid over the carpet in the tent and, together with Siyavash’s father and his cousin Habib, I eat salads, rice, yogurt and the succulent lamb, talk about migration, summer in the valley and the glories and tribulations of the Bakhtiari. Then I follow the old man’s example and allow the altitude – we are above 2,500 metres – a full belly, the flat clank of sheep bells, birdsong, the babbling of the river and a bubbling sense of happiness lull me to sleep. When I wake, he is talking to two older women, while three younger ones sit on the opposite side of the tent, a small child between them. Two of these women – wearing colourful headscarves to indicate they are unmarried – signal me to put my head down again and sleep some more. When I do finally wake, I walk downstream a little and sit alone, and stare some more.

If I were a photographer, I would want to capture the shifting of late shadows across the snow mountains, and the diamond glitter of the river through the valley. If I were a composer, I would try to harmonise the constant running of water with the clunking of stones as they drag along the riverbed, the buzzing of bees, the whistling and whooping of men as the flocks are brought in for the night. But I am a writer, and sitting barefoot and slightly sun-struck, I note the clarity of the sky and a chill descending as the light fades. Late that night, with nomad tents glowing across the liver and the moon full overhead, I fall asleep trying to remember Byron’s lines: ‘Not vainly did the early Persian make/His altar the high places and the peak… there to seek The Spirit…’

One of the challenges of leaving Iran’s obvious touring circuit is a lack of information on what there is to see beyond places such as Shiraz, Esfahan and Tehran. But I remember a photograph of a spectacular village clinging to a steep hillside and, although I have no idea how old the image is, I find the place on a map and decide it is worth trying to visit. It takes a few hours in a four-wheel-drive to cross the barren highland on an asphalt road that turns to piste. In one place, we are forced off the track while some Bakhtiari herders walk their goats to new pasture. Further on, at a precipitous bend, we wait while a bulldozer struggles to replace the road, washed away by melting snow. As we wait, some Iranian men drive up, park their car and leave with ropes and poles to climb the snow-covered mountain.

The views become ever more spectacular. The peaks, a patchwork of hard snow and newly exposed rock, now look as though they are part of a linocut. The valleys plummet below us, sometimes white, sometimes brown. Then snow and rock give way to Persian oaks, cypresses, walnuts, almonds and terraced fields of wheat. Closer, I see through the trees the green dome of a holy man’s tomb and further up, Sar Agha Sewed, the village I have been looking for. It’s built on a slope so steep that the flat, earth roof of each single-storey house serves as the floor and terrace of the house above it; there is something so perfect about the sight that I stand for a while in silence, smiling, a moment of wonder only disturbed by an elderly woman inviting us in for tea.

The explorer Wilfred Thesiger said he ‘couldn’t bear the Persians’ because they had not offered the sort of hospitality he had enjoyed in Arabia. Perhaps he didn’t travel among the Bakhtiari. This grandmother, living with very little in a two-room cave house, serves tea, biscuits and sweets, shares the history of her family and their village, and then insists that I take a large circle of her delicious homemade bread. On the way back to the Kouhrang River, we pass many families who are setting up their summer camps. They greet us, look for a good carpet among their bundles, unroll it over the rocks and offer tea before asking the traditional questions: who are you? Why have you come? Where are you going? And everyone I meet tells stories. Some are tribal: one man relates how the Bakhtiari held out against Alexander the Great, conqueror of the ancient Persian Empire; another explains that the first oil discovery in Iran was made on Bakhtiari land, exploited by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP But most are personal tales of pride in their traditions and love of their mountains, of hardship and loss, and of how their children will live differently in town, studying at a boarding school or finding a job.

The following day, driving to see the migration route around the Yellow Mountain, one of the Zagros high peaks, we stop in a landscape that reminds me of Monument Valley, Utah, and Habib talks about the dangers of the migration, about the wolves and bears. ‘And for this reason, Bakhtiari men like two things. A weapon and …’

‘A woman?’

‘No… dogs. Because when men and women are sleeping, the dogs are watching out for them.*

A little way down the road, we come to a different sort of lookout: a man scanning for police. His friends have parked their cars on the verge, turned up the music and – there in the wild – are doing what they cannot do in the city. They are dancing. ‘Come and join us!’ Which we do. They are heading home to Esfahan, as we will soon be. When we leave them, a couple of the young women ask if I have any friends looking to get married. ‘Send them over,’ they chant. ‘We want a ring!’ I wonder if I will meet them in Esfahan, back on the Khaju Bridge where I go the evening I return. But I see neither them nor the young Bakhtiari. From there I go to dinner in the courtyard of my favourite haunt, the Abbasi Hotel. The waiters wear baggy trousers and black felt Bakhtiari hats and tourists take photographs of them, Iran’s famous nomads. It is then I realise how lucky I have been to travel into the mountains and share that fleeting moment of nomadic life. Soon, if tourism in Iran develops the way many in the country are hoping, we will visit Esfahan in the same spirit that we go to Marrakech, to play and shop and feast. And then we will head into the Zagros mountains, towards places like Chelgerd and the Kouhrang Valley, in the same way we now go to the Moroccan High Atlas, to clear our heads, free the mind and spirit, and have an adventure with travelling folk. But why wait for resorts and restaurants to open, for courses and excursions to be planned? You can go to the mountains now. All the important things are already there…